From media-party linkages to ownership concentration causes of cross-national variation in media outlets' economic positioning

Erik Neimanns and Nils Blossey

No 22/8, MPIfG Discussion Paper from Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

Abstract: A sizable literature on media bias suggests that media coverage is frequently biased towards certain political and economic positions. However, we know little about what drives variation in political and ideological bias in news coverage across countries. In this paper, we argue that increasingly commercialized and concentrated media markets are likely to be associated with media coverage leaning more favorably towards economically more right-wing positions. Media bias should reflect the preferences of media owners and should be a result of a reduced diversity of news media content. In contrast, where media outlets continue to be oriented more closely along partisan lines, often referred to as political parallelism, bias on economic issues should be more likely to cancel out at the aggregate level. To test these claims, we combine expert survey data on partisan attachments of media outlets, party ideologies, and media ownership concentration for twenty-four European countries. Results from multilevel regression models support our theoretical expectations. With media framing potentially affecting individual-level preferences and perceptions, high and rising levels of media ownership concentration may help to explain why governments in the affluent Western democracies often do remarkably little to counter trends of rising income inequality.

Keywords: media bias; media framing; media ownership concentration; political parallelism; Medienbias; Medieneigentümerkonzentration; Medienframing; politischer Parallelismus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:mpifgd:228

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