Who Owns the Media?*

By Simeon Djankov, Caralee McLiesh, Tatiana Nenova, A. Shleifer. Journal law and economy, 2001

913 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world. We find that almost universally the largest media firms are owned by the government or by private families. Government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media. We then examine two theories of government ownership of the media: the public interest (Pigouvian) theory, according to which government ownership cures market failures, and the public choice theory, according to which government ownership undermines political and economic freedom. The data support the second theory.

Subfields: Accounting, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db4573895974f343b0381fd01bae4ff52bfeb15d

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Citations in the corpus

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit (2014, background): “The data on the outcomes of municipal elections comes from either the electoral office of the Italian Minister for Internal Affairs or from the electoral archives of Italian regions.(12) The information on the individual characteristics of elected politicians are gathered from the “Registry of Elect”
Media Ownership, Concentration and Corruption in Bank Lending (2011, positive): “Djankov et al. (2003) show that state ownership of the media tends to have a negative influence on a broad number of important metrics including the degree of press freedom, the level of political and economic freedom, as well as overall measures related to the health of the society (e.”
State-owned MNCs and host country expropriation risk: The role of home state soft power and economic gunboat diplomacy (2014, background): “As Djankov et al (2003) succinctly summed up: state powerful enough to enforce contracts and secure property rights can also use this power for its own benefit.”
What determines the quality of institutions (2002, background): “A free media and access to information allows market participants to provide checks and balances on each others’ activities and on government activities (Djankov et al., 2001).”
The New Comparative Economics (2003, background): “Higher level of regulation of judicial procedure are associated with higher costs and longer delays, without offsetting benefits in terms of perceived justice (Djankov et al., 2003).”
Media Sentiment and IPO Underpricing (2017, neutral): “Evidence about the problem of misreporting are documented in Djankov et al. (2003), and Mullainathan and Shleifer (2005), who suggest the risk of having media with concentrated ownership, government-friendly attitude, and audience bearing biased news.”
Fiscal Transparency, Political Parties, and Debt in OECD Countries (2003, neutral): “We did try to interact transparency with the share of state ownership of television (from Djankov et al. 2002), to see whether the effect of fiscal transparency is stronger where the media is privately owned, but were unable to obtain significant estimates of such an effect.”
Private Benefits of Control: An International Comparison (2004, background): “…in both developed and developing countries but has, to our knowledge, largely been ignored in empirical examinations of corporate governance.1 1 Djankov et al (2001) analyze media ownership and its correlation with the performance of several macro institutions, but they do not look at the…”
Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability (2006, neutral): “Simeon Djankov et al. (2003) demonstrate how state ownership of the media is related to various measures of poor government performance.”
Accountability and Corruption: Political Institutions Matter (2001, background): “(governments), thus improving governance [Fackler and Lin (1995), Rose-Ackerman (1999), and Djankov et al (2001) ].”
Individual and Contextual Correlates of Trust in Media Across 44 Countries (2014, background): “Our scale covers 2003 to 2006.5 As an indicator of media ownership, Djankov et al. (2003) constructed ownership variables that distinguished between state and private ownership of the press or television in 97 countries.”
Media and Politics (2015, background): “Djankov et al. (2003) document media ownership patterns across the world and investigate how ownership correlates with policy outcomes.”