Media Ownershipand Journalism
Media Ownershipand Journalism
Keywords: journalism studies, media ownership, pluralism, democracy, monopolization, media systems,
clientalism, commercialism, media concentration, nonprofits, public service broadcasting
Introduction
The issue of ownership is primarily of interest to journalism scholars due to the
assumption that ownership can have an effect on news content, journalistic autonomy,
freedom of expression, and organizational and professional practices. Here, ownership
refers to the various forms of governance associated with particular ownership
structures, while the owners of media constitute the individuals and companies that wield
influence over their organization (Schlosberg, 2016, p. 8). Of equal importance is the
distinction between media that create news content and those that distribute it over
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network platforms (Noam, 2016, p. 9). Here, we are mainly concerned with how owners
and forms of ownership impact on content creating news media.
The research on media ownership comprises a “contested and congested” (Hardy, 2014,
p. 79) body of literature. The bulk of research has been carried out in U.S. and U.K.
contexts in the 1980s and 1990s, when news media profits were high, and when the
critical political economy perspective emerged as a particular strand of media research.
Overall, the body of research devoted to news media ownership can be characterized by
four features:
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The reason for this is that news media ownership must be seen in context with overall
social, political, and economic framework conditions under which media ownership
occurs. News media ownership assumes different characteristics depending on whether
and when it is profitable or politically interesting to own media. When investing in news
production is economically beneficial, it typically attracts corporate owners aiming to
maximize profit on the public stock market. When investments in news production are
politically beneficial, it typically attracts industry, military, or partisan ownership. When
news media ownership is not economically beneficial, as has been the development in
Western media systems in recent years, it attracts a variety of owners with different
motives. As the landscape shifts toward the digital economy, there are four trends in the
development of news media ownership that can be observed in relation to the emerging
“crisis” in journalism:
While these trends all speak to the shifting conditions for news media ownership in the
digital era, it is important to observe that much of the literature on media ownership was
written when news media ownership was profitable. As such, profit motives and market
failure associations are highly present in the research, particularly as normative and
critical perspectives. While ownership of legacy news media in Western countries no
longer entails the same profits as before, research has yet to revise the critical
perspectives of the 1990s.
Of vital concern, however, is the fact that media markets develop differently in different
regions of the world. The motives for, and effects of, media ownership depend on the
particularities of the media system in question. While U.S. and U.K. markets have
experienced a crisis in journalism funding in recent years, this does not adequately
describe the situation in most other markets in the world (Soloski, 2013). Nevertheless,
the research presented at central conferences and in leading journals predominantly
concerns U.S. and U.K. market contexts, sustaining a largely Anglo-American crisis
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narrative that subsequent research tends to relate to. Common across the world,
however, is that news media ownership research is motivated by the potential impact that
journalism has on society, and the economic and political benefit that might arise from
controlling journalistic organizations. News media ownership is therefore largely seen as
precarious—a potential threat to democratic pluralism and journalistic quality and
independence (Picard & Dal Zotto, 2016).
Overview
Ownership matters because “all capital comes with conditions” (Ohlsson, 2012, p. 55).
This is because property rights essentially involve owners in the governance of media
firms. As Altschull (1997, p. 259) remarks, “the content of the news media inevitably
reflects the interest of those who pay the bills.” The study of news media ownership
therefore entails investigations into journalism’s various organizational forms (Benson,
2016, p. 29)—as part of the conditions and constraints that journalism operates under
(Street, 2010).
In the following, a brief history of media ownership is outlined, followed by three major
sections: (1) main theoretical perspectives, which includes critical political economy
perspectives and media industries and management studies; (2) different forms of
ownership, including corporate ownership, state ownership, and civil society ownership;
and (3) major trends and findings in the research, where the research on ownership
concentration, commercialization, clientalism, and diversity is outlined. Finally, the state
of research is discussed.
In most parts of the world, ownership of news media has historically largely been non-
corporate and private. In Europe and the United States, newspapers in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries were either owned by families, local business leaders, or politicians.
