Additional Material for Handcu¤s for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability

The baseline model assumed that all voters are informed if there is at least one informative outlet. This may be unrealistic because it presupposes that people are willing to switch to a di¤erent outlet if their usual outlet does not have interesting news. The goal of the present section is to consider a more general model where some viewers are ‡exible (they are willing to switch to a di¤erent media source) and some are not. We also generalize the model to allow for heterogeneity among outlets in the strength of the commercial motive (we replace a with ai) and in the transaction costs (we replace with i). Finally, we now allow the possibility that the government censors the media as well as buying silence