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Abstract

The assumption that ownership has an effect on the diversity of news is based on the forms of control that ownership allows and the market conditions in which ownership is exercised. In this study, we perform a large-scale analysis of the Swedish newspaper market, surveying 130 newspapers and parliamentary speeches over a period of six years (2014–2019), to substantiate to what extent market and for-profit ownership forms impact political viewpoint diversity. Our analysis shows that newspapers with market leadership and chain ownership offer more political viewpoint diversity than number two and single-owned papers. In contrast, the ownership forms surveyed here (private, foundation, and publicly traded ownerships) display little effect on newspapers’ internal diversity. We also find that a greater number of papers in a local market does not imply more external diversity in that market. The analysis thus offers some nuance to the notion that ownership form and market pluralism are prerequisites for viewpoint diversity, highlighting instead the importance of scale effects for pluralistic media systems.

Keywords

computational analysis market conditions ownership pluralism political viewpoint diversity

Introduction

Media ownership has captured the attention of communication scholars because of the assumption that ownership concentration can have a negative impact on political pluralism (cf. Picard and Dal Zotto 2015). As media owners could use their ownership power to exert influence on political processes (Benson et al. 2018), researchers have long promoted ownership diversity at the media systems level (McQuail 1992) to ensure a pluralist democracy (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Two questions are of particular importance to substantiate this assumption. The first is to what extent diverse ownership—the distribution of ownership power across multiple hands (Napoli 1999)—affects political viewpoint diversity in the news. The second is to what extent a diversity of ownership forms—the institutional logics (cf. Benson 2016) that follow from the modes of power of for-profit media ownership—matters for political viewpoint diversity.

Although Neff and Benson (2021) have found economic instrumentalism to be impacted by ownership forms in the US market context, research is still lacking as to what market and ownership conditions mean for the distribution of political views. Although there is a clear assumption in the literature (Sjøvaag 2014) of a relationship between ownership power and the diversity of political views in the news, there is still no clear agreement on whether a greater number of owners and a more distributed ownership of news media will produce more diverse content (Noam 2009). Questions also remain as to what market structure is most conducive to external media pluralism, some research suggesting that monopoly positions allow for more content diversity, not less (Berry and Waldfogel 2001), due to their incentives and means to implement higher levels of product differentiation than companies in competitive markets. Other studies posit that moderate competition provides the best condition for diverse content (Van der Wurff and van Cuilenburg 2001). Hence, there is still a gap in research about the relationship between ownership, market conditions, and political viewpoint diversity in the news (Karppinen 2018). Filling this gap will not only help to substantiate the relationship between press ownership and politics at the media systems level but will also provide a basis for policy formation to sustain political pluralism in democracies.

To fill this research gap, we analyze the provision of political viewpoints in news coverage in the Swedish context—a media system with a history of political parallelism that turned toward neutral professionalism in the 1980s (Brüggemann et al. 2014; Hallin and Mancini 2004), and a comparatively diverse distribution of for-profit ownership forms along foundation, private (including family and independent), and publicly traded media companies. Our data consist of all newspaper articles from 130 newspapers (approximately eight billion words) and transcripts of all parliamentary speeches of representatives of eight political parties (approximately twenty-five million words) from 2014 to 2019. We assess the representation of political views in newspaper coverage based on an index of political slant of Swedish newspapers created for a previous study (Garz and Rickardsson 2022), an extension of the language-based approach for measuring media bias developed by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010).

We find that newspaper chains and market-leading papers offer greater political viewpoint diversity than single-owned papers and secondary papers (number two papers in the market), which highlights the importance of scale effects for political viewpoint diversity. We find little difference across the for-profit ownership forms. Hence, our analysis suggests that how ownership is organized matters more than ownership form. Our results also indicate that a higher number of newspapers in a local market does not imply a greater diversity of viewpoints in that market. In our setting, oligopolistic markets do not produce higher levels of external diversity than monopolistic or duopolistic markets. While these results speak to the idiosyncrasy of Swedish newspaper ownership (foundation ownership being for-profit as opposed to the nonprofit orientation of the US equivalent), our findings add nuance to the notion that ownership form (cf. Benson 2016) and market pluralism (Perloff and Salop 1985) are prerequisites for political viewpoint diversity.

