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Media Competition, Multimarket Contact, and Viewpoint Diversity

SSRN Electronic Journal
2024
  • 1
    Citations
  • 376
    Usage
  • 1
    Captures
  • 0
    Mentions
  • 0
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    1
    • Citation Indexes
      1
  • Usage
    376
    • Abstract Views
      319
    • Downloads
      57
  • Captures
    1
    • Readers
      1
      • SSRN
        1
  • Ratings
    • Download Rank
      743,581

Article Description

Media regulators in many Western countries aim to ensure that consumers have access to diverse viewpoints in news coverage. A common argument is that this goal can be best achieved if there are enough independent sources in the market, implying that media policies should foster media competition. However, the effects of competition on viewpoint diversity are theoretically ambiguous, and empirical evidence is scarce. We address this gap by compiling a comprehensive dataset on the Swedish newspaper industry, covering multiple waves of mergers and acquisitions. To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit changes in multimarket contact between companies caused by out-of-market effects of ownership changes. Our results indicate that the consolidation of the industry substantially raised the average number of multimarket contacts, which induced newspaper companies to differentiate their slant more. As a consequence, the diversity of political viewpoints decreased both within companies and at the local market level, leading to reductions in readership. The findings suggest that increasing concentration of media ownership may have negative implications for democratic processes.

Bibliographic Details

Marcel Garz; Jonna Rickardsson

Elsevier BV

consolidation; media bias; mergers and acquisitions; newspapers; ownership concentration

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