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ABSTRACT
While media ownership has often been studied, too little attention has been accorded to one aspect of news coverage—promotional economic instrumentalism (EI)—evident in a news organization's tendency to mention and praise its ownership interests (owners, investors, and associated economic interests). Such distorted news coverage may constitute an ethical conflict of interest and a failure to provide complete information needed by citizens in a democracy. Drawing on a sample of 19 U.S. news outlets, we compare promotional EI across ownership forms. Stock market-traded media mention their ownership interests most often, while conglomerates with substantial non-news media holdings combine relatively frequent mentions with a higher proportion of positive mentions than other media. Privately held media also engage in significant promotional EI. Thus, both profit maximization and amenity potential motives are at work. Journalistic professionalism appears most associated with neutral mentions rather than critical scrutiny. Case studies of competing news outlets show that ownership interests linked to one outlet may be critically exposed by a competing outlet, lessening the rival’s capacity to engage in non-transparent promotion.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Hyo Jung Kim and Marcus Nilsen for their research assistance. We also wish to acknowledge Mattias Hessérus for contributions to an earlier draft of the paper and Leona Achtenhagen and Oscar Westlund for their helpful comments on versions presented to conferences of the European Media Management Association and International Communication Association. Participants and audience members at sessions sponsored by the ICA and the American Sociological Association also offered helpful feedback.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Definitions of “hard news” are culturally specific but generally foreground high quality information about public affairs and current events, as opposed to information primarily aimed at entertaining audiences (see, for example, Plasser Citation2005).
2 We do not include private equity-owned outlets in our study but would expect them to perform similarly to stock market-traded media.
3 Institutional investors Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, and Capital World Investors appeared among the top 10 owners at half or more of the stock market-traded news outlets.
4 Because Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post has raised concerns about the newspaper’s coverage of Amazon (Abramson Citation2019; Bustillos Citation2015), we include the company in our analysis as a major affiliated business. The Boston Red Sox and Liverpool F.C., also owned by Boston Globe owner John Henry, and the Minnesota Timberwolves, also owned by Minneapolis Star Tribune owner Glen Taylor, were not included in the main sample. In these cases, we judged that mentions of such outside “interests” would be difficult to separate from normal local sports coverage and would distort OMI scores.
5 Driedger and Weimer (Citation2015) found an issue with Factiva allowing users to inadvertently set preferences for other users, but we confirmed with our library that this is no longer the case and thus does not affect our results.
6 In cases where the outlet produced fewer than 100 items, we gathered the total corpus. Our search terms surfaced some mentions not part of news content (such as email addresses, photo credits, and bylines) or coincidental with ownership terms, but these were relatively rare, making up just 6% of the sample used to calculate OMIs.
7 ProQuest’s database of Washington Post articles includes print and online versions of the same article. OMIs are based on the proportion of mentions out of all words, and given the very high word counts, there should be little effect on the results.
8 AC1 accounts for reliability measurement issues arising from largely homogenous samples (Gwet Citation2008). Our samples are largely homogenous due to the predominance of staff-produced content and neutral valences.
9 Valence results exclude extraneous ownership mentions, such as mentions embedded in bylines or photo credits and rare instances of people or places that coincidentally share ownership names.
10 Conglomerates are indicated in , but percentages for conglomerates vs. non-conglomerates are not shown. Unless otherwise noted, percentages in tables for aggregate categories are averages of averages.
11 Cross-mention valence figures for the New York Times and Washington Post involve only four search terms most relevant for understanding treatment of their largest individual owners: “Carlos Slim” and “Sulzberger” (the Times’ dominant individual shareholders during the time period searched) and “Jeff Bezos” and “Amazon” (the Post’s owner and his globally prominent online retailer). Slim’s two primary business holdings, Inmobiliari Carso and América Móvil, are rarely mentioned in either outlet, with just one item mentioning either company in the Times and one item in the Post.
12 These self-ownership mention OMI scores differ from those reported in because new samples were drawn and produced both new numbers of items with mentions and new mentions per item averages. In the case of the Washington Post, while the number of items was lower, the number of mentions per item was higher, producing an OMI score slightly higher than when institutional investors were included.
13 MinnPost cross-mentions of Star Tribune ownership generate an OMI of 20 vs. Star Tribune’s 15; Star Tribune cross-mentions of MinnPost funders generate an OMI of 8 vs. MinnPost’s 25.
14 For a recent analysis of France's media owners and their associated economic and political interests, see Sedel (Citation2021).