Rodney Benson, Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel, How Media Ownership Matters

How Media Ownership Matters offers a somewhat different yet familiarly compelling, empirically grounded rationale for reconsidering how scholars conceptualize media ownership in contemporary democracies. Opening with vivid vignettes from the United States, Sweden, and France, the authors demonstrate that ownership power manifests through public service orientation, economic instrumentalism, and political instrumentalism, three modes that structure journalistic possibility across media systems. The book setsout an ambitious agenda: to move beyond binaries of “mogul power” versus “market structure” and to operationalize ownership as an institutional form embedded in funding models and audience dynamics.