European Political Science Review
Paying the piper: government advertising and media bias
2026-06-10
Printed media can shape its audience’s political preferences. Research on governments influencing their narrative focuses on censorship of political scandals but largely ignores day-to-day political content. We analyze opinion columns from Mexico, a country with a democratic culture where outright censorship is unfeasible, and yet there is journalistic evidence on the government “sponsoring” the media to communicate messages with a less negative tone. We estimate the negative tone of over 200,000 opinion pieces from Mexico’s eight most prominent newspapers using sentiment analysis. We propose a novel metric of media capture that conveys the over-favoring of publicity spending by the government in news outlets. We find that captured media are less negative about the incumbent president and more negative about their main political rival, suggesting media organizations adapt their content to their advertisers’ preferences. The results are validated by rare qualitative evidence that uncovers the blacklisting of media deemed too negative of the incumbent.