A shift toward concentration and “tycoon” ownership emerged in the second half of the
19th century, particularly in the United Kingdom (Curran, 2002) and the United States
(McChesney, 2003). Corporate consolidation began in the 1960s, and accelerated in the
1980s and 1990s, particularly in advanced capitalist economies. Deregulation and foreign
investment led to increased transnational cross-media ownership (Thussu, 2005),
followed by convergence, where many news enterprises were consolidated into profit-
making entertainment and marketing-oriented conglomerates (Hardy, 2017, p. 10). In
post-communist countries, an early period of diversification of ownership after the fall of
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the Soviet block was quickly followed by increased concentration (Splichal, 2001) and
foreign takeovers (Doblek-Ostrowska, 2012). The growth in foreign ownership has, in
turn, caused many countries to relax domestic ownership restrictions in recent years—
encouraging domestic scale to better counter foreign interests (Picard & Dal Zotto, 2016,
p. 56). Overall, most newspaper businesses today are privately owned, for-profit
enterprises (Küng, Picard, & Towse, 2008, p. 8; Picard & van Weezel, 2008, p. 24)—except
in authoritarian systems such as China, Cuba, and North Korea, where newspapers are
largely owned by the state. Despite the predominantly commercial nature of newspaper
industries, generally only a few newspaper companies are publically traded in the
different media systems, but these tend to be large, dominant players.
When radio broadcasting systems began to emerge in the 1920s, these were largely
started as private enterprises. By the 1930s shifting toward corporate ownership in the
United States, and toward state ownership in Europe, radio ownership forms in these
markets came to shape future broadcasting markets. With the introduction of television in
the 1950s, broadcasting’s presumed effects on society made ownership in this sector a
policy issue. Most European, African, and Asian states chose to assume state ownership
of the national broadcasters, while in the United States and Latin America private
operators were given control of the airwaves. Whereas private broadcasting emerged
relatively late in the European context, most broadcasting systems in the world today are
mixed systems of private and state ownership. Western nations all have some media
ownership regulations, or competition policies that can be applied to news media, and
some have cultural and media specific policies addressing ownership concentration
(Picard & Dal Zotto, 2016). As emerging democracies move toward regulation of
journalism sectors, these tend to follow liberal or democratic corporatist models, mainly
differentiating along questions of foreign ownership limits. Overall, the history of
broadcasting largely demonstrates the extent to which monopoly ownership of media is
contested ground (e.g., Kuhn, 2006; Pickard, 2014A).
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research. Dominated in part by issues of concentration (e.g., Bagdikian, 2004; Herman &
McChesney, 2001), research has largely failed to clearly distinguish between ownership
and commercialization as its root problem. An emerging field of research, however,
considers the impact of ownership in comparative journalism research (e.g., Esser et al.,
2012), while attention to alternative forms of ownership are also on the rise (e.g., Benson,
2018).
The political economy of media emerged in the 1960s as the study of mass
communication. This is a broad approach based on economics, political science,
communication, and social analysis. The critical branch of political economy addresses
the material conditions of communication (Hardy, 2017)—the power relations that
constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of material and symbolic
resources in the media industries (Curran, 2014; Garnham, 1979; Mosco, 1996; Murdock
& Golding, 2005). With roots in the classical political economy of Adam Smith (1776),
critical political economy is largely influenced by Marx’ historical materialism, adding
class to the analysis of the relations of production. Often holistic and historical in
orientation, this research considers the media as situated between market realities and
state intervention (Murdock & Golding, 2005, p. 61), often including perspectives related
to globalization and cultural imperialism (see Schiller, 1971; Smythe, 1960).
