Green dies in darkness? The impact of newspaper closures on toxic pollutant emissions
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This paper investigates whether media facilitates public monitoring of disclosed toxic chemical emissions.
Since 2004, more than 20% of newspapers in the United States have shut down, and newspaper employments were cut by half (Takenaga, 2019; Sullivan, 2020). Because newspapers produce more local news than any other media outlets --TV stations, radio, and online media combined (Mahone et al., 2019; Abernathy, 2020), the decline of the newspaper industry has left many communities without any local newspapers, creating a “news desert.”
How can newspaper closure impact toxic emissions?
Newspaper coverage on pollution could mobilize environmental groups to protest through intense not in my backyard (NIMBY) movements or shame the plant managers into investing more in reducing pollution. For example, one power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, reduced its toxic emissions by 60% over two years after the local newspaper, The Herald News, reported that the plant was the state’s third-largest emitter in 2000 (Yeo, 2018). In the Flint water crisis, local newspapers such as the Flint Journal and the Detroit Free Press played a critical role in pressing the government, the responsible party in this case, to acknowledge the crisis (e.g., Fonger 2015a, b; Tanner and Kaffer 2015). As another example, Dyck et al. (2008) documents that the coverage of some Russian firms’ self-dealing by Financial Times and Wall Street Journal significantly reduces these corporate governance violations by damaging their reputations and forcing regulators to investigate.
What do we find?
We use plants whose counties experienced a newspaper closure as the treatment group while plants from the same firm located in other counties as the control group—this research design controls for any firm-wide time-variant shocks. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis, we find that plants located in counties experiencing a newspaper closure increase their toxic emissions by 10% within five years.
This figure plots the toxic emissions from treatment plants and control plants around newspaper closures after control for plant fixed-effects. The blue dots indicate the coefficient is significant different from zero at 90% level.
DOI:10.1007/s11142-023-09786-5
Full paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3800977