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Summary. This essay for a leading progressive UK thinktank argues that the trend for media outlets to be increasingly owned and controlled in an oligopolistic, non-transparent fashion is damaging to the health of our democracy. The report draws on case studies from across Europe and recommends a series of steps to both raise the public profile of this issue and to regulate concentrations of media power where these are found.
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Summary. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of ownership and control of media providers today, and the affect that these ownership structures have on news sources and journalistic autonomy. Drawing on new research data, the book illustrates the essential themes and future directions for more democratic and accountable media systems in the 21st century.
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Summary. This article sets out the emergent challenges and opportunities for developing effective and ‘future proof’ policy for regulating media plurality. This analysis is carried out against the backdrop of UK authorities’ 2018 public interest test of the proposed merger between 21st Century Fox and Sky, and the latest data on the UK media ownership landscape. That merger review established important precedents for plurality reform, particularly in its acknowledgement that digital intermediaries are not an inherently pluralizing force and that regulatory intervention is needed to prevent concentrations of agenda power, especially at the level of wholesale newsgathering. The article goes on to critically examine the existing regulatory approach to considerations of whether media mergers are in the public interest, especially in the light of mounting evidence of intensifying consolidation within and across news platforms. This article argues that effective plurality reform must start with new legislation that sets out indicative thresholds and detailed guidance on the meaning of plurality sufficiency. This will enable a proper assessment of plurality outside merger activity and could serve as the basis for periodic reviews, enabling regulators to respond effectively to the challenge of new technologies and dynamic market conditions. We also address problems in the plurality measurement framework developed by Ofcom, namely, the inclusion of digital intermediaries as news ‘sources’ in data collection and analysis. In light of findings from the Fox/Sky merger review, a more effective approach would be to reallocate consumption attributed to major intermediaries based on analysis of the actual news sources consumed via those platforms. Far from privileging intermediaries, this approach will provide a more robust basis on which to bring them into the fold of plurality regulation, namely, through the development of plurality standards for algorithm governance. Such an approach also reflects a new reality in which the interplay of gatekeeping and agenda power between traditional media and intermediaries is not a zero-sum game, amidst growing evidence that major intermediaries are serving to consolidate rather than diversify the news offer in favour of incumbent and mostly legacy publishers.
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Summary. This book section interrogates the specific role of platform monopolies in shaping and framing public debate, arguing that far from ‘pluralising’ the agenda, the particular characteristics of news and information algorithms are more likely to be having the opposite effect on balance, reinforcing the dominance of a small number of mostly legacy, incumbent news brands.
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Summary. The Media Manifesto delivers a sharp analysis of our communications crisis and a passionate call for change. It provides hope for media reform movements across the globe and puts forth a roadmap for radical reform of concentrated media power, placing media justice, economic democracy and social equality at the heart of our scholarship and our campaigning.
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