Critical political economic scholarship is mainly concerned with how the characteristics
of media ownership influence the organization of journalistic production and labor
(Hardy, 2014, p. 80). News organizations are hereto largely seen as systems maintaining
the interests of ruling elites (e.g., Bagdikian, 2004; Garnham, 1979; Golding & Murdock,
1991; Gandy, 1982; Gitlin, 1980; Mosco, 1996; Murdock & Golding, 1977; see Zelizer,
2004). The most influential publications in this context have been Ben Bagdikian’s The
Media Monopoly (2004), Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent
(1988), and Robert McChesney’s The Political Economy of the Media (2008). Here,
Bagdikian analyzes the rising power and concentration of American media
conglomerates, assuming a direct relationship between media ownership and political
influence. To understand how corporate media wields its power, Herman and Chomsky’s
propaganda model considers the role of dominant mass media firms’ size, concentration,
and profit orientation. The relationship between capitalist ownership and journalism is
here mediated by the “purely commercial motives” (Carey, 2008) that inspire a “culture of
objectivity” in journalism (Roshco, 1975; Schiller, 1981). While this “culture of objectivity”
renders a certain degree of autonomy to journalists, this only occurs within the limits of
consensus (Schlesinger, 1978), fostering the uncritical treatment of corporate and
government sources of power (Bennett, 1996), leading to pro-corporate bias (McChesney,
2003) and a standardized news logic (Ettema, Whitley, & Wackman, 1997, p. 35).
Often described as a “leftist” (Curran, 2014) approach, critical political economy merges
critical and normative perspectives on journalism (Zelizer, 2004). Historical processes are
central, including the growth of the media, the extension of corporate reach, and the
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changing impact of the state intervention (Murdock & Golding, 2005, p. 64). Methods are
varied, including document analysis, historical research, textual and content analysis, and
market analysis (Hardy, 2014). The use of economic statistics and market data is,
however, contested (Noam, 2016), and central works have been criticized for inflating or
exaggerating market share figures to back claims of media concentration (Noam, 2009,
pp. 19–20). In the digital context, critical political economy perspectives serve as
correctives to celebratory approaches to digital journalism research (Hardy, 2017, p. 1)
and as frameworks for analyzing shifting and emerging conditions of how communication
is organized (Hardy, 2014). As such, say Wasco, Murdock, and Sousa (2014, p. 5), for
critical political economy scholars, “digital media appear not as a primary lever of change
but as a new field of struggle dominated by long-standing battles and combatants,”
including questions of the unequal distribution of power.
Media ownership in the media industries perspective is studied mainly from two angles—
how the organizational forms, born from different types of ownership impact on
journalism (e.g., McManus, 1994), and framework conditions in the surrounding
structures (such as competition, regulation, and supply chains) impact on ownership
composition in the market (Busterna,1988; Lacy, Shaver, & Cyr, 1996; Noam, 2009;
Picard, 2005). The dominant perspective here has been the Industrial Organization
model, where the structure–conduct–performance paradigm describes how the economic
market structure affects the conduct of firms, which in turn affects the performance of
those markets. The problem with this perspective, says Ots (2015) is that it is first and
foremost suited to highly stable markets. The increasing globalization, convergence, and
fragmentation of media markets have therefore called for more adaptive and interpretive
approaches (Dimmick, 2002), including innovation perspectives (Storsul & Krumsvik,
2013).
John McManus’s 1994 book, Market-Driven Journalism: May the Citizen Beware, is a
central work in this field. McManus uses a model of economic reasoning in news
production to produce a systematic overview of the practical ways in which ownership
impacts news businesses. In publically traded companies, stockholders exercise their will
through electing boards of directors, while investors set general operating conditions,
expecting profit, influence, and prestige in return. Corporate management allocates
capital and sets company policy—legally obligated to serve the economic interests of the
owners. Newsmakers operate within this model under constraints set by others, where
owners and major investors have the most power. As media firms compete in markets for
investors, sources, advertisers, and consumers, the news becomes a commodity to fit
these markets.
Because “commercially funded media require financial resources and strength to sustain
and nurture their activities, but they cannot fully pursue their economic self-interest
without harming optimal public service” (Picard, 2005, p. 337), media sectors tend to
incentivize good behavior through regulation. Media industries are subject to anti-
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monopolization and competition law like any other industry, and in many countries in the
world, governments are active in controlling mergers and firm growth (such as in the
European Union). The Internet presents a problem here. While media industries are
regulated individually, the Internet carries a mix of content from all these industries.