Theoretical Perspectives

In media and communication studies, diversity primarily refers to heterogeneity in the features of media enterprises, including ownership, content, representation, and reception of media messages (e.g., McQuail 1992). While diversity and pluralism are often used interchangeably, diversity is a dominant nomenclature, referring to communication research on media content (Loecherbach et al. 2020). Particularly in the European context, media diversity is typically understood as that which enables political pluralism at a deliberative level (cf. Sjøvaag et al. 2019). Scholarship usually distinguishes between internal and external diversity. Internal diversity describes the diversity of content within a single media outlet, whereas external diversity refers to “pluralism achieved at the level of the media system as a whole, through the existence of a range of media outlets or organizations reflecting the points of view of different groups or tendencies in society” (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 29). As diversity is a means to a pluralist democracy (Doyle 2002), often invoked through media policy (Baker 2006), its grounding conception is that of representation and the distribution of power in social systems (Jeffres et al. 2000).

News media contribute to democratic pluralism by reflecting differences in society, giving access to different points of view, and offering a wide range of choices (McQuail 1992). While “viewpoint” diversity can be defined in a number of ways (Baden and Springer 2017), we conceptualize viewpoint diversity here as a plurality of political perspectives that are represented in the news (cf. Masini and Van Aelst 2017). The content available to audiences should thus ideally reflect the variety of preferences, identities, and ideologies that exist in society (McQuail 1992). Information about the extent to which a media system facilitates pluralism can be accessed by investigating, among other things, the distribution of ownership within the media structure (Noam 2009). Ownership concentration (the number of owners on a market) is associated with how much strategic intent there will be to provide more and different media content. In theory, the more owners/suppliers in a market, the higher the degree of market competition, where media producers try to attract the audience by differentiating their content (Hollifield 2006; Perloff and Salop 1985). Differentiation is, however, also a costly strategy. Studies have shown that markets with multiple weak suppliers tend to provide audiences more standardized content (Van der Wurff 2004), and that increased competition hence can reduce content diversity (Nord 2013). Moreover, research on market leadership (cf. Van der Wurff 2004) shows that large, dominant actors tend to have less interest in duplicating content, suggesting that pluralism could also be linked to a news outlet’s market position.

At the center of the discussion is the tendency of certain markets to consolidate over time and strive toward increasing production efficiencies—which stands against the democratic interest of nations to maintain a diverse media landscape and a diversity of views and opinions. Although prior research on ownership concentration and cross-media ownership adds to our understanding of the risks associated with a single owner controlling the news sphere (Baker 2006; Doyle 2002), there is no causal evidence that diverse ownership produces diverse content (Picard and Dal Zotto 2015). While research has shown correlation between ownership and news content (cf. Benson et al. 2018; Humprecht 2017), there are still unanswered questions regarding what ownership concentration means for the diversity of political viewpoint diversity offered to readers in local news markets.

Literature Review

Prior research on media ownership effects has tended to focus on the impact of ownership on the diversity of content in the news (Beckers et al. 2019; Humprecht and Esser 2018), or the level of clientelism, bias, or political parallelism that ownership can influence in a media system (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010). Media ownership effects are thus assumed along the value chain of news production—from journalistic practice to overall pluralism in society (cf. Hendrickx and Ranaivoson 2019). Research on the conditions for viewpoint diversity tends to highlight the professional and institutional factors such as the role of sources (Wolfgang et al. 2021), or a newspaper’s market orientation (Masini and Van Aelst 2017). A few studies have found ownership concentration to lead to less viewpoint diversity (Park 2021), while others find the opposite (Pritchard et al. 2008).

Central to research on the effects of ownership on content and viewpoint diversity is the question of ownership form. Who owns—private shareholders, a family, a foundation, or a state—seems to affect both how issues are reported and framed on a political scale (Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2012), meaning that ownership creates news bias (Bailard 2016), influences news selection (Baum and Zhukov 2019), and impacts on the quality of political coverage (Dunaway 2008). Studies have found state-owned public service broadcasting to offer more, as well more diverse, political news (Aalberg et al. 2010; Cushion 2022), and that foundation ownership tends to inspire stronger public service values (Benson et al. 2018). From the US context, family-owned and nonprofit news has been found to provide more investigative reporting (Hamilton 2016). Research also finds that competition between news outlets in the same market tends to have a mitigating effect on the active promotion of ownership interest (Neff and Benson 2021), that it promotes political reporting (Sjøvaag et al. 2019), and that it can mitigate the homogenizing effects of chain ownership (Baum and Zhukov 2019). Reversely, studies have also found that market competition can have a negative impact on the quality of political news coverage (Dunaway 2008), and that competition can increase content homogenization in online news (Boczkowski 2010).

