Book Talk | Rodney Benson | How Media Ownership Matters
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, April 23rd (5:30-7:00 PM) for a book talk with Rodney Benson. He will discuss his new book How Media Ownership Matters with Anya Schiffrin and Steven Waldman.
Drawing on extensive interviews and a comparative analysis of more than 50 news outlets in the US, Sweden, and France, the book shows how four ownership forms—market, private, civil society, and public—each shape the news in civically consequential ways. Interacting with funding models and target audiences, these forms affect the degree to which coverage is oriented toward public service, partisanship, or the promotion of owners’ economic interests.
Daniel Hallin, UC-San Diego, has described the book as the “finest work to date” on media ownership, “rigorous and complex at the same time engaging and accessible — a wonderful contribution to the political economy of news.”
Rodney Benson is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt and Affiliated Faculty in Sociology at New York University. He is the author of Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison (winner of the Doris Graber Award for best book of the decade in political communication), co-author of Public Media and Political Independence, and co-editor of Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. In addition to leading sociology and communications journals, he has written articles for Le Monde Diplomatique, The Conversation, Byline Times, and the Christian Science Monitor, and his research on media ownership and funding has been featured in NiemanLab, Axios, the Atlantic, Poynter, The New Republic, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a senior lecturer who teaches on global media, innovation and human rights. She writes on journalism and development, investigative reporting in the global south and has published extensively over the last decade on the media in Africa. She is the editor of Women in the Digital World, (Routledge, April 2023) Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press, 2014) and African Muckraking: 75 years of Investigative journalism from Africa (Jakana 2017). She is also the editor of Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms and Governments Control the News (Columbia University Press 2021.) Dr. Schiffrin’s work with economist Haaris Mateen on the valuation of news has been cited in the Atlantic, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post and many other publications.
Steven Waldman is the founder and president of Rebuild Local News. He is also the co-founder and former president of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in newsrooms across America. Before becoming an advocate for local journalism, Waldman was a journalist covering national politics for Newsweek, U.S. News and World Reports and Washington Monthly. Later, he wrote a report for the Federal Communications Commission, outlining the information needs of communities.