Meanwhile, its global nature evades regulation unless by an international body (Küng et
al., 2008, p. 11). As such, current media business structures make ownership distinctions
more difficult to detect, primarily due to the complexity that the many forms of
cooperation, alliances, and networks that news media operate under—which diffuses
control within the system (Klimkiewicz, 2010, p. 908).
Benson (2016) here uses public to denote the public service orientation of publically
owned media (media owned by the state, such as public service broadcasting), not to
denote publically traded media—a nomenclature often used to describe private media on
the stock market. Benson instead designates both privately owned and publically traded
media to the commercial sector. In addition, Benson designates to the civil society sector
philanthropic, religious, academic and foundation funding, and trust ownership. Whether
juridical, actor-based, or sectoral, divisions of ownership forms can assume different
meanings in different media systems. However, the sectoral ownership division suggested
by Benson presents as the most appropriate for discussing the various ways in which
ownership impacts on news and journalism.
Owners have two kinds of control over their media—allocation control and operational
control. Allocation control includes controlling the company’s finances and resources;
forming the policy and strategy of the company; controlling mergers, acquisitions, or
cutbacks; and profit control. Operational control includes the internal distribution of
resources; setting editorial strategies; deciding on leadership models; and hiring leaders
and managers (McManus, 1994). For private media, the more shares are owned by a
single party, the more power this party has over the company. For state-owned media, the
political composition of the ruling coalition matters for future budgets, provisions, and
management appointments, while oversight procedures determine the distance between
political power and broadcasting provisions (Benson & Powers, 2011). Media ownership
is often concentrated, exceeding concentration levels allowed for in other industries
(Noam, 2016). Most Western nations have been characterized by monopoly or oligopoly in
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Different ownership forms have different characteristics. Public (i.e., state) ownership
entails public funding and public oversight. Stock market ownership entails more fluid
ownership structures and quarterly reports, while family ownership means control is
limited to a single owner or owner group, with the ownership privileges often being
passed down from generation to generation. With party ownership—a historical form of
ownership that has all but died out—journalists are often tied to the party line, and
newspapers are largely advocates of a political program (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Trust
and foundation ownership is thought to entail more relaxed profit expectations, long-term
operational security, and to an extent a more “ideal” form of ownership. Journalism is
therefore subject to different kinds of controls, powers of pressures under different
ownership forms.
Corporate Ownership
Corporate sector ownership is typically divided into public and private ownership, where
the former is traded on a public stock exchange and the latter is not. Publically traded
news media companies are often large corporations emphasizing maximization of
shareholder value (Benson, 2016, p. 35). Mergers and takeovers are natural parts of most
commercial industries, and the news media industry is no exception. Ownership
concentration reduces the reliance of companies on other organizations in the production
and dissemination process. This helps companies gain advantage over competitors,
making news more efficient and profitable. Ownership domination, however, can also lead
to homogenization, as different newspapers within the same corporation develop a
consensus on newsworthiness, adopt collective views and similar styles (Harrison, 2006).
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Chain or group ownership entails ownership of two or more news media outlets by the
same firm or individual, creating economies of scale. Chain-owned news media are
usually publically traded (Benson, 2016), although the phenomenon also exists in other
sectors (see below). When chains are formed, their organizational characteristics can
have an effect on journalists. Soloski (1979, pp. 20–24) has identified a number of
methods by which chains maintain control over their newspapers, including budget
control and mandated use of chain wire copy (see also Breed, 1955). As role expectations
in a chain newspaper are sourced outside the individual paper at a higher organizational
level, managers of chain papers are more prone to corporate attachment (Parsons,
Finnegan, & Benhan, 1988, pp. 100–101). The impact of chain or group ownership has
attracted much academic attention (Hamilton, 2005). While Baker (2006) found them to
be negative, chain formations can also help newspapers professionalize, creating greater
distance between reporters and local enterprise and politics exerting pressures on
journalists. Moreover, evidence is not conclusive that chain ownership necessarily
homogenizes content or practices (Braun, 2015; Lacy, 1991; Sjøvaag, 2014B). Chain
ownership can also squeeze titles for profit and dictate the editorial line (Entman, 1989).
