Abstract
In the current economic environment, message synergy may result in a perceptible manifestation of ownership's impact on media content. That influence raises ethical issues: journalistic independence and access to the media marketplace for a variety of messages. This project analyzes the “soft news” content of the two most popular morning television news shows, The Today Show and Good Morning America during November 2007 sweeps. The analysis demonstrates that “soft news” story topic selection appears to be strongly influenced by economic connections to the parent corporation. The potential impact of this distortion of the cultural public sphere for journalists, viewers, creative artists and advertising at the institutional level are analyzed. The wages of synergy include a restriction of journalistic autonomy, confining viewers to a role that is exclusively consumption oriented, and, at the institutional level, jeopardizing the credibility of news programming which could have a long-term impact on advertising revenues.
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