Media Ownership and Bias: Evidence by the Washington Post’s Reporting after Amazon’s Acquisition in 2013
Journal: Modern Economics & Management Forum DOI: 10.32629/memf.v1i3.198
Abstract
This study examines the impact of ownership change on media coverage by investigating the impact of Jeff Bezos's (Amazon's owner) purchase of the Washington Post (WP) in October 2013. We collect all articles that have Amazon mentions published by WP and the New York Times (NYT) for 12 months before and 12 months after the acquisition. Then, we use the difference-in-differences method to compare changes in sentiment, length, and time of publication of the articles reported by WP compared to NYT. From the comparison, we show that Amazon's acquisition has posed a certain extent of influence on the publication time of the articles. Our findings highlight that ownership change limits the media's ability to fulfill its role as a watchdog without interference.
Keywords
media ownership, bias, acquisitions
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[2] Parenti M. Methods of media manipulation. The Humanist. 1997; 57(4): 5.
[3] Meyer M. (2014, July-August). Brick by brick. Columbia Journalism Review. Available from: https://archives.cjr.org/cover_story/washington_post_jeff_bezos.php.
[4] Exploring the Amazon. The Economist. 2015; 415: 64.
[5] Day M., Metcalf T. (2019, July 6). MacKenzie Bezos Gets Ready for a $38 Billion Stake in Amazon. Bloomberg. Retrieved from: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/bezos-split-finalizes-as-38-billion-amazon-stake-transfer-looms.
[6] Stewart J. (2019, January 21).Why Jeff Bezos’ Divorce Should Worry Amazon Investors. The New York Times. Retrieved from Factiva database.
[7] Jeff Bezos, in divorce settlement, retains 75 percent of the couple's Amazon stock and all voting power (2019, April 4). The Washington Post. Retrieved from Factiva database.
[8] Inquiring minds: How did a tabloid get Jeff Bezos's texts? (2019, February 6). The Washington Post. Retrieved from Factiva database.
[9] Archer A. M., Clinton J. Changing Owners, Changing Content: Does Who Owns the News Matter for the News? Political Communication. 2018; 35(3): 353-370.
[10] Lutz A. (2012) These 6 Corporations Control 90% of The Media In America. Business Insider. Available from: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6.
[11] Chomsky D. “An Interested Reader”: Measuring Ownership Control at the New York Times. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 2006; 23(1): 1-18.
[12] Harding J. (2002, June 11). Media king warms to his subjects. Financial Times. p. 30.
[13] Szalai G. (2007, January 27). Murdoch: Big media has less sway on Internet. The Hollywood Reporter.
[14] Bagdikian B. H. The Media Monopoly (4th ed.). Boston: Beacon Press; 1992.
[15] Gilens M., Hertzman C. Corporate Ownership and News Bias: Newspaper Coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The Journal of Politics. 2000; 62(2): 369-386.
[16] Hanretty C. Media outlets and their moguls: Why concentrated individual or family ownership is bad for editorial independence. European Journal of Communication. 2014; 29(3): 335-350.
[17] Turow, J. Hidden Conflicts and Journalistic Norms: The Case of Self-Coverage. Journal of Communication. 1994; 44(2): 29-46.
[18] Butler A. W., Gurun U. G. Don’t Believe the Hype: Local Media Slant, Local Advertising, and Firm Value. The Journal of Finance. 2012: 67(2): 561-598.
[19] Anderson S. P., McLaren J. Media Mergers and Media Bias with Rational Consumers. Journal of the European Economic Association. 2012; 10(4): 831-859.
[20] Hamborg F., Donnay K., Gipp B. Automated identification of media bias in news articles: an interdisciplinary literature review. International Journal on Digital Libraries. 2019; (20): 391-415.
[21] Bhowmick P. K., Basu A., Mitra P. Reader Perspective Emotion Analysis in Text through Ensemble-based Multi-Label Classification Framework. Computer and Information Science. 2009; 2(4): 64-74.
[22] Druckman J. N., Parkin M. The impact of media bias: how editorial slant affects voters. J. Polit. 2005; 67(4): 1030-1049.
[23] Saez-Trumper D., Castillo C., Lalmas M. (2013, October). Social media news communities: gatekeeping, coverage, and statement bias. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (pp. 1679-1684).
[24] Niessner M., So E. (2017) Bad News Bearers: The Negative Tilt of Financial Press. Social Science Research Network.
[25] Doyle G. Financial news journalism: A post-Enron analysis of approaches towards economic and financial news production in the UK. SAGE Publications. 2006; 7(4): 433-452.
[26] Thibodeau P. H., Boroditsky L. Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS one. 2011; 6(2): e16782.
[27] Gorlick A. (2011, Feb 23) Is crime a virus or a beast? When describing crime, Stanford study shows the word you pick can frame the debate on how to fight it. Stanford News. Available from: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/february/metaphors-crime-study-022311.html.
[28] Sengupta P. Disclosure timing: Determinants of quarterly earnings release dates. Journal of Accounting and Public Policy. 2004; 23(6): 457-482.
[29] Qin B., Strömberg D., Wu Y. Media bias in China. American Economic Review. 2018; 108(9): 2442-76.
[30] Fahri P. (2013, Oct 1) The Washington Post Closes Sale to Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos. The Washington Post. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-closes-sale-to-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/2013/10/01/fca3b16a-2acf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html.
[31] Google Research Team: Blair-Goldensohn S., Neylon T., Hannan K., Reis G. A., McDonald R., Reynar J. (2008) Building a Sentiment Summarizer for Local Service Reviews. Google. Available from: https://research.google/pubs/pub34368/.
[32] Hamborg F., Lachnit S., Schubotz M., Hepp T., Gipp B. (2018) Giveme5W: Main Event Retrieval from News Articles by Extraction of the Five Journalistic W Questions. In: Proceedings of the iConference.
[33] Kothari S. P., Li X., Short J. E. The effect of disclosures by management, analysts, and business press on cost of capital, return volatility, and analyst forecasts: A study using content analysis. The Accounting Review. 2009; 84(5): 1639-1670.
[34] Tetlock P. C. Giving Content to Investor Sentiment: The Role of Media in Stock Market. The Journal of Finance. 2007; 62(3): 1139-1168.
[35] Huberman G., Regev T. Contagious Speculation and a Cure for Cancer: A Nonevent that Made Stock Prices Soar. The Journal of Finance. 2001; 56(1): 387-396.
Copyright © 2020 Tongyi Jin, Altynay Abilgaziyeva, Tsz Ting Lam
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