Joint Seminar between LIEPP and the CEPR Media Plurality RPN.

Monday, October 13
Sciences Po, Salle d'Innovation
1, place Saint Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris
16h - 18h30

Abstract

How Media Ownership Matters provides a new approach to understanding news media ownership, going beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls to examine the influence of different forms of ownership on the production of news. Building on the sociological theory of "institutional logics," the book identifies four broad ownership forms—market, private, civil society, and public. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews of top executives and editors, an original and extensive collection of industry data, and a comprehensive content analysis of more than fifty news outlets in the United States, Sweden, and France, the book analyzes how these ownership forms—along with associated funding models and the social and political characteristics of owners and audiences—contribute to three civically consequential modes of power: public service orientation, political instrumentalism, and economic instrumentalism. 

Speakers

• Rodney Benson is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Sociology, at New York University. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California-Berkeley and an MA in international affairs from Columbia University. In addition to his lead authorship of How Media Ownership Matters (Oxford, 2025; w/ M. Hessérus, T. Neff, and J. Sedel), Benson is the author of Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison (Cambridge, 2013; French translation, 2018), winner of the 2020 Doris Graber American Political Science Association Award for the Best Book of the Decade in Political Communication, and the editor (w/ E. Neveu) of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Polity 2005; Chinese translation summer 2017). His research and theoretical articles have appeared in leading journals including American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, Poetics, American Behavioral Scientist, Political Communication, and the International Journal of Press/Politics. He has also written articles for Le Monde Diplomatique, The Conversation, and the Christian Science Monitor; his research has been featured in The Atlantic, NiemanLab, Axios, Columbia Journalism Review, Le Monde, Al Jazeera English, among others. 
• Julia Cagé is a Professor in the Economics Department at Sciences Po Paris. She is the recipient of a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a five-year project titled “Campaign Finance, Information and Influence: A Comprehensive Approach Using Individual-Level Data and Computer Sciences Tools” (PARTICIPATE) (legal information). She is a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), affiliated with the Economic History, Industrial Organization, and Public Economics programs, as well as a member of the CESifo Research Network. She leads the CEPR’s Research and Policy Network on “Media Plurality.” She received the Best Young French Economist Award in 2023 and the Yrjö Jahnsson Award in 2025.