Strategic Information Transmission through the Media

We model media manipulation in which a sender or senders manipulate in-formation through the media to inuence receivers. We show that if there is only one sender who has a conditional preference for maintaining its credibil-ity in reporting accurate information and if the receivers face a coordination situation without information about their opponentstypes, the sender could inuence the receivers to make decisions according to the senders primary preference by manipulating the information through the media, which makes the report common knowledge. This is true even when the sender and the receivers have contradictory primary preferences. This result extends to the cases in which the sender has imperfect information or in which the senders primary preference is to maintain its credibility. In the case of multiple senders, however, when there is enough competition among the senders or when simul-taneous reporting takes place, the receivers could play their favored outcome against senderspreferences, which sheds light on a solution to the media ma-nipulation problem