Recently, many scholars have been interested in quantifying the effect of the national news media on the behavior of electorate. Understanding how the national media environment affects the election results is critically important, but also notoriously difficult. In particular, even if an association between media coverage and election outcomes exists, it is difficult to identify whether this association is due to the media's influence over the voters or the result of the media adjusting its contents to the preferences of voters. In this exercise, we will consider the entry of the Fox News Channel (hereafter Fox News) into the television market in the late 1990s. This exercise is based on the following study: Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan (2007). "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122:3, pp. 1187-1234. Note that due to the nature of negotiations between cable companies and television networks, adding a new channel to the line-up of a cable company may take a long time. For this reason, in contrast to what many people might expect, the Fox News was not able to enter conservative media markets first. We will be looking at some of the differences between the towns that initially did not receive Fox News, and those that did. The data set is in the csy file foxnews. csv. It contains information for 10,126 towns across 28 states in the United States: Name Description town Town name state State in which the town is located subrf2000 Share of Fox News subscribers in 2000 gopvoteshare 2000 Two-party vote share for the Republicans (2000 Presidential election) gopvoteshare 1996 Two-party vote share for the Republicans (1996 Presidential election) gopvoteshare 1992 Two-party vote share for the Republicans (1992 Presidential election) college1990 Proportion of population with a college degree in 1990 male1990 Proportion of male population in 1990 black1990 Proportion of black population in 1990 hisp1990 Proportion of hispanic population in 1990 income 1990 Median income in 1990 logincome1990 Median income in 1990 on the logarithmic scaleQuestion 1 We will investigate whether there are any systematic differences in the distribution of some key pre-treatment variables (hs1990, black1990, hisp1990, male1990, logincome1990) between towns that received Fox News as compared to those that did not. First, create a new variable called foxnews2000 that takes the value of 1 if the share of Fox News subscribers in a given town is strictly larger than 0 and equals 0 otherwise. Create five Quantile-Quantile plots to assess the similarity of the distributions for towns with and without subscribers across the five variables (hs1990, black 1990, hisp1990, male1990, logincome1990). Interpret the results. Are there any consistent patterns of differences between the two groups of towns? What do the plots tell you about our ability to make causal inferences regarding the effect of Fox News on the election outcome? Question 2 We further examine whether there are any clear differences between those towns that did receive Fox News and those that did not. To do this, apply the k-means algorithm with two clusters to the five variables you analyzed in the previous question. Be sure to remove any missing values and scale each variable so that their means are zero and standard deviations are one, before applying the algorithm. What is the distribution of the clusters with respect to whether or not towns received Fox News? What are the characteristics of each cluster? Explain how this analysis answers the question about our ability to make causal inferences about the electoral effect of Fox News