Although September talks for a newspaper bailout may have fallen flat in congress, the idea is sure to be resurrected given the latest circulation drops. America’s statesman would do well to read this study, which looks into media coverage in Argentina where the government provides a steady stream of revenue to its newspapers.

Argentine governments have a long tradition of funneling official advertising to sympathetic media and withholding it from others…

[The study] found a “huge correlation” between, in any given month, how much money went to a newspaper and how much corruption coverage appeared on its front page. For example, if the government ad revenue in a month increased by one standard deviation — around $70,000 U.S. — corruption coverage would decrease by roughly half of a front page.

Now, many in the U.S. assert that there is an inherent ideological bias within the press that affects coverage. Some conservative authors, for example, thought that many media organizations did not cover the corruption investigations into ACORN because of ideological purposes. But is ideology important when government money comes into play? The study’s authors looked into this very question:

Even when a liberal paper is covering a liberal government, month-by-month corruption coverage goes up or down as government ad payments go up or down. In fact, the data showed that government dollars were nearly five times as powerful in determining corruption coverage as the ideological proximity between newspaper and government decreased.

In looking at the study, there is one condition that we should keep in mind, as Techdirt points out, “Of course, this is a correlation — so it’s entirely possible that governments that support the press are simply less corrupt and less prone to scandal.” Even if the study does not establish a causal relationship between funding and coverage, it raises some very interesting points. It is hard to imagine that the press, by human nature, would bite the hand that feeds them. As one of the study’s authors, Harvard University’s Rafael Di Tella, concluded:

The difference isn’t particularly important, since either timing scenario indicates a non-independent press. He said the evidence they gathered seemed to support newspapers reacting to government money, not the other way around.