Abstract
Even democracies endowed with the most active free press struggle to maintain diversity of news coverage. Consolidation and market forces may cause only a few dominant players to control the news cycle. Editorial policies may be biased by corporate ownership relations, narrowing news coverage and focus. To an increasing degree this problem also applies to social media news distribution, since it is subject to the same socio-economic drivers. To study the effects of consolidation and ownership on news diversity, we model the diversity of Chilean coverage on the basis of ownership records and social media data. We create similarity networks of news outlets on the basis of their ownership and the topics they cover. We then examine the relationships between the topology of ownership networks and content similarity to characterize how ownership affects news coverage. A network analysis reveals that Chilean media is highly concentrated both in terms of ownership as well as in terms of topics covered. Our method can be used to determine which groups of outlets and ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage.
Highlights
Chomsky once commented on the role of a free and diverse press: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” [35] This is the position that many advanced democracies find themselves in as the diversity of news coverage seems to shrink, whereas news coverage itself seems to continuously expand in a non-stop news cycle
We focus on Chilean news outlets since they have established a significant social media presence with a high number of Chilean users per 1000 individuals [5]
We study the communities of news outlets that are produced by using community detection over similarity graphs built for each similarity metric
Summary
Chomsky once commented on the role of a free and diverse press: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” [35] This is the position that many advanced democracies find themselves in as the diversity of news coverage seems to shrink, whereas news coverage itself seems to continuously expand in a non-stop news cycle. As news media outlets attempt to cater to their audiences or community, they narrow their coverage to communityspecific material, and as a consequence further limit their audience awareness in a homophilic cycle of mutual preferential attachment. This effect has recently been studies in terms of so-called online “filter bubbles” [2], in which users can choose to subscribe to outlets and news that confirm their pre-existing preferences and view-points, narrowing their own media exposure, and encouraging outlets to increasingly specialize to smaller and more defined communities [4]
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