Media property: Mapping the field and future trajectories in the digital age

Abstract

Ownership has been a core research theme in parts of media and communication science since its establishment as a distinct research field. In particular, scholars in the field of political economy of the media, media sociology and media industry studies typically pay close attention to the role ownership has on various media and communication processes. In this article, we argue, however, that media ownership has been treated largely as a black box ignoring the inner workings and dynamics of it. Filling this void, we reach out to research on ownership from the field of political economy, sociology as well as social and legal philosophy to discuss two options to conceptually grasp the ‘inner workings of property’. To showcase the importance of this conceptual redefinition, the article discusses the implications of unpacking property in the realm of digital capitalism.

Introduction: Media ownership in media and communication research

Ownership has been a fundamental topic of study in media and communication science since its inception. However, Sjøvaag and Ohlsson (2019) argued in their review of media ownership and journalism that ‘most journalism research largely refrains from addressing the issue of who owns the media’ (p. 18). This observation not only holds with respect to the field of journalism, but also for other subfields of media and communication science (Pickard, 2016; Sjøvaag and Ohlsson, 2019). Much of research on media ownership falls within the fields of political economy of the media, media sociology and media industry studies. In the following, we review and discuss core works from those fields in order to show how media ownership has been taken up in those subfields. In addition, we establish that even though literature looks at ownership, it tends to lack a complex and nuanced understanding of it, thus, treating it largely as a black box.

Assessing ownership concentration across multiple dimensions

A core research interest particularly in the field of media industry studies is to conceptually clarify and empirically assess media concentration, that is, in how far certain products (horizontal) and stages of production and distribution of media (vertical) are concentrated in terms of ownership and/or are cross-owned (diagonal). The debate over media and concentration spans across several decades, paradigms and a variety of empirical foci and research methods (Downing, 2011). Various measures and methodologies of media concentration in different core markets (e.g. TV, newspapers etc.) on a national or cross-national comparative scale have been developed with one core goal is to assess whether the market structure might restrict diversity in the media industry (Ferschli et al., 2019; Iosifidis, 2010; Winseck, 2008). More recently, researchers use network analysis techniques to track (indirect) connections between formally distinct firms (Gomez and Birkinbine, 2024; Schnyder et al., 2024) and trace the ownership patterns of global media giants revealing the corporate structures and the way they leverage their multiple holdings to create synergy or cross-promotion between their properties (e.g. Birkinbine et al., 2016; Tröger and Becker, 2023).

This stream of research is primarily concerned with the concentration of media, in the sense of assessing the concentration of distinct entities (e.g. different media companies). The research typically does not pay close attention to different types of ownership (e.g. private and public ownership – see next section). In addition, media concentration is typically linked to undue effects it may have on media diversity, public opinion formation and journalistic autonomy (Grönlund and Björkroth, 2022; Sjøvaag and Ohlsson, 2019). However, those effects are rarely explicitly studied but rather assumed: High market concentration is typically associated with (the danger of) limited media/product/content diversity and vice versa – a claim explicitly or implicitly based on neoclassical theory (Grönlund and Björkroth, 2022; Sevignani, 2022). Beyond neoclassical theory, concentration of media ownership is sometimes also problematised based on alternative but mostly liberal-democratic normative grounds. For instance, Baker's (2006) democratic distribution principle for communicative power argues that ‘a very wide and fair dispersal of power and ubiquitous opportunities to present preferences, views, visions’ (p. 7) is an essential feature of democracies. Still, it is very rare for media concentration to be explicitly studied in conjunction with its effects for diversity, public opinion or journalistic autonomy.