In analyzing the effects of ownership forms on news content, researchers distinguish rather broadly between professionally oriented and profit-oriented ownership forms (e.g., Humprecht and Esser 2018), often dichotomized as private and state ownership (e.g., Badr 2021). Operationalizing ownership form requires more nuance than this, however. Benson (2016) distinguishes ownership forms based on their institutional logics and modes of power, separating between commercial and public or nonprofit forms of ownership. Benson et al. (2018) divide these logics more specifically into stock market, privately held, civil society and public ownerships and their link to the ability of various ownership powers to perform public service. Picard and Van Weezel (2008) divide ownership according to juridical corporate power structures, operationalized as private ownership, public ownership, nonprofit ownership, and staff ownership.

To enable an analysis of political viewpoint diversity of newspapers in the Swedish context, we conceptualize ownership form based on modes of power akin to Benson (2016) and Benson et al. (2018), but tied more specifically to the different operational and allocative powers (McManus 1994) that various ownership forms allow. Allocative power includes control over a company’s finances and resource; policy and strategy formation; merger and acquisition control; and cutbacks and profit control. Operational control refers to owners deciding on editorial strategies and leadership models, including the hiring of leaders and managers, and internal resource distribution. The institutional arrangements that follow from for-profit ownership thus tend to flow from the degree of separation between ownership and control that private and publicly traded ownership forms afford (Dunaway 2011). Sweden is a particularly suitable environment for studying ownership power across a variety of for-profit ownership forms, as private, foundation, and publicly traded ownership are distributed across regional market structures, thus allowing for an analysis of ownership effects along political divides at the overall market level.

The Swedish Context

The media system in Sweden is Democratic Corporatist (Brüggemann et al. 2014; Hallin and Mancini, 2004), with a mixed media system where publicly funded media coexist with successful commercial media. Editorial independence and journalistic professionalism are strong. The press enjoys arm’s-length direct and indirect state support, justified by external pluralism goals to ensure that there are newspapers in all parts of the country (Gustafsson et al. 2009; Ots 2014). While roughly 50 percent of Swedish newspapers receive direct state support, Swedish newspapers have also been comparatively successful in switching to subscription online revenue models. The landscape overall consists of approximately 160 newspapers, all of which are for-profit enterprises. Forty-four percent of Swedes subscribe to a morning paper (The Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority 2020), and 33 percent pay for online news. The landscape of newspaper ownership is consolidating fast, particularly with regional concentration (Nygren et al. 2018). About half of the newspapers in Sweden have changed ownership since the millennium (Leckner et al. 2019), evidence of the extent to which small and mid-size newspaper chains are seeking consolidation effects of merging with larger owners (Ots 2012; Sjøvaag 2022).

The market for newspapers consists of free newspapers, evening tabloids, and subscription morning papers, of which the subscription press constitutes the largest segment overall. Many of these papers were founded by political parties, and while today these are commercially operated, professionalized newspapers, they constitute important platforms for political opinion expression (cf. Weibull and Anshelm 1991). Markets are generally dispersed. There is a plethora of local newspapers, many with monopolistic positions. The contours of an umbrella market structure remain (Lacy 1984), where local papers predominantly compete with regional outlets and national titles.

Sweden has a multiparty parliamentary representative political system, with eight parties in Parliament organized predominantly around two blocks, green/socialist and conservative/liberal. While Sweden has a consensus-seeking political culture, there have been tendencies toward increasing levels of conflict along the left/right political spectrum in recent years (Oscarsson et al. 2021). In October 2014, a green/social democrat coalition came into office, replacing a conservative/liberal government. The coalition remained in power until 2022 and was for a period also backed by the center and liberal parties.

Operationalizations

As our sample consists of newspapers, and all newspapers in Sweden are for-profit enterprises, our analysis concerns the commercial domain of media ownership. For-profit newspaper ownership in Sweden is distributed along three forms of ownership, including foundation ownership (forty-six papers), private ownership (where fifty papers are family owned and thirty-three cases are independently owned), and publicly traded (one paper). Hence, the dominant forms of commercial ownership in the Swedish newspaper market are private ownership and foundation ownership.

