We study the impact of news content on individuals’ perceptions about corruption. To this purpose, we combine individuals’ beliefs about the likelihood that corruption events may occur in everyday life, as obtained from questions introduced in a large household survey, with their as-good-as-random exposure to corruption-related news on the date of the interview. Results show that a 1 SD increase in the number of corruption news items raises corruption perceptions by 3.5%. Consistently with a mechanism of persuasion, perceptions respond mainly to news not related to specific corruption events rather than to those reporting on arrests, investigations or convictions.

中文翻译：

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可说服的看法：媒体内容对腐败信念的影响

我们研究新闻内容对个人对腐败的看法的影响。为此，我们将从大型住户调查中引入的问题中获得的个人对日常生活中可能发生腐败事件的可能性的看法与他们在当天尽可能随机地接触腐败相关新闻相结合采访的。结果表明，腐败新闻数量每增加 1 个标准差，腐败观念就会提高 3.5%。与说服机制一致，人们的看法主要对与特定腐败事件无关的新闻做出反应，而不是对逮捕、调查或定罪的报道做出反应。