Analysing different types of ownership and their relation to the public sphere

A second stream of research attempts to classify the various forms of media ownership and studies their effects on the public sphere. For instance, Picard and van Weezel (2008) distinguished between private ownership, publicly traded ownership, non-profit ownership, and employee ownership in order to discuss the different economic and managerial conditions as well as implications for journalism related to the different types of ownership. They conclude that ‘from the journalistic standpoint, it has long been recognized that stable, financially strong, and well-managed companies are more likely to perform well in public-interest terms’ (p. 29). Theine et al. (2024) substantiated this insight by providing a systematic review of research investigating empirically the effects of media ownership on journalistic content. Their review shows that media owners do not simply provide structures within which editorial teams and journalists conduct their work based on professional criteria. Instead, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that media ownership influence happens on a structural, institutional, and at times individual level. Private ownership tends to use media for private interest (e.g. by advancing a political agenda); stock market traded media tends to prioritise (short-term) business and profit interests. Studies investigating public service media tend to find that this type of media ownership typically offers more diverse and substantiated journalistic content. For instance, Humprecht and Esser (2018) showed across different countries that ‘media systems that financially support strong public service-oriented news outlets are most likely to create media discourses that meet the normative goal of diversity in voices, backgrounds, and perspectives’ (p. 1841).

In contrast to the first stream, this research classifies different types of media ownership and discusses the relationship to the public sphere, thus goes beyond a simple framework assessing distinct media entities. However, a major drawback of this research is that the different types of media ownership tend to be treated rather schematically without many nuances beyond established categories (e.g. private vs. public ownership). In addition, evidence tends to be scattered across case studies and specific examples with little systematic knowledge.

Ownership power and capitalism

A third stream – particularly represented by critical political economy scholars – puts much emphasis on media ownership, although it tends to be narrowly focused on private ownership sidelining other types. One reason for this is likely the fields prominence in the US which in turn is unique among western democracies in its nearly complete reliance on commercial media (Benson and Powers, 2011; Pickard, 2020). Another reason is the mainly negative criticism of media capitalism without simultaneously outlining alternatives. A key focus is how power operates through communication systems and how media ownership interacts with those power dynamics (Pickard, 2016). Of the different forms of power, particularly economic power is relevant in conjunction with media ownership as it refers to the ‘control of use values and resources that are produced, distributed, and consumed’ (Sevignani, 2022: 6). This power translates into direct decision-making powers and indirect, allocative control, which Murdock (2005/1982: 118) defines as the ‘[…] power to define the overall goals and scope of the corporation and determine the general way it deploys its productive resources’ (see also Nuss and Theine, 2023).

Private media ownership and concentration is also problematised with respect to macroeconomic and macro social processes. In this context, Murdock and Golding (1973) showed how oligopolistic media ownership structures provide the backdrop for a consensus in capitalist society; not as a series of conspiratory interventions from above, but rather driven by ‘the desperate search for large audiences attractive to advertisers’ that leads to a media output which ‘must be vociferously inoffensive’ (p. 230). This vociferously inoffensive consensus, among others, tends to ignore or trivialise strikes and other challenges from the working class and marginalised groups, sharply limits the political debate to those perspectives of the existing predominant political spectrum and covers international news mostly limited to Global north countries (see Herman and Chomsky, 1988 for a similar argument in the US context). Knoche's (2021) ‘concentration theory’ is similarly concerned with macro processes but puts more emphasis on how capitalist, private ownership through profit maximisation and competition can be regarded as fundamental structural economic causes of media concentration. In addition, key economic policies pursued by neoliberal states – deregulation and concentration promotion policies – act as further concentration enhancing measures. Thus, Knoche's approach to a critique of the political economy of the media highlights the crucial structuring of private ownership for more general dynamics in capitalism such as concentration and monopolisation. This theorisation always presupposes the existence of strong and unrestricted capitalist private property and then derives (negative) consequences from it, for example, for the democratic constitution of the public sphere.

Ownership and inequality in the media discourse

A fourth, final stream looks at how ownership issues are represented in the media discourse. This includes questions of how and to what extent media cover debates about ownership as one basic pillar of a liberal-capitalist society and the dynamics of increasingly unequal distribution of economic resources and ownership. For instance, Kendall (2011) shows how US American news and entertainment media systematically legitimises social and economic inequality by presenting the middle and upper classes as generous and caring, or as leading enviable lifestyles, while the poor are predominantly characterised as deviant, lazy and greedy. Analyses of media debates beyond the US tend to find similar results with the media overly justifying inequality by pointing to trickle-down effects, meritocratic notions of fairness, and the importance of competition for innovation (e.g. Grisold and Theine, 2020; Smith Ochoa, 2020; Waitkus and Wallaschek, 2022). For instance, Waitkus and Wallaschek (2022) demonstrated that the personal conduct of wealthy business owners in German media was seldomly criticised and that their wealth was juxtaposed with references to their indispensable contributions to the economy. Liu and Baker (2016) studied how Australian media discursively construct philanthropists as ethical leaders who are influential and interventionalist yet entirely concerned with the social good.

