Rodney Benson, Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel (New York: OUP, 2025)
How Media Ownership Matters Online Appendix Tables
How does media ownership matter? Through a comparative analysis of more than
50 news outlets in the US, Sweden, and France, the authors show how four ownership
forms—market, private, civil society, and public—each shape the news in civically
consequential ways. Interacting with funding models and target audiences, these forms
affect the degree to which coverage is oriented toward public service, partisanship,
or the promotion of owners’ economic interests. How Media Ownership Matters
provides a roadmap to understanding how forms of ownership are shaping the
future of journalism and democracy.
Reviews of the book:
Daniel C. Hallin, University of California-San Diego, co-author of Comparing Media Systems: “Ownership has always been assumed, in both scholarship and public discussion, to be a key factor affecting the production of news. But it’s also something extremely hard to study systematically. How Media Ownership Matters is the finest work to date on this subject, rigorous and complex at the same time engaging and accessible. It’s a wonderful contribution to the political economy of news.”
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Copenhagen, and former Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford: “Through a comparative analysis of more than 50 news outlets in the US, Sweden, and France, the book shows how four ownership forms—market, private, civil society, and public—each shape the news in civically consequential ways. Interacting with funding models and target audiences, these forms affect the degree to which coverage is oriented toward public service, partisanship, or the promotion of owners’ economic interests.”
Nik Usher, University of San Diego, author of News for the Rich, White, and Blue: “How Media Ownership Matters takes political economy scholarship out of its overdetermined focus on media consolidation. With a cross-national, empirically driven analysis of institutional, political, and cultural logics of the news industry, this book will be foundational to anyone hoping to understand not just how but why media ownership matters.”