Private ownership of media is one of those things, says Noam (2009), that can spawn
empire building, launching press barons and media tycoons. According to Curran (2002),
journalism history has often seen the press barons emerging in the United Kingdom
media system during the second half of the 19th century as forces of emancipation. As
these individuals (such as Carnegie, Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook) favored
entertainment, press barons developed commercial publication profiles, thereby
detaching the commercial press from the political parties and from the state (Curran,
2002, p. 38). The rise of politically active press barons in the United States and the
United Kingdom first inspired concern over the effects of ownership on media pluralism,
information flow, and open debate (Murdock & Golding, 2005, p. 67; Picard & Dal Zotto,
2016). These worries have been amplified in the wake of rising multimedia conglomerates
and their involvement in central communication sectors in large media markets
(Schlosberg, 2016).
The exploits of media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch in the United States, United
Kingdom and Australia, Carlos Slim in Mexico, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy have been of
constant interest to researchers (Noam, 2016), particularly as regards their political
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influences. In recent years, new digital tycoons such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezoz’s
acquisition of The Washington Post and Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar launching the
investigative journalism site The Intercept have received similar attention. And not least,
the role played by Facebook in news consumption, and the power of its CEO Mark
Zuckerberg in constructing people’s news diets, pose new questions about the role of
technological giants in the news media sector globally. According to Noam (2016), these
concerns reflect a shift in control from the industrial to the information age concerning
the means of production.
State Ownership
State power over the media takes many forms—as pure state ownership (e.g., public
service broadcasting); through licensing (of broadcasting or distribution rights); or
through financial means (e.g., taxes, fees, and subsidies). The role of the state as owner
of news media outlets therefore has a variety of expressions (see Figenschou, 2010)
based on the different roles the state plays out in a given society (Hallin & Mancini, 2004,
p. 49).
As far at the Western world is concerned, the United States stand out as almost wholly
reliant on commercial media. The media industries in almost all other Western countries
include some forms of state ownership (Benson & Powers, 2011), the most important of
which is public service broadcasting (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). In many of these national
markets, public service media enjoy a market leading position, both in terms of audiences
(especially in Western Europe), journalistic quality, and editorial independence (Benson,
2018). While public service media have been accused of over-representing the left-of-
center political agenda in many national markets, public service media have also been
proven to provide more in-depth, critical journalism and foreign news, and a greater
diversity of voices and viewpoints (Benson, 2016; Humprecht & Esser, 2018), whereas the
opposite has also been found (e.g., Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2017). European public service
broadcasting, in Spain and the United Kingdom for example, has seen an increase in
partisan political meddling in recent years (Garcia-Martines & Nguyen, 2012).
Commercial media increasingly see public service broadcasting as unfair competition,
especially in the online realm, and long-term funding is scaling back in some countries
like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands (Benson & Powers, 2011).
While most state-controlled broadcasters in Western Europe have evaded direct political
control (Benson, Powers, & Neff, 2017), southern European countries have not yet
reached this point, in Spain and Greece for example, where the ruling party directly
controls public broadcasting (Hallin & Papathanassopoulos, 2002). In recent years, there
has also been a similar development in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and
Hungary. The effect of this is that state-controlled broadcasters in these regions are not
strong autonomous institutions, limiting journalistic autonomy (Hallin &
Papathanassopoulos, 2002, p. 181). Papathanassoulos (2001) therefore remarks that
media systems characteristics, including ownership, create doubt about the extent to
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which the (Anglo-dominant) “professional” model of journalism has indeed spread around
the globe.
