Media, Economics and Geopolitics

Research in political economy has documented a vast number of different media effects suggesting that the media can have a profound impact on a range of economically & politically relevant outcomes. Yet, the existing empirical work is significantly skewed towards a few countries, raising concerns about the generalizability & broader cross context relevance of the empirical findings. Further, given the predominant focus on individual countries and its politics, this implies limited attention is devoted to the frictions between national media, national politics and transnational policy making in the myriad of areas that require collective and coordinated global action. To what extent the primarily national media has concrete effects undermining global policy making across a broad range of areas - or on the specific issue of climate change - is an important empirical question that requires both suitable data and suitable research designs. MEGEO will deliver on both dimensions and in the process catalyse research across multiple disciplines.The overarching objectives of MEGEO are:1) To develop & make available a comprehensive and consistent novel data resource measuring what national media reports on and how and to what extent other countries are represented in each other's media2) To characterize the extent to which national media may affect policy making in domains with clear transnational relevance that has previously been mostly ignored 3) To quantify the extent to which skewed reporting on foreign countries may have tangible economic & political impacts The work is organized across three work packages that will provide a systematic ""Topology of Media Focus"" across countries