This stream finds that media tends to relativise issues of economic inequality, wealth and ownership by making them seem inevitable and even justified – for instance, by using tropes of meritocracy. In stark contrast, economic elites tend to enjoy favourable depictions, are rarely criticised. In extension, redistribution policies and the population groups that would benefit from them frequently encounter scepticism or outright resistance in media coverage (Dammerer et al., 2023; Grisold and Preston, 2020; Grisold and Theine, 2017, 2020). In contrast to the three streams discussed above, this final research stream focuses on the discursive construction of ownership issues in the mediated public sphere. Findings emerging from this research are often placed in the context of its material conditions, that is, (private) media ownership and concentration. However, they are typically not considered jointly.

Overall, all four research streams within media and communication studies offer important traditions to study ownership and its diverse relation to media. A triangulation of those perspectives results in a comprehensive picture of media and ownership dynamics. However, as we will show in the following, those perspectives share a common blind spot: they do not open up the concept of property.

Unpacking property: Ownership practices and functional equivalents

Research in the fields of political economy, sociology as well as social and legal philosophy tends to understand property ¹ to be more multi-layered and complex than the way it is addressed in media and communication studies. We propose addressing this blind spot in order to better understand the inner workings of property. Throughout property research we find two options for doing so.

First, the bundle theory points to different functions and powers of property (e.g. Carruther and Ariovich, 2004: 25; Penner, 2020; Schlager and Ostrom, 1992). This approach makes clear that a single form of property encompasses various functions such as access and use, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation or economic use rights and its varying compositions. The well-known examples are patents which grant private property to knowledge goods typically with a restricted duration. After this period has expired, the knowledge becomes common property and can be freely copied by others. The bundle theory differentiates between various types of property functions but at the same time risks losing sight of dominant articulations of them in capitalist societies. Private ownership of money, means of production, the privately produced goods and the profits they generate for sellers and buyers, the capitalist private ownership of labour capacities and all of these properties associated with coinciding rights of access, exclusion, disposition, exploitation – this represents the capitalist normal or ideal case.

Second, the ‘doing property’ approach makes clear that there is more than the institutionalised, the legal and the justified form of property with its different functions and rights associated. Martin (2020) argues, for instance, ‘[w]hen the central dynamic of property/economy (i.e. only private individual accumulation will create economic incentives) is accepted as the default normal, we are blind to the many modes of property that have existed or might exist, to property's capacities relative to other economic practices, and to the range of things beyond law that keep property in place and secure its powers’ (p. 280). Supporting this, Blomely highlights the praxeological dimension of property: ‘For property to be made real requires sustained, repetitive and often complicated work. Such iterative enactments are not just an outcome of property, but its precondition and a means for its continuance’ (2013: 37). In our own previous work (van den Ecker et al., 2023), we argue that this praxeological perspective on property should be extended beyond the economic realm: It is important to see that property has not only economic dimensions (such as rights or practices of closure, productive use, alienation, and profitable use) but also that property includes political and sometimes legally binding justifications and complex cultural processes of valuation. The cultural processes of valuation, for instance, rely on social relations and intentional or unintentional practices making something valuable. Equivalent to the economic (the various mentioned rights) and the cultural-political dimensions of property (something legitimately recognised as property), ‘doing property’ entails processes of closure, valuation (assigning value to something and making profit from it) and justification (the distribution of valuable and profit generating goods hast to be accepted and recognised) alike.

From this brief overview of the bundle theory perspective and the ‘doing property’ approach, we can digest that property entails different functions and powers (bundle theory) and rests on various cultural-political, legal and economics processes (‘doing property’). However, those insights are, in our perspective, hardly ever present in media and communication studies. Why is this a problem? In the following section we use the bundle theory perspective and the ‘doing property’ approach in order to conceptualise property in digital media capitalism – and thus showcase why media and communication studies should care about the inner workings of property.

