When a local factory shuts down because of a global trade deal, the town's newspaper suddenly starts leaning way more to the right.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
Trade Shocks and Media Slant
SSRN · 6259678
The Takeaway
Economic trauma doesn't just change how people vote; it changes the entire information ecosystem. In U.S. towns hit hard by NAFTA, local newspapers shifted their political tone significantly, creating a permanent rightward tilt in everything they reported.
From the abstract
Does trade liberalization reshape the political language of local news? I scale over 52 million newspaper articles against the evolving political vocabulary of the U.S. House of Representatives and use an event study exploiting variation in NAFTA exposure across commuting zones. Trade-exposed newspapers underwent a systematic rightward shift: the share of Republican-leaning articles increased by 9.6 percentage points for a topversus-bottom-quartile difference in trade vulnerability. The shift is