State ownership also extends to the press and commercial media in many countries, and
some media systems also have state-owned news agencies. In China, entertainment
industries can have private and foreign ownership, but news media outlets, including
commercial newspapers and broadcasters, are owned by the state. Whereas privatization
of sectoral economy in China is expanding, it still promotes state ownership and socialism
in the media sector, limiting privatization of media. In China’s Lenin-inspired definition,
press freedom is first and foremost freedom from capitalist control (Zhao, 2012, pp. 153–
154).
News media owned by the civil society occupy a sector between commercial and state-
controlled news media (Benson, 2018). But much like its commercial and state
counterparts, the civil society sector comprises a number of distinct subcategories of
owners. These include political and religious organizations such as parties, unions and
churches, non-profit organizations such as trusts and foundations, and various forms of
cooperative ownership arrangements.
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systems, restrictions on party ownership was introduced after the fall of Communism,
primarily with the aim to limit the “dominance of certain ideologies and potential foreign
(Russian) interests” (Balčytienė, 2012, p. 63). While formal ties between political parties
and news media may have been broken, informal ties still remain in some systems, like in
Portugal, where strong political players moved in to take control over the media after
privatization in the late 1980s (Hallin & Papathanassopoulos, 2002).
The charitable trust is a product of the Anglo-American, or common law, legal system.
Trust ownership of news media is thus found primarily in the U.S. and U.K. media
landscapes. Trusts can resolve the question of succession between multiple beneficiaries,
and in the United States, trusts avoid estate taxes (Benson, 2018; Kaye & Quinn, 2010;
Picard, 2014). American non-profit, philanthropic, or trust ownership of news media has
seen a rise in recent years. These entail a range of ownership forms linked to various
organizational fields such as religious, academic, secular, or trade union non-profit media
that tend to have strong commitment to public service (Benson, 2018). This type of
ownership can be described as ideal (see Konieczna, 2014), as there is no profit demand
from investors and alternative, critical, innovative, and socially relevant journalism is
often the goal (see Ellis, 2011; Levy & Picard, 2011; Graves & Konieczna, 2015; Kaye &
Quinn, 2010). However, trustee stewardship is difficult to attain, dependent on and
beholden to key actors (Ellis, 2011), and “mostly reinforces and extends upper middle-
class, pro-corporate orientation in mainstream American journalism” (Benson, 2018, p.
1060).
The equivalent of the charitable trust in the civil law system of continental Europe is the
foundation. The foundation shares many of the characteristics of the trust; it typically has
either a charitable or an ideological cause, or both, and is operated on a non-profit basis.
But whereas the trust is controlled by one or more trustees, who can dissolve the trust at
their own leisure, the foundation constitutes a legal entity of its own. As such, it is not
only “owner-less”—it is also constructed to last for eternity (Ohlsson, 2012). Primarily
found in the Scandinavian countries (Ohlsson, 2015), foundation ownership is the
dominant ownership form of the newspaper industries in both Denmark and Sweden, and
in 2016, a foundation took control over Amedia, Norway’s second largest newspaper
group with some 60 local newspapers. A non-profit foundation does not, however, relieve
news media companies from operating according to for-profit principles.
News outlets that are owned and operated directly by the employees constitute a final
form of civil society ownership in the news media landscape. Examples of cooperative
ownership of news media can be found primarily in Latin American and Mediterranean
media systems. Examples from France include Libération, founded as a cooperative after
the 1968 uprising, and Le Monde, in both of which journalist ownership has eroded over
time (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Journalists also challenged ownership control of news
media in Portugal, Italy, and Spain in the 1970s, where radical journalists perceived news
media as instruments of class struggle in processes of democratic transition (Hallin &
Papathanassopoulos, 2002). Today, say Hallin and Macini (2004, p. 117), “a legacy of this
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period exits in the form of editorial councils that give journalist the right to be consulted
on certain decision, usually including the appointment of the director.”
