Shaping the beliefs of the majority. Pluralism and competition in mass information

This paper analyses a market where two sources of information sell reports to a population of readers. Sources care about the outcome of a two-party election where the readers vote according to the information received. The paper discusses whether or not pluralism matters as regards the truthfulness of information disclosures at an equilibrium, and whether we should expect the majority of the population to be less well informed than the minority. Given the definition adopted in the paper, pluralism is found to matter only to a limited extent: the minority source provides better information than the majority source, independently of whether they share or not the same political goals. On the other hand, the pattern with a well informed élite and a less informed majority turns out to be an equilibrium outcome when political choices are made exclusively by the winning party. The paper also compares the previous case with the one where political choices are influenced by both parties, to an extent which depends in a continuous way on their shares in the population. (JEL: L82, Z1, D72)