Show notes: ide.mit.edu/news-events-media?type_1=podcast

In this podcast we discuss the economics of the media and its intersection with technological change. Our guest is Ananya Sen of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy. Ananya is an expert in using new types of data and clever statistical methods to study the effects of the media. We start by discussing the literature on the effects of media on outcomes such as voter turnout and academic achievement. Next, we move on to a discussion of media slant and whether it’s driven by the preferences of viewers or the preferences of the newspaper’s owners or supplies. We finish by talking about how digital technology is affecting the structure of the media. Perhaps surprisingly, Ananya tells us that the existing literature on filter bubbles and polarization suggests that people are not more polarized online than offline.