Persuading Through Media Bias With News Diffusion

I analyze persuasion in a model in which a media outlet with a partisan motive (i.e., to persuade agents) can report news with a partisan bias (“slant”) and the news then diffuses sequentially in a population of biased (in the same direction as the media outlet) and unbiased agents, whereby each agent decides whether to share the news with the next agent or not. I find that the slant is increasing in the bias of the biased agents and in the agents' tendency to meet similar others. I also discuss two variants of the model: one in which there is no diffusion and another in which the media outlet has a pure diffusion motive rather than a partisan motive.