Private ownership can include a host of arrangements and these enterprises can vary in size and concentration (cf. Dunaway 2011). Depending on the organization of the company and the relationship between ownership and management, the number and diversity of owners or shareholders, and their aims and interests (Dunaway 2008), private ownership forms can influence profit expectations as well as ideological goals. Family-owned companies are thought to withstand market pressures because they enjoy long-term ownership commitment (Benson 2016). They are also thought to have strong operational control over the company (Bammens et al. 2011) as they have more power in setting editorial strategies, and in hiring managers and editors. However, they do face issues of sustainability as family control is usually diluted when power is handed down through the generations (Picard 2004). After having struggled to make necessary investments and keep their news media operations financially competitive in the digital era, several owner families have recently chosen to exit the news market. In the studied period (2014–2019), family-owned corporations in Sweden include Bonnier, Hall Media, Nya Wermlands-Tidningen, and Stampen. Included under the category of private ownership, independent newspaper ownership refers to single proprietors and interest organizations. This form of ownership assumes operational and allocative powers, as independent owners decide on both editorial and financial strategies. An example is Världen Idag.

Foundation ownership in Sweden is a unique ownership form that differs from trust ownership in the United Kingdom and nonprofit ownership in the United States. While American nonprofits tend to be funded by philanthropy and donations, foundation-owned newspapers in Sweden are not exempt from profit expectations, and typically rely on advertising and subscription revenue. Where the US trust is controlled by one or more trustees, Swedish newspaper foundations are formed to last for eternity and are essentially ownerless (Ohlsson 2012), and thus tend to allow relatively strong allocative powers due to their primary motivation to sustain the publishing operation. Foundation-owned or controlled corporations in the studied period include Gota Media, MittMedia, Norrköpings Tidningars Media, and Stiftelsen VK-Press.

These ownership forms are assumed to be more public interest-driven than stock-owned or shareholder-controlled media companies, where the profit motive is more pronounced (Benson 2016; Dunaway 2011) and owners have more allocative than operational power. We only have one newspaper under stock ownership in our sample, Svenska Dagbladet, and its owner Schibsted is majorly controlled by the Tinius Foundation. In summary, all newspapers in Sweden are for-profit enterprises with commercial incentives. Moreover, most foundation, private and publicly traded newspapers in Sweden, are organized as chains as these benefit from the efficiency and centralization that this organizational form affords, and thus from economies of scale and scope. Chains have organizational traits and corporate control mechanisms that can have a homogenizing effect on news content (Berry and Waldfogel 2001). To that end, we distinguish between single-owned and chain-owned newspapers. In addition, we operationalize the market positions of newspapers as market leading versus secondary (number two papers) to distinguish between newspapers’ provision to target mass or niche/local audiences. Market-leading newspapers tend to attain their position because they cater to a general audience, toning down political or ideological leanings to avoid deterring certain audience groups. Reversely, number two papers in such markets are more incentivized to focus on niches to soften competition (Cook and Sirkkunen 2013). Finally, we operationalize newspapers’ ability to produce diverse content in terms of their presumed resources to innovate and employ reporters, as proxied by their subscription revenue,¹ publication frequency (e.g., daily vs. weekly), and average number of pages.

Hypotheses and Research Questions

Research questions are formed to ascertain the impact of ownership form and market conditions on political viewpoint diversity. Hypotheses are formed to test the relationship between market/ownership conditions and the diversity of political viewpoints in newspapers.

RQ1: Which of the for-profit ownership forms offers more political viewpoint diversity—foundations, private ownership, or publicly traded newspapers?

Because newspaper chains can exploit economies of scale by centralizing their production, allowing them to produce diverse content at a low cost, we hypothesize that:

H1a: Newspapers that are part of a chain offer more diversity of political viewpoints than single-owned newspapers.

H1b: The larger the chain a newspaper is part of, the greater the level of diversity of political viewpoints in the newspaper.

As market leaders have the means to cater to large, diversified audiences, while number two papers may have to focus on niches to soften competition, we hypothesize that:

H2: Newspapers that are local market leaders offer a greater diversity of political viewpoints than secondary papers.