Transformations of property regimes in digital media capitalism

Let us start with an example. Does Instagram or Google really own the content and the data, they have privileged access to and use it to make profits? Social media services do typically require users to agree to its use and privacy contracts – a use and exploitation sub-license for all the content that is posted and made accessible via their digital media infrastructure and platforms (Sevignani, 2016; Solove, 2013). However, things are more complicated with data. As it stands, in the US and the EU, data cannot be itself a property by law. Nevertheless, data access and data processing and computing is key in digital capitalism (Cohen, 2020; Srnicek, 2022; Zuboff, 2019). We argue that unpacking property enables a deeper understanding of the ongoing digital transformation of the media industries (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Turow and Couldry, 2018). It is precisely in this transformation, we argue, that functional and praxeological equivalents to private property become more relevant and these cannot be understood with the standard unitary, black box concept of media property.

Drawing from politico-economically informed social theory, we identify two crucial and intertwined trajectories in digital media capitalism.: First, from private property to access (early on and very popular: Rifkin, 2001) and, in connection with this, a second trajectory from profit to rent. These trajectories can be understood as reactions to ongoing digitalisation processes within capitalist societies, such as ubiquitous datafication and the importance of access to data resources for economic actors, the increasing relevance of informational goods in the economy, and the specific qualities of knowledge production. These trajectories define and limit the space in which different economic players act (strategically).

In fact, different, competing conceptual foundations (such as neoclassical economics as well as heterodox, Marxist economics) have similar perspectives on those two trajectories (although with different ways how to articular that): In neoclassical economics, intellectual goods are usually seen as non-rival because use by one person does not prevent use by others, and because it is often difficult or costly to restrict access to them. They are also considered non-exclusive; thus, they could simply be made available to everyone free of charge – if the economic incentive to produce more knowledge were not removed. There are also widely discussed network effects, which say that additional users or contributors may make informational goods more valuable. Likewise, Marx speaks presciently of the general intellect, meaning that the knowledge of a society becomes the most important productive force. Knowledge work has a general character and cannot be localised in specific companies. If openness is necessary for the (re-)production and further development of information goods, but partially impedes their profit generating exploitation, capital must both allow knowledge, information and data to flourish openly (and free of charge) and in some cases take possession of them. For the critical analysis of digital capitalism, it is necessary to understand this concrete ‘dialectic of production-necessary openness and profit-necessary closure’.

Post-Operaist theories (Lazzarato, 1996; Vercellone, 2010) are among those that have most pointed concluded from this that capitalism appropriates the wealth of immaterial, that is data, information, knowledge producing, labour now in a different way. Instead of being able to organise this labour or even to control the most important productive forces (the knowledge of the workers themselves and their living communication), it appropriates the cultural commons only after the fact. They speak of profits becoming rent in this context. In the literature, the concept of rent means many things at the same time (see for a recent discussion: Reitz et al., 2024). Sometimes rent is related to markets and sometimes to production; it relates to incomes without own work performance, without work organisation, to incomes in situations with incomplete competition and especially due to monopoly positions, mere titles of ownership, or the mere possession of important goods. Frequently and across different camps in economic thinking (Stratford, 2023), rents are deductions of profits or value created not by the rentiers but elsewhere in the economy (Christophers, 2021). This implies that digital media capitalism increasingly centres on taking instead of making (Mazzucato, 2018). As Christopers argues, ‘to the extent, then, that contemporary, rentier capitalism is more about having something valuable (the asset) than it is about doing something valuable, it rewards getting – creating the asset – accordingly’ (2021: 15).

There are two major strategic reactions – pursued by different capital fractions – to the two trajectories of digital media capitalism or as we may call it ‘the governance of reproducibility and rent’. One is more reactive, the other is more proactive: In a defensive-reactive way some capital fractions, including the traditional media content industry aims at a political-regulative (re-)enforcement of (intellectual) private property rights: For instance, Google and other social media corporations should pay for news snippets. In contrast, BigTech capital fraction proactively promote various ‘open’ business models (e.g. regarding science, data, access) that allow for harnessing third party activities and contributions from users (as in the case of free and open software and user data), the public sector (as in the case of joint research activities that result in commercial patents), or subordinate firms. This channelling of knowledge, information and data stream towards BigTech works mainly through infrastructure and platform control. Here, private property only plays a supporting or backing role, as Julie Cohen argues: ‘traditional intellectual property rights play helpful but secondary roles in processes of de facto propertization’ (Cohen, 2020: 343).

