Competitive capture of public opinion

Two opposed interested parties (IPs) compete to influence citizens with het- erogeneous priors which receive news items produced by a variety of sources. The IPs right to capture the coverage conveyed in these items. We character- ize the equilibrium level of capture of item as well as the equilibrium level of information transmission. Capture increases the prevalence of the ex ante most informative messages and can explain the empirical distribution of slant at the news-item level. Opposite capturing efforts do not cancel each other and instead undermine social learning as rational citizens discount informative messages. Cit- izen skepticism makes efforts to capture the news strategic substitutes. Because of strategic substitution, competition for influence is compatible with horizontal differentiation between successful media. In equilibrium, rational citizens choose to consume messages from aligned sources despite knowledge of the bias in a manner consistent with recent empirical evidence.