Media market concentration and pluralism

Abstract

We study the relationship between market concentration and market variety, and thereby focus on two dimensions of variety, namely on internal variety and on external variety. In our setup, firms can expand their internal variety continuously around their focus point on a Salop‐circle. External variety then refers to the market supply of variety offered by all firms on the circle. We believe that this setting is particularly applicable to media. It turns out that in more concentrated markets, there is an incentive to provide more internal variety in order to compete for consumers. Then, the relationship between market concentration and external variety turns out to be ambiguous. There also exists no clear free market bias with respect to socially optimal internal and external variety.

More or More of the Same: Ownership Concentration and Media Diversity in Egypt

“…Although sources diversity and content diversity might be associated, one does not automatically ensure the other (Voakes et al 1996). To that effect, Stühmeier (2019) mentioned the concepts of external and internal pluralism. The former refers to the number of outlets in a market while the latter is the number of viewpoints within a single outlet.…”

Diversos pero concentrados: percepciones de comunicadores sobre el pluralismo de los medios digitales en Chile

“…Por ejemplo, la concentración de la propiedad y el control disminuye la competencia y el pluralismo desde un nivel global (Stühmeier, 2016), pasando por una óptica desde América Latina (Becerra & Mastrini, 2017) y Chile (Breull, 2015), además considerando en esta misma línea lo presentado en el trabajo de Sergio Godoy y María Elena Gronemeyer sobre los medios digitales en Chile y la relevancia del financiamiento privado (2012). Correlacionando la discusión de la literatura secundaria y los hallazgos, esta tensión también se constata en las entrevistas donde se señala que las fuentes de financiamiento afectan directamente las capacidades de comunicar y la permanencia y composición de los equipos editoriales, incidiendo incluso en la percepciones de los periodistas (Hatcher & Currin-Percival, 2016; Domingues-da-Silva, 2015).…”