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We formalize the editorial role of news media in a multisector economy and show that media can be an independent source of business cycle fluctuations, even when they report accurate information. Public reporting about a subset of sectoral developments that are newsworthy but unrepresentative causes firms across all sectors to hire too much or too little labor. We construct historical measures of US sectoral news coverage and use them to calibrate our model. Time-varying media focus generates demand-like fluctuations that are orthogonal to productivity, even in the absence of non-TFP shocks. Presented with historical sectoral productivity, the model reproduces the 2009 Great Recession.

In this paper, I use high-frequency financial market estimates to identify the monetary policy shock in a non-recursive 133 variable FAVAR. All restrictions are imposed exclusively on impact, and only on financial market variables. Using the economy's underlying factor structure as the link between its real and financial sides, I find that high-frequency responses contain valuable information about the behavior of lower-frequency macro variables. Even though the proposed identification scheme does not fall back on any of the standard (FA) VAR identifying assumptions, it confirms the classical finding that monetary policy has strong and significant delayed effects on real activity. I also obtain stock market responses that are compatible with the efficient market hypothesis and find that consumer prices react very little to monetary policy.

We formalize the editorial role of news media in a multi-sector economy and show that media can be an independent source of business cycle fluctuations, even when the information they report is accurate. Our approach tightly links agents’ beliefs to real economic developments and allows for incomplete information without exogenous noise shocks. In the model, media monitor the economy, making state-dependent decisions on which subset of sectors to report. Accurate public reporting about sectoral developments that are newsworthy but unrepresentative, causes firms in all sectors to over- or underinvest in productive capacity. We construct historical time series of sectoral news coverage in the US and use them to calibrate a multi-sector model driven only by sectoral TFP shocks. Time-varying media focus generates demand-like aggregate fluctuations that are orthogonal to productivity. Presented with historical productivity shocks constructed by the BEA, the model reproduces the 2009 Great Recession.

News media provide information about economic conditions to a large part of society and serve as a source of public signals that coordinate beliefs and decisions. We document how the focus of news media shifts over the business cycle and discuss the implications for the ability of economic agents to coordinate their actions.