Influence of media ownership on news content
My-Le Lai
April 1997 (rev.)
In an era of increasing concentration of media ownership, especially after Hollinger's takeover of Southam in 1996, Canadians need to understand the negative impact that media monopolies may have on news content. This study approached the question of ownership influence on news content by using historical and comparative analyses. The historical study addressed the question of changes in the Ottawa Citizen's Op/Ed pages following the takeover by Hollinger in 1996. The second part of the study compared coverage in five mainstream dailies of the major Canadian media groups: Hollinger/Conrad Black, Rogers Communications/Ted Rogers, and Thomson Corp./Ken Thomson.
Random weeks were constructed from three-month time periods (Oct.-Dec.) in 1991 and 1996, and all articles on the Ottawa Citizen Op/Ed pages were selected -- 81 items in all. The items were then analyzed for type of author, editorial topic, and regular columnists' perspectives. The analysis revealed that the Op/Ed pages of the Ottawa Citizen changed between 1991 and 1996 in the direction of a more right-wing or pro-business perspective.
In the second study, a key-word search of The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen for a six-month period (1 January 1996 to 30 June 1996) yielded 970 articles. Frequencies were noted and a content analysis was done on a randomized sample of 214 articles. This analysis found that ownership did affect content, but in a subtle and indirect way, as seen by the differences among each newspaper's coverage of the three media groups.
This study provides preliminary support for the hypothesis that media ownership influences news content. However, improvements need to be made and more research is required to provide more sound empirical data. For instance, a larger sample should be used, another coder should have coded the data for intercoder variability, and more variables could have been used to provide a more exhaustive analysis. Clearly, the impact of organizational factors on news content is complex and multi-dimensional.