Legally forcing a news outlet to be 'neutral' doesn't remove bias; it just forces the outlet to use 'probabilistic' reporting to manipulate audiences.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
A Theory of Neutral Media: Costly Information and Audience Targeting
SSRN · 6503211
The Takeaway
The study shows that neutral media outlets strategically choose when to be informative and when to be vague based on the 'extremeness' of their target audience. Instead of providing balance, they use 'stochastic' reporting—effectively flipping coins on whether to tell the truth—to capture specific viewers while still technically following neutrality rules.
From the abstract
We study how a traffic-driven media outlet behaves when it must remain neutral, in the sense that it cannot favor either side of a binary state. Citizens differ in prior beliefs and decide whether to follow the outlet, while the outlet chooses costly information provision subject to this neutrality constraint. We show that neutrality does not eliminate strategic information provision; it changes its form. An optimal policy can be represented by a single binary report that treats the two states s