Handbook of Media Economics, vol 1B

of advertising in the late nineteenth century was an important driving force in the devel-

opment of an independent press in the United States.

Qin et al. (2014) suggest that commercialization of the news is an important factor that

affects newspaper content in China. Their results imply that newspapers which depend

more on commercial revenues and are less directly controlled by the Communist Party

are less likely to report low-level corruption. At the same time, more commercial news-

papers are more likely to produce entertaining content like sports or celebrity stories.

A number of studies look at the determinants of media capture and media freedom

from an international perspective.

Egorov et al. (2009) show that higher oil rents lead to

less media ...