Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
media ownership
watchdog role
content homogeneity
market concentration
online news
Who Owns the Online Media?
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenges of media ownership opacity and accountability by constructing ownership networks for thousands of European and American outlets to measure transnational market concentration. Employing a fixed-pair design, we examine the causal effect of ownership changes on content similarity. Results indicate that over half of media entities are controlled by single owners, with common ownership significantly driving reporting convergence, particularly in the United States. The primary contribution lies in establishing cross-nationally comparable quantitative metrics demonstrating that content homogenization is predominantly driven by ownership structures rather than audience demand. These findings provide robust causal evidence regarding the detrimental impact of media consolidation on information diversity, clarifying the structural determinants of news uniformity across Western media markets.
📝 Abstract
Ownership matters for the media's watchdog role. We map the ownership networks behind thousands of online news outlets in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The networks reveal who is ultimately responsible for the news: for over half of the outlets, a single entity. The rest sit behind multi-layered structures, making responsibility hard to trace. Market concentration, measured comparably across countries, is largely low to moderate. Looking at content, we find that co-owned outlets report more similarly, even within fixed outlet pairs, as ownership changes -- not least in the U.S., where reader demand is often thought dominant.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Ownership Networks
Media Concentration
Content Similarity
Watchdog Role
Cross-national Comparison
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