Picard and Dal Zotto (2016) note that scholars tend to find problems with all forms of
media ownership. Private ownership is problematic because proprietors can use it for
private interest; corporate ownership can put profit goals ahead of social goals; public
service media can present limited choice and are prevented from pursuing political
agendas; big companies can control content and markets; small companies cannot
provide the proper range of quality and content, and they are weak in the face of
pressures from powerful interests; foreign owners can bring in foreign influences that
can affect national sovereignty; and domestic owners are often too close to domestic
social and political power. Hence, all forms of ownership come with their own set of
advantages and disadvantages. However, note Picard and Dal Zotto (2016, p. 56), “many
of the complaints about ownership have nothing to do with ownership, but rather the
commercialized nature of media and the pursuit of economic rewards.”
Over the past 20 years, traditional journalistic enterprises have struggled in the
advertising market, losing ground to rival platforms in search and social media, notably
Google and Facebook. When mature businesses such as newspapers encounter disruptive
technologies such as the Internet, many engage in what Porter (1980) has termed
“harvest strategies”—lowering quality while raising prices to harvest money on the brand
(Meyer, 2009, p. 14). Convergence strategies have been used to offset the demands of
multi-platform publishing, with many newspapers merging newsrooms, rationalizing and
centralizing production, re-using content, and multi-skilling reporters (Larrondo et al.,
2016) toward more hostile labor situations (Örnebring, 2010). The financial crisis in
journalism has nonetheless been less severe in countries with civil sector ownership and
state support than in more market-oriented systems such as the United States (Benson,
Powers, & Neff, 2017).
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There is good evidence that ownership concentration in the news media is increasing
across the world (Noam, 2016). The prevailing view on the effects of ownership
concentration is that it has a negative impact on the diversity of ideas that have access to
the sphere of public debate, which sustains democracy (Horwitz, 2005). Political
pluralism, it is assumed, can be most effectively attained by preventing a monopolization
of ideas in the mediated public sphere (Doyle, 2002; Entman, 1989). However, the extent
to which there is a link between ownership concentration and diversity in news and
journalism is difficult to establish, and therefore contested (Berry & Waldfogel, 2001;
Noam, 2009; Picard & Dal Zotto, 2016). While negative trends such as homogenization,
bias, and commercialization are often linked to media concentration, it is just as likely,
remarks Noam (2009, p. 13), that these results are twin outcomes of the profit
orientation. Moreover, the effects of concentration depend on the market—the number of
competitors, the form of ownership, the size and boundaries of the market.
Within the information technologies industries, concentration issues are causing concern
among scholars, particularly as online search and advertising are highly concentrated
(Turow, 2011), and because platform power combines infrastructure and content
ownership (Evens & Donders, 2016). Moreover, rather than dispersing power in the
media sectors, digital power is still incumbent power (Hardy, 2017, p. 11; Küng et al.,
2008; McChesney, 2008; Sjøvaag, Stavelin, Karlsson, & Kammer, 2018; Winseck, 2008).
The Internet has, thus, not fulfilled the emancipatory potential of digitization in breaking
conglomerate monopoly power purported by many scholars (e.g., Deuze, 2007; Shirky,
2008). Rather, the issues concerning scholars over the concentration of communicative
power continues in the digital age.
The profit motive is generally held as the main reason for commercialization of news and
journalism. Commercialism entails shaping stories to suit advertisers and owners—the
commercial penetration of professional journalism by corporate marketing, commercial
messages and advertising (Horwitz, 2005, p. 183; McChesney, 2003, pp. 310–311).
Publishers who follow free enterprise ethics and maximize profits provide audiences with
the simple and familiar—“the very kind of news that earns the least credit in the
marketplace of ideas” (Entman, 1989, p. 91). Herein lies the market failure thesis
(Pickard, 2014B), the assumption that market-governed media will underproduce certain
types of content that is critical to deliberation and self-government (Horwitz, 2005, p.
196). And while Croteau and Hoynes (2001, p. 8) note that “the most fundamental
dilemma may be that in the media world, entertainment is generally more profitable than
information,” there is also generally a commercial niche for high-quality news, in the
financial news segment and in-depth journalism for example.
