Impacts of Cross-Ownership Between Newspapers and Television on Viewpoint Diversity: Testing One-Owner-One-Voice Thesis

ABSTRACT

The growing phenomenon of media cross-ownership and its impact on news content is receiving international attention. This study tests one-owner-one-voice thesis, which posits that a single owner represents a single voice regardless of how many media outlets the owner operates, in the context of South Korea. To do this, the current study analyzed 18,037 TV news reports and 1893 newspaper articles about the 2012 and 2017 presidential campaigns of South Korea published by three cross-owned newspaper and television clusters. The results reveal that each cross-owned newspaper and television station showed a very similar slant in covering the presidential candidates and political ideology. The findings offer strong evidence that one-owner-one-voice holds up in South Korea and suggest that it is fallacious to assume that cross-ownership ensures viewpoint diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Media cross-ownership
• viewpoint diversity
• candidate slant
• ideology slant
• media concentration
• one-owner-one-voice thesis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC, 373 F.3d 372, 383 (3d Cir. 2004).

2 Federal Communications Commission, “Amendment of Sections 73.34, 73.240, and 73.636 of the Commission’s Rules Relating to Multiple Ownership of Standard, FM, and Television Broadcast Stations, FCC 75-104, Second Report and Order,” 50 FCC Reports, Second Series 1046, January 31, 1975 (1975 Cross Ownership 2nd R&O).

3 Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC, 373 F.3d 372, 382 (3d Cir. 2004) at 397.

4 South Korean media do not delete their news content from their sites except when a news story faces a defamation lawsuit.

5 ChannelA: http://www.ichannela.com/news/template/program_news.do?cateCode=0005&subCateCode=000500

JTBC: http://news.jtbc.joins.com/Replay/news_replay.aspx?fcode=PR10000403.

TVChosun: http://tvchosun.com/news/newspan/main.html.

6 The formula for computing the candidate slant coefficient for the number of items is ((P+(N*2)+(M*3))/(P + N+M)−2)*100, where P is the number of pro-Park items in a category, N is the number of neutral items in a category, and M is the number of pro-Moon items in a category. For the 2017 data, P was replaced by H, which shows the number of pro-Hong items.

7 The formula for computing the ideology slant coefficient for the number of items is ((C+(M*2) + (L*3))/(C + M+L) - 2)*100, where C is the number of politically conservative items in a category, M is the number of politically moderate items in a category, and L is the number of politically liberal items in a category.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chang Sup Park

Chang Sup Park (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University at Albany, the State University of New York. His research interests include the impacts of digital technologies on journalism, audience involvement in news activities on social/mobile media, and practices and implications of automated journalism.