own news, a firm can signal-jam a rival firm’s news, making it uninformative. Conse-
quently, duopoly competition is not sufficient to eliminate bias. However, when there
are two firms supporting each of two “viewpoints” (political candidates), i.e., four firms
in total, bias is completed eliminated. This is due to what they refer to as “informational
Bertrand competition”—if two firms have the same viewpoint and one is slightly more
informative, it obtains the entire market for that viewpoint.
5
Hence, there cannot be an
equilibrium in which one firm can become marginally more informative and capture the
whole market. The authors test their model with experiments, which generally support
their theoretical predictions.
The general theme of all these ...