Ananyev Maxim, Volkova Ekaterina
Melbourne Institute, Melbourne University, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
Department of Finance, Melbourne University, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
PLoS One. 2024 Dec 31;19(12):e0315137. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0315137. eCollection 2024.
This study examines how media acquisitions by corporate conglomerates influence the political slant of Australian newspapers. Using a comprehensive measure based on the language of over 30 million news articles from more than 200 newspapers, we analyze the impact of three major acquisitions between 2016 and 2019. Employing a synthetic difference-in-differences approach, we find that acquisitions can significantly shift newspapers' political slant, with effects varying by acquiring entity. News Corp's 2016 acquisition led to a marked conservative shift in newspapers it already owned, while subsequent acquisitions by Nine Entertainment and the acquisition of Australian Community Media by Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz resulted in shifts away from conservative slant in acquired newspapers. Our results provide evidence for the importance of supply-side factors in determining media slant, particularly in an era of increasing media ownership concentration.
本研究考察企业集团的媒体收购如何影响澳大利亚报纸的政治倾向。我们基于200多家报纸的3000多万篇新闻文章的语言构建了一个综合指标，分析了2016年至2019年间三次重大收购的影响。采用合成差分法，我们发现收购会显著改变报纸的政治倾向，且影响因收购实体而异。新闻集团2016年的收购使其旗下报纸明显转向保守倾向，而九娱乐公司随后的收购以及安东尼·卡塔拉诺和亚历克斯·韦斯拉茨对澳大利亚社区媒体的收购则导致被收购报纸的倾向从保守转向其他方向。我们的研究结果证明了供给侧因素在决定媒体倾向方面的重要性，尤其是在媒体所有权集中度不断提高的时代。
