IS Seminar - No News is Bad News: Political Corruption and the Decline of the Fourth Estate
Supporting the below United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:支持以下聯合國可持續發展目標：支持以下联合国可持续发展目标：
The rise of the internet has precipitated the birth and downfall of numerous industries, but perhaps no industry has been transformed to the same degree as news production. Journalism has seen the rise of content aggregation, the proliferation of fake news through social media, and the decimation of local reporting capacity, all of which have served to hollow the newspaper industry. In this work, we examine the downstream effects of this decline industry on an outcome of significant theoretical and practical significance: political corruption. As newspapers are an important investigative arm of local communities, it is possible that the closure of community media will embolden corrupt actors who believe they are less likely to be detected following the closure of a local newspaper. To estimate any effect, we employ a difference in difference approach, exploiting the phased closure of major daily newspapers across the country. Results indicate a significant increase in federal corruption charges in federal districts following closure. Further, we observe no evidence that the rise in online newsvendors and the democratization of the press ameliorates this effect. This highlights the important role of the “fourth estate” in inhibiting corruption in governance and the need to conceptualize the punitive societal effects of the internet more expansively.
Dr. Brad N. Greenwood is an Associate Professor at George Mason University. He joined the faculty at Mason from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Previously, he has also served on the faculty at Temple University’s Fox School of Business and the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. Dr. Greenwood’s research examines the intended and unintended consequence of innovation, and how access to the resulting information affects welfare at the interface between business, technology, and social issues; notably in the contexts of healthcare and entrepreneurship. He is currently an Associate Editor at Management Science and MIS Quarterly. His work has been published in such leading outlets as: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Organization Science, Information Systems Research, Productions and Operations Management, MIS Quarterly, the Communications of the ACM, the Strategic Management Journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, and PLoS ONE.
His corporate experience includes nearly eight years as a deputy project manager and analyst for CACI International, a mid-sized consulting firm in the greater Washington DC Metro Area. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and Management Information Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Greenwood also received his MBA from the University of Notre Dame; his Master’s of IT from Virginia Polytechnic Institute; and his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently enrolled as a student at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.