Of course we can also observe interesting and further to be researched alliances between these fractions. For instance in late 2023, the Springer publishing house granted Open AI, partly owned by Microsoft, access to its (newspaper) content to further develop the AI application ChatGPT on the grounds of their rich data. Springer did so, not only for additional revenues but also in order to obtain a privileged access to Open AI's technologies which helps to transform Springer's own business models. For a better understanding of such ‘open business models’ and its implications, we suggest that the notion of functional equivalents to private (media) property is helpful and can be further differentiate between three forms: First, profits through ‘openness’ can continue to be regulated by property law: there are many property-law functional equivalents to capitalist private property, for example, software licenses that are open but enable exploitation. Thus, we should consider property-law equivalents to capitalist private property on the basis of an unbundling of the right to private property. An important example in this area is the ‘permissive’ software licences, such as MIT, which allow the code to circulate, but at the same time do not exclude the commercial use of software. Second, profits through ‘openness’ can continue to be legally regulated, but not by property law. For instance, data protection laws award users with privacy rights allowing them to exclude others from the use of their private data; but – as critically outlined – also allows them to enter exchange relations with social media corporations (Sevignani, 2016). Another important example are non-disclosure agreements, which are pervasive in intra-firm relations and even quite common when it comes to universities cooperating with private sector companies. Thus, we also emphasize attention towards the legal equivalents to capitalist private property based on other relevant juridical norms and laws than property law. Third, there are also not or not yet legally conceived practices of openness, exclusion, and appropriation and exploitation. This is especially notable in industries in transition like the digital media industry. Privileged access to data, which is important for many business models, is of course a good example here. This is because data itself is not yet capable of being owned; in order to gain profitable access to it, the use of surveillance technology (which may be privately owned) and corresponding data preparation and processing capacities are required. We, finally, suggest considering practical functional equivalents to capitalist property in media and communication studies.

To better understand the latter in particular, which, as indicated, are of course strategically combined with the other two forms of equivalents the notion of ‘ecosystems’ (e.g. Benkler, 2006; Cusumano et al., 2019) is helpful because it shifts our focus beyond individual companies or commodity chains between economic actors. In such ecosystems, typical for digital capitalism, different modes of production or economies (e.g. commodities, commons, gits etc.; see Sevignani, 2022) are articulated and non-capitalist, even non-economic actors are included and also contribute to the profits made by those corporations that have managed to structure the ecosystem. We understand the much debated ‘platformization’ (Srnicek, 2016) as a widely pursued strategy to achieve hegemonic positions within ecosystems in terms of control over knowledge, information, and data flows. Compared to other formations, such as innovations systems or value chains, platforms establish more direct relations between contributors and thus more direct control and enforcement power of the platform operators over those other actors and contributors. Most importantly this is possible due to concrete socio-technical rule-setting of the platform operators. For instance, they are able to set the terms of who can participate in the platform-curated ecosystem, what services can be offered, but also the terms of quality control and pricing on the platform (Dolata and Schrape, 2023; Törnberg, 2023). Platformisation is part of a wider process of what others call ‘intellectual monopolization’ (Durand and Milberg, 2020; Pagano, 2014; Rikap, 2021; Schwartz, 2022) – the monopolisation of the most technologically advanced, means of knowledge, information, and data absorption (Rikap, 2023). Those monopolies, most prominently the US and Chinese BigTech corporations, infiltrate many and ever more industrial sectors, including the traditional media industry. The questionable BigTech business models, their impact in different economic sectors and their acceptance are widely discussed, for example, with regard to the EU amendments to the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act (Cabral et al., 2021); also explicitly in terms of media regulation (Just et al., 2023).

