Who’s Buying the Free Press? A Q&A with Rodney Benson

If I say ownership “form,” it’s a way of analyzing ownership in terms of structures rather than individual persons. It’s a way of asking the question: If you have this kind of owner, what kinds of journalistic practices are incentivized or disincentivized? Or to use a sociological term, what kind of “institutional logic” does it express, materially and symbolically? The book identifies four broad ownership forms: market, private, civil society, and public.

Market ownership refers to any owner primarily subject to a short-term profit-maximizing market logic—chiefly stock market-traded and private equity/hedge fund ownership. Market ownership incentivizes cost-cutting to keep profit margins high, constant profitability that makes it difficult to accept losses while making long-term investments, and the kind of sensationalistic or entertaining news content that maximizes views and revenues regardless of civic value. This doesn’t mean there will not be quality journalism at market-owned outlets, but usually there will be less of it. Just to give a few examples, when BuzzFeed was privately held, it could invest in in-depth investigative reporting, even if this kind of journalism didn’t attract a large audience. As soon as BuzzFeed converted itself to a stock market-traded company, it not only reduced the size of its newsroom, it also changed the types of stories that it published, toward more celebrity news and breaking news. And eventually, it closed down the news website entirely. Likewise, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital has aggressively cut newsroom staff and budgets across its chain of local newspapers, not simply to achieve profitability, but to maintain maximum profitability (often 10 percent or higher).

Now, when there is a dominant shareholder, as at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, these profits pressures can be less, but they are still there. And to be clear, not all dominant shareholders are the same. Not all make the choice to defend and invest in quality.

Private ownership is distinguished from market ownership in at least two major ways. First, it is usually a more concentrated form of ownership, residing either with an individual, a family, or a small group of investors with a long-term time horizon. Second, although aspiring to generate positive net revenues to support operations, private owners have no obligation to "maximize shareholder value" and thus have greater discretion to balance profit targets and timelines with amenities of status, civic duty, or political influence. Understanding the logics of ownership forms helps us make the personal structural: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have been able to do as they please with their media properties because they are private owners.

Civil society refers to the associational and organizational sector that operates between the market and the state, without being entirely independent of either. Civil society ownership thus encompasses a range of distinct institutional logics, such as professional (primarily journalistic, but also academic), religion, and community (political party, labor union, or nonprofit associations). What unites these diverse institutional logics under the rubric of civil society is a strong mission-driven orientation and a certain distance from profit pressures.

Finally, public ownership ranges from a more democratic state/bureaucratic logic in most western democracies to a non-democratic state/bureaucratic logic in authoritarian nation-states.

Public media, by definition, have strong civic missions, but their ability to deliver on these missions varies depending on their level of funding and the extent of their “arms-length” legal and regulatory protections from government partisan interference.

Now, these four ownership forms—market, private, civil society, and public—could be roughly interpreted as a continuum from the most-commercial or profit driven to the least commercial. But each of these forms, as well as subforms, also express distinct logics that are not reducible to this market/non-market opposition. For example, to fully understand The Christian Science Monitor, or the French Catholic La Croix, or the Swedish Protestant Dagen, you have to look deeper into the values of their religious owners.

Why did you focus on the U.S., France, and Sweden?

These countries share many characteristics as relatively prosperous capitalist democratic polities with similar intellectual and cultural heritages. Yet they also represent each of the three western “media systems” identified by political scientists Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini in their classic work Comparing Media Systems—liberal, in the free market sense, for the U.S.; polarized pluralist for France; and democratic corporatist for Sweden. Each system represents different configurations of market, state, and civil society involvement with the media. Including three countries provides a way to investigate how ownership functions across diverse media environments, allowing us to more confidently generalize any findings.

What difference does ownership form make for the kind of news that gets produced? Can you give some examples?

It makes a difference in at least three broad ways, which the book refers to as ownership’s “modes of power.” These modes are public service orientation, political instrumentalism, and economic instrumentalism. With regard to public service orientation, outlets with civil society and public ownership tend to have the strongest overall public service orientation—in other words, these non-profit driven ownership forms invested a higher proportion of their resources in investigative and in-depth public affairs news and devoted a higher proportion of their news hole to public affairs. Public service news was the lowest priority at stock market-traded outlets, especially when the owning company had outside non-news media holdings.

To be clear, some stock market-traded outlets with a dominant shareholder, such as The New York Times, or privately held outlets, such as Le Monde, also prioritize public service news. The problem is that at most of these outlets, the audiences are disproportionately highly educated and wealthy, so they are not reaching the broad public.

What makes public ownership distinctive—notably in Sweden and France—is that they provide higher quality public service information for a large audience than their mass audience commercial counterparts. Public media in the U.S.—NPR and PBS—have historically been starved of adequate public funding so they have had to rely heavily on charitable contributions and have not attained the scale of their Western European counterparts. But I would add that many local PBS and NPR stations are the major sources of news for rural areas and smaller cities not well-served by commercial media, and public funding has been essential in keeping these stations afloat. So, the recent efforts by the administration to eliminate public funding for NPR and PBS would deprive citizens in these areas of access to critical public affairs information.

