Town Level Data on Cable Operators and Cable Channels

12 Sep

I am pleased to announce the release of TV and Cable Factbook Data (1997–2002; 1998 coverage is modest). Use of the data is restricted to research purposes.

Background

In 2007, Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan published a paper that used data from Warren’s Factbook to identify the effect of the introduction of Fox News Channel on Republican vote share (link to paper). Since then, a variety of papers exploiting the same data and identification scheme have been published (see, for instance, Hopkins and Ladd, Clinton and Enamorado, etc.)

In 2012, I embarked on a similar such project—trying to use the data to study the impact of the introduction of Fox News Channel on attitudes and behaviors related to climate change. However, I found the original data to be limited—DellaVigna and Kaplan had used a team of research assistants to manually code a small number of variables for a few years. So I worked on extending the data. I planned on extending the data in two ways: adding more years, and adding ‘all’ the data for each year. To that end, I developed custom software. The data collection and parsing of a few thousand densely packed, inconsistently formatted, pages (see below) to a usable CSV (see below) finished sometime early in 2014. (To make it easier to create a crosswalk with other geographical units, I merged the data with Town lat/long (centroid) and elevation data from http://www.fallingrain.com/world/US/.)

Sample Page
cable_factbook_example
Snapshot of the Final CSV
csv_snap

Soon after I finished the data collection, however, I became aware of a paper by Martin and Yurukoglu. They found some inconsistencies between the Nielsen data and the Factbook data (see Appendix C1 of paper), tracing the inconsistencies to delays in updating the Factbook data—“Updating is especially poor around [DellaVigna and Kaplan] sample year. Between 1999 and 2000, only 22% of observations were updated. Between 1998 and 1999, only 37% of observations were updated.” Based on their paper, I abandoned the plan to use the data, though I still believe the data can be used for a variety of important research projects, including estimating the impact of the introduction of Fox News. Based on that belief, I am releasing the data.