That being assumed, “neither media content nor behaviour can be derived from an
account of corporate and market structures alone” (Hardy, 2014, p. 106). The problem,
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says Meyer (2009, p. 5), is that it is “very difficult to show that quality journalism is the
cause of business success rather than its byproduct.” Herein lies the particular interest in
ownership that journalism scholarship assumes—the contention that those who own the
news media have interests, and that journalism can be used to promote those interests.
Content homogeneity is therefore often identified as the main concern regarding how
news output affects the public and democracy. Homogeneity can, however, be shaped by
many factors, including journalists’ news practices (Ruotolo, 1988, p. 124). In fact,
scholars have argued that professionalism, not ownership nor the presence or absence of
competition, is what creates homogeneity in news (Benson, 2016, p. 40).
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As journalism does not happen in a vacuum (Hanitzsch & Bergansa, 2012, p. 797;
Mancini, 2000, p. 267), the type of owners, the type of ownerships, and the type of
competition that exits in a news market impact on the organization, contents, and
practices of journalism in different settings (Donohue, Olien, & Tichenor, 1985; Soloski,
1979; Street, 2010; Zhu, Weaver, Lo, Chen, & Wu, 1997). There is therefore general
agreement in the literature that journalistic autonomy—the degree of freedom that
reporters have in practicing professional tasks (Reich & Hanitzsch, 2013, p. 135)—is
restricted by commercialization and corporate control. These forces are often thought to
cause journalistic quality to deteriorate (Altschull, 1997, p. 261; Reese, 2001; Reich &
Hanitzsch, 2013), while different forms of ownership also influence journalism in different
ways—some promoting quality more than others (see Benson 2013). In particular, owners’
increased profit demands and resource reductions are thought to make news more
market-driven (Weaver & Willnat, 2016), often in favor of owners’ commercial and
ideological interests (Cook, 1998, p. 173; McChesney, 2003, pp. 309–310; Soloski, 1989,
p. 225). Ownership pressures on the news media are, however, thought to largely
manifest indirectly (McChesney, 2003). To that extent, they are also largely invisible to
journalists and publics (Hanitzch & Mellado, 2011; McChesney, 2003, pp. 302–306).
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generate revenue for shareholders. To that end, news media ownership is largely treated
as a precarious aspect of journalism, often seen as a threat to journalistic autonomy,
press freedom, and media diversity. Solutions to the problems of ownership are often
assigned to policy. The role of the state in regulating privately owned media is, however,
contentious, as state benevolence depends on the particularities of the media system in
question.
Overall, however, most journalism research largely refrains from addressing the issue of
who owns the media. As such, the perspectives and insights gained from the political
economy of communication and from the industry studies of news media add greatly to
our knowledge of the framework conditions of journalism. Nevertheless, as most
perspectives on media ownership are firmly embedded in the characteristics of mass
media, more work needs to be done to understand the impact of networked technologies
and the growing power that third-party intermediaries have on journalism. Media
ownership is growing more concentrated and global. As such, how the owners, and the
ownership forms, of the global networked media infrastructure will come to impact
journalism in the future can only benefit from the perspectives raised by media ownership
research.
Further Reading
Benson, R. (2018). Rethinking the sociology of media ownership, in L. Grindstaff, J. R.
Hall, & M. Lo (Eds.), Routledge handbook of cultural sociology (2nd ed., pp. 411–420).
London, U.K.: Routledge.
Bezanson, R., Soloski, J., & Cranberg, G. (2001). Taking stock: Journalism and the publicly
traded newspaper company. Ames: Iowa State University Press.
Cagé, J. (2016). Saving the media: Capitalism, crowdfunding and democracy. Cambridge,
U.K.: Harvard University Press.
Cushion, S. (2012). The democratic value of news: Why public service media matter.
Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan.
Konieczna, M. (2018). Journalism without profit: Making news when the market fails.
Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Nielsen, R. K., Fletcher, R., Sehl, A., & Levy, D. (2016). Analysis of the relation between
impact of public service media and public media. Oxford, U.K.: Reuters Institute for the
Study of Journalism.
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Helle Sjøvaag
Jonas Ohlsson
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