Press advertising and the ascent of the 'Pensee Unique'

The press industry depends in a crucial way on the possibility of financing an important fraction of its activities by advertising receipts. We show that this induces the editors of newspapers to moderate, in several cases, the political message they display to their readers, compared with the political opinions they would have expressed otherwise. To this end, we consider a three-stage game in which editors select sequentially their political image, the price of their newspaper and the advertising tariff they oppose to the advertisers. The intuition of the result lies in the fact that editors have to sell tasteless political messages to their readers in order to sell a larger audience to the advertisers. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.