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This paper puts forth a theory explaining domestic backlash against international investment law by connecting media coverage—specifically the bias in the news media’s selection of international disputes—to public opinion formation towards international agreements. To test our theory, we examine both the content and effects of the media’s reporting on international disputes, focusing on the increasingly controversial form known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). We find that newspaper outlets in both the United States and Canada have a bias in favor of covering disputes filed against their home country as opposed to those filed by home country firms. Using two national survey experiments fielded in the United States and Canada, we further find that the bias in news story selection has a strong negative effect on attitudes towards ISDS and related agreements, especially among highly nationalistic individuals.
Brutger et al. (Thu,) studied this question.