The Business of the Culture War

Abstract: We link the contemporary American “culture war” to the entry of 24-hour cable news networks, which we find emphasize cultural issues more than the broadcast networks preceding them and far more than political candidates. Estimating viewer preferences using household-by-second data, we show cable news faces a tradeoff: cultural content attracts non-news entertainment viewers while economic content attracts viewers of rival news outlets. Broadcast news and politicians similarly trade off the cultural content that appeals to the politically disengaged against the economic content that appeals to the politically engaged, but we show why cable has the strongest incentives to emphasize culture. In turn, constituencies quasi-randomly more exposed to cable news networks assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians run more cultural campaigns