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LIT-1333: Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1031) in full, from the authors' 2005 working paper in LSE Research Online; worth reading for the model of media capture as a bargain (each outlet must be paid what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the press is captured exactly when n·τa < r, THEORY-837), for its precise sense of media independence as the transaction cost of transfers, and for the observation that capture needs no deception. Read it knowing that it is static, that news in it is hard and the same at every outlet, that its cross-country table is raw means, and that the published AER text was not compared.
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance, social-science
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1031 — Besley and Prat — Handcuffs for the grabbing hand
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-837 — In Besley and Prat's model of an incumbent who can pay n identical outlets to suppress verifiable bad news, where one outlet's report informs every voter, each outlet's price for silence is what it would earn as the only one to break the story, so the media are captured exactly when n·τa < r; under capture voters, though fully rational and not deceived, learn nothing and never remove a bad incumbent

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Besley, T. & Prat, A. (2006). Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability. American Economic Review 96(3): 720–736. doi:10.1257/aer.96.3.720.

Read 2026-10-21 in full, from the 2005 working paper (NOTE-1031). The capture condition is held as THEORY-837.

Why this is here

A21 cited it as the model of endogenous media capture: “influencing news content doesn’t necessarily require formal censorship.” The captured institution is the one that should evaluate another, which is the loop CLAIM-404 says a captured evaluator closes, and the shape of CASE-123. The reading (NOTE-1031) finds the model static: capture is a one-shot bargain between the incumbent and every outlet, with no feedback from one period to the next, so it bears on the claim’s evidence route and on formal independence, not on its loop.

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