Abstract
Building on an original panel dataset of episodes of Fascist violence at the day-level in 1919-22, this paper studies the strategic incentives for political violence related to media coverage. We collect and digitize approximately a hundred and fifty Italian newspapers from the early XX century that we process with OCR techniques in order to extract their texts. We exploit the newspaper content to reconstruct outlet-specific local media markets combining econometrics and GIS techniques. Furthermore, we analyze the subject and tone of each article with natural language processing tools. We then set up a spatial diff-in-disc research design in order to obtain meaningful causal estimates. The findings show that the probability of observing a Fascist attack sharply increases for municipalities just inside the media market as compared to similar municipalities just outside of it, suggesting that Fascist squads were aware of the propaganda potential of media attention. The tone shift in the journalistic coverage following a Fascist attack depends on the political leaning of each outlet, with newspapers at the opposing ends of the ideological spectrum displaying the largest increase in subjectivity.