Juan Morales (Collegio Carlo Alberto)

“Violence Against Journalists and Freedom of the Press: Evidence from Mexico”

Abstract: We study the relationship between violence targeting journalists and news reporting in Mexico. Our main empirical strategy exploits variation in the timing of journalists’ killings. We use high-frequency data on news reporting collected from a comprehensive archive of the largest Mexican news outlets (EFIC), an online archive of news reports compiled through the Google Custom Search Engine, and a dataset of over 6 million tweets published by Mexican journalists and media outlets. We also examine long-run changes in the demographics of journalists using a difference-in-differences strategy and data from the 2010 and 2015 Mexican censuses.