Lobbying in Disguise

The ability of private interests to influence the political process is an important topic in economics and political science. While some of these efforts appear as campaign finance and lobbying expenditures in the official record, private interests may also engage in "covert" influence through media capture. In this paper, we systematically examine whether and to what extent corporations in the United States with an interest in slowing climate action might have used corporate advertisement in media outlets as a strategic tool to align such outlets' coverage with their views. Based on several complementary empirical strategies, we find that advertisement spending by such actors (i) increases during election periods and (ii) is associated with both lower and more skeptical-leaning coverage of climate change and climate policy.