Lazily Informed: Consumer Inertia and News Diets

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of entertainment shows on the propensity to watch the news through viewers? inertia on channel choice. It uses the legally-induced cancellation of the game-show Pasapalabra in 2019 to study audience inertia around news- broadcasts. The cancellation of this popular show is estimated to have decreased news audience by about 28% on the largest Spanish news broadcast, which was emitted on the same channel directly after the cancelled show. This paper proposes a dynamic discrete demand model for audience with consumer inertia to show the impact of entertainment programming on subsequent news broadcasts. It employs a detailed clicker panel-dataset to disentangle heterogeneous consumer preferences from inertia. Additionally, it uses data from the 2019 Spanish national elections that happened before and after the cancellation to provide suggestive evidence that the decrease in viewership of Telecinco?s news broadcast can be associated to a decrease in voter participation.