Political instrumentalism involves any use of a media outlet to promote partisan candidates or causes. Partisan intensity, the degree of imbalance in favoring the right over the left parties or vice versa, is highest in our study at civil society-owned outlets indirectly affiliated with political parties, as is more common in Sweden and France. But what is interesting is that across the three countries partisan intensity is also increased by audience subscription funding. So, outlets primarily funded by paying audiences tend to be more intensely partisan than those funded by advertising or other sources. This is a potential civic downside of the increasing turn toward subscription funding.

Economic instrumentalism is the most taboo mode of ownership power. An owner engages in economic instrumentalism when a media outlet is used to promote positive news or suppress negative news about the owner’s business interests. Public revelations of alleged promotion or suppression most often involved outlets with private or stock market-dominant shareholder ownership. In our quantitative content analysis, we found promotional content to be most common at stock market-traded outlets, though overall, mentions of owners’ business interests were relatively rare. Regardless of ownership form, outlets tended to cover their owners and associated business more positively than other businesses, so this was concerning.

Did you also find any significant differences among the three countries?

There is this long tradition of media criticism concerned with the over-concentration of media ownership, especially in the U.S. But the Columbia economist Eli Noam and an international team of collaborators carried out this massive study of media ownership concentration across the thirty countries with the largest national media markets, and they found that the U.S. had the least concentrated news media market, both in terms of revenues and audience share. Sweden and France, in the middle of the 30-country sample, thus had more concentrated media markets than the U.S., which seems a bit surprising. Of course, any concentration of media ownership is a civic problem, and the exact ranking may have changed somewhat in recent years, but at least in terms of raw concentration, the U.S. seems to be not as concentrated as many others.

If we pay attention to the forms of ownership, however, the U.S. situation looks very different. We identified the five largest audience news websites in the U.S., France, and Sweden, and immediately saw that the largest U.S. news websites were highly concentrated in their ownership form—all of them were stock market-traded. In contrast, in France and Sweden, the top news websites were more evenly distributed across private, civil society, and public ownership, as well as market ownership. 

To be clear, the U.S. is also distinctive for its vibrant sector of nonprofit newsrooms, funded by a philanthropic sector that is much larger than in Sweden or France. News outlets like ProPublica and The Texas Tribune are producing excellent investigative reporting and political analysis, and they and other nonprofits are pioneering collaboration across newsrooms in the reporting and distribution of quality news. But to date, the nonprofit sector is still very small compared to U.S. commercial media revenues and audiences.

In recent decades, similar to the U.S., France has seen a resurgence of large business owners who made their fortune outside of news media, thus entailing potential conflicts of interest. A tradition of journalistic collective action is particularly strong in France. Journalists have thus increasingly joined together to put pressure on these owners to provide guarantees of journalistic autonomy, including in some cases the right to veto the owner’s appointment of editor-in-chief. Also, when an owner buys a news outlet and changes its political stance, French journalists can invoke a legally-established “conscience clause” and resign with paid leave. Some journalists have used their conscience clause benefits to found digital news startups, expanding media pluralism.

Sweden is unique in maintaining one of the highest levels of news media readership and trust in the world. A well-funded and highly regarded public media system (SVT and SR), with robust “arms-length” protections from partisan political pressure, anchors this trust. Economic instrumentalism also seems to be less frequent in Sweden. This may be related, in part, to the practice of designating the legally “responsible publisher,” who is usually the publication’s editor-in-chief. This institution reinforces the editor’s professional prerogatives in deciding what to publish and in resisting self-interested owner pressure.

What is your biggest concern for the future of news media in the next 5 to 10 years? What are the things you're hopeful about?

In the U.S., my biggest concern is that stock market-traded companies, hedge funds, and a handful of “benevolent” billionaires will continue to underwrite most of our major news outlets. If that’s the case, we will be stuck with a system that is ethically compromised because of its vulnerability to political pressures and civically sub-optimal because it either “harvests” profits at the expense of public service or else reserves quality news only for a small subscribing elite. In the meantime, this ecosystem is underproducing quality journalism that is economically accessible and stylistically appealing to the vast majority of the public (including many young people) that either cannot afford to or chooses not to subscribe.

I’m cautiously hopeful that charitable or public funding can be refocused on accessibility, ensuring that professionally-produced news reaches audiences that the market underserves. Among the largest foundations, unfortunately, the main focus still seems to be on providing short-term startup support, not on long-term operational support to correct for systematic market failure. If big donors aren’t going to become a reliable long-term means of underwriting journalism, then there has to be a greater focus on helping more news outlets generate sizable pools of small donors—like those that have kept The Guardian paywall-free.

Another promising approach is market or private owners donating their media properties to independent nonprofit entities. These news outlets would still need to generate operating revenues, whether from commercial or non-commercial sources, but they would be unburdened of the need to distribute profits to outside investors. In recent years, several owners have taken this step and put the civic interest over their personal financial interests. In the U.S., this has happened notably at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Salt Lake Tribune, and most recently, The Spokane Spokesman-Review. In France, a similar step was taken by the largest shareholder of Le Monde. This is a very encouraging trend I hope will continue and that perhaps could be further incentivized by public policies.

Is there anything I haven’t asked that you’d like to add?

We’ve talked a lot about how media ownership matters, but it’s important to remember why it matters. It matters because trustworthy, accessible information that holds power to account is crucial for sustaining and strengthening democracy. And journalists will be better able to support democracy when they themselves are backed up by a robust, reliable, and diverse network of ownership forms and funding models.