The dis-intermediation of media systems due to the rise of digital communication at the expense of traditional mass media gatekeepers was subsequently accompanied by a re-intermediation of the public sphere by mostly commercial social media platforms. This has now led to ‘hybrid media systems’ (Chadwick, 2017). Lay communication, PR, advertising and (professional) journalism are merging, which makes it more difficult to assess the quality of journalistic content, for example, in terms of their truthfulness or generalisability. Journalistic quality must be proven after publication, at best in public discussion. The digital offerings from the traditional media share attention with self-generated content from ‘content creators’ and ‘influencers’ and make reference to each other. Mass media and professional journalism – although their services will probably be more important than ever before – are losing reach and interpretative power, while revenues in the advertising and audience market are declining, which increases competitive pressure. Instead, communication flows are increasingly being channelled via social media platforms that automatically ‘curate’ them according to changed criteria.

The re-intermediation of media systems outlined above adds a new layer to the already highly concentrated journalistic media. Media is now increasingly integrated into the (advertising, publishing, software and hardware) ecosystems built by BigTech. But such new and ongoing, and potential counter tendencies in the extended media industry cannot be grasped by solely focussing on property as black boxes or fixed entities. The main development is not that BigTech buys media companies (although that does happen) and then gains control over the publishing process through strong ownership rights; nor is it just that BigTech sells tools or other services to the media industry. Rather, it is about (one-sided) dependencies being established in ecosystems that enable not only monetary but also intellectual (knowledge, information and data) flows between the integrated players and possibly monopolise them in the hands of a few powerful players. To really comprehend this, we argue, needs a new conceptualisation and unpacking of media property. In line with this, we proposed in earlier work to extend the notion of ‘media capture’ (Schiffrin, 2021) to media environment capture (Sevignani et al., 2024), which stresses the multidimensional dependence of media organisations on the services and activities of large technology corporations in the context of their strategies to ‘embrace’ the media. However, it remains a task to operationalise such embracing strategies for empirical research and to identify suitable markers for the new forms of dependency of the media industry.

Conclusion

In this contribution, we argue that communication and media studies should open up the black box of media ownership in order to conceptually and empirically grasp ongoing transformation of property in the realm of digital capitalism. In conclusion, we relate this perspective on (the inner workings of) media property developed here back to the main tenets of media property research outlined at the beginning of this contribution and thus thereby identify trajectories for further research.

First, media ownership concentration research should deepen network analysis techniques as this method perfectly fits to the ecosystem logics highlighted in this article but then needs to identify markers for links that go beyond the property form (e.g. corporate structures and synergies between their properties) in order to grasp and empirically map intellectual monopolisation processes specific to the media industry (such as unilateral advantages, within ecosystem, resulting from multilateral co-operation (with different institutional bases) between distinct actors (with different ownership structures)).

Second, while such research is important to understand the economic dimension of digital media capitalism, it should then also ask about the implications of intellectual monopolisation for processes of public deliberation. Conceptually, it seems obvious that the promotion and influencing of communication using absorptive capacities, for example, for datafication, does not leave the circulating communicative content, styles and forms untouched. Empirically, however, this pressing issue was and is by far less obvious as for instance the contrary views on filter bubbles and fragmentation of the public sphere clearly show. A question for further research is therefore what consequences the intellectual monopolisation in the expanded media industry has for the democratic constitution of the public sphere and what implications the identified different functional and practical equivalents to capitalist private property (in media) have here. In addition, research into the effects of a counterbalance or the scaling of public service platforms in public or co-operative ownership should be intensified.

Third, from this point of view, the aim is to analyse as precisely as possible and to formulate contributions to critical theory construction, how economic and epistemic power is transformed into journalistic power and which, possibly new, forms of journalistic power arise in digital media capitalism.

Fourth, it is also about using discourse and content analyses to understand how the described processes of intellectual monopolisation and the infiltration of the media industry as well as the counter-movements (sometimes also led by prestigious media outlets) are publicly negotiated and framed. From our point of view, it is interesting to crucial to understand how the dominant ideologies of digital capitalism, for example, unstoppable technological progress, solutionism and participation, affect media regulation and whether one-sided profits made possible by the contributions of the many are perceived as a problem or not.