Media Ownership and Public Service News: How Strong Are Institutional Logics?

Abstract

This article analyzes the extent to which diverse institutional logics (stock market, privately held, civil society, public) are linked to the exercise of one important mode of media ownership power: public service orientation. The research draws on a content analysis of a total of fifty-one news organizations in Sweden, France, and the United States, representing, respectively, Hallin and Mancini’s democratic corporatist, polarized pluralist, and liberal models. We find that two types of institutional logics—affordance and homogenization—shape the amount and type of public-service-oriented news. On average, public-service-oriented news was highest at civil-society-owned media, but there was significant variation within this category: We call this kind of institutional logic an affordance logic because it affords but does not guarantee a certain kind of news content. Public media, on the other hand, exhibited the least deviation across outlets within each country, thus exemplifying a strong homogenization logic. All forms of ownership, but especially privately held and civil society media, exhibited significant variations across individual organizations. Economic field dominance, as in the United States, did not produce greater homogenization across ownership fields as predicted by field theory.

Investigating the Gap between Newspaper Journalists’ Role Conceptions and Role Performance in Nine European, Asian, and Latin American Countries

“…This finding corroborates earlier research showing that State-owned media exert more external control over journalists in favor of a more State- or government-aligned coverage (Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011; Reich and Hanitzsch 2013). With regard to differences between private and corporate ownership, our analyses are in line with earlier notions of greater variety “within” than “between” ownership types (Benson et al 2018).…”

“…Although ownership types vary across countries and even media types, a widely accepted approach for the study of newspapers is to differentiate among private, corporate-owned, and state-owned newspaper companies. While private newspapers are usually less determined by economic pressures and tend to produce more substantive, issue-focused political news, newspapers publicly traded on the stock market put more emphasis on profit maximization at the expense of professional values and journalistic quality (Benson et al 2018; Dunaway and Lawrence 2015; Hamilton 2004). Studies, however, have disagreed on the size and direction of the effect of both market orientation (Mellado and van Dalen 2014; Skovsgaard et al 2012), and corporate/private ownership on journalistic roles across individual organizations (e.g.…”

“…Studies, however, have disagreed on the size and direction of the effect of both market orientation (Mellado and van Dalen 2014; Skovsgaard et al 2012), and corporate/private ownership on journalistic roles across individual organizations (e.g. Benson et al 2018; Henkel et al 2019).…”

Donor Power and the News

“…In this context, stakeholder analysis is useful for drawing attention to how IRIN managers’ strategic decision making emerged from a process of negotiation between their donors’ requirements, their own organizational aims and objectives, and the perspectives of journalists and other staff. However, to draw attention to causal mechanisms that are peculiar to news production, our analysis is also guided by a theoretical framework developed by Benson et al (forthcoming) for analyzing the power of media owners. Informed by the third-way sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Benson and his colleagues suggest that organizational values are produced and reproduced by interest-orientated journalists as they negotiate political and economic structures.…”

“…In the first section of this article, we introduce Benson et al’s (forthcoming) model of owner power and identify the most likely ways in which donor influences manifest themselves in journalistic practices. In the next section, we discuss our methodological strategies and the rationale for selecting this case.…”