Because larger organizations have more resources to employ reporters, innovate and create economies of scale, we hypothesize that:

H3: The greater a newspaper’s resources, the greater its diversity of political viewpoints.

Finally, because competition authorities tend to justify press subsidies based on the argument that external pluralism requires a plethora of independent sources in a market, we ask:

RQ2: Does a greater number of newspapers in a local market imply a higher aggregated diversity of political viewpoints in that market?

Methodology

Sample and Data Sources

Our sample consists of digitally archived article text, which we used to construct content-based measures of political viewpoint diversity covering subscribed Swedish newspapers between 2014 and 2019. The justification for this selection lies with the slant index employed to perform the analysis, based on the same time period (Garz and Rickardsson 2022). The sample consists of 130 outlets accounting for more than 95 percent of the circulation in this segment. A few titles were omitted from the sample due to a lack of editorial content (in free newspapers) or archived text (in a few small publications), or a lack of access to readership data at the local level (for evening tabloids). The data were processed at a yearly frequency, following the unit of measurement of the sources described below.

Circulation numbers were sourced from the Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority, which includes subscription figures by year and municipality. Data on subscription price, publication frequency, and newspaper size were obtained from the Nya Lundsteds Database hosted by the National Library of Sweden. Ownership data, ownership form, and changes in ownership during the period were gathered by surveying publicly available information from the companies themselves (their websites and press releases). Local market reach was determined based on Napoli et al. (2018), by examining their cover pages and local sections, as well as their online directories of targeted localities.

Measuring Diversity of Political Viewpoints

We assess the representation of political views in news coverage based on the language-based approach for measuring political slant provided by Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010), later adopted in other studies (e.g., Beattie 2020; Garz et al. 2020). In this approach, slant toward a political party or ideology is quantified by comparing media language with language used in political texts. Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) compare US newspaper coverage with speech protocols of Democratic and Republican politicians in the US Congress. The approach demonstrates that newspapers and politicians share a similar ideology when they often use the same phrases, capturing slant in the form of “distortion” and “filtering” (e.g., Gentzkow et al. 2015). Not only does the measure discover the extent to which news outlets frame the same facts in different ways, but also through the selection of facts and topics covered. Language similarities thus reflect how media and political parties communicate about various issues, as well as what issues they focus on. For two-party systems, the method can measure to what extent media are biased toward either political direction. In systems with multiparty systems, such as Sweden, the method can be used to gauge how balanced the mix of slant is per media outlet: Does the outlet focus on just one party (i.e., offer concentrated slant) or does it cover multiple parties equally (i.e., offer diverse slant)?

We used the data on the slant of Swedish newspapers developed by Garz and Rickardsson (2022), publicly available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PBBYPO (Garz 2022), to compute an index of internal concentration of political viewpoints based on Herfindahl’s (1950) and Hirschman’s (1964) formula. This index ranges from 0 to 100, where a value of 0 indicates that a newspaper provides perfectly equal degrees of slant toward each of the eight parties (i.e., the highest possible level of diversity), whereas a value of 100 indicates that all slant is focused on a single party (i.e., the highest possible level of concentration) (see the Supplemental Material for mathematical details).

The Herfindahl–Hirschman index was selected over other concentration measures (c.f. McDonald and Dimmick 2003), as it is widely utilized, easy to interpret, and enables the comparison of values to other applications. For instance, in competition policy, an index below 15 indicates that an industry or a market is competitive, while values above 15 and under 25 reflect moderate levels of concentration, and values above 25 indicate high levels of concentration that may require anticompetitive measures (e.g., Federal Trade Commission 2010).

We used the index of internal concentration of political viewpoints as our main dependent variable. As Table 1 shows, this index has a sample mean of 15.845. According to the classification of the Federal Trade Commission (2010), this value implies that the “market shares” of slant toward the different parties are mildly concentrated. The standard deviation of the index is relatively low (SD = 0.373), suggesting that Swedish newspapers apply very similar standards regarding the diversity of political viewpoints, to which we would stress that we are looking at minimal variations. Thus, this is a case of a dispersed but homogenized media system.

Table 1.

Summary Statistics of Newspaper-Level Variables.

	Mean	SD	Min.	Max.
Index of internal concentration of political viewpoints	15.845	0.373	15.046	18.217
Foundation ownership (yes/no)	0.411	0.492	0.000	1.000
Private ownership (yes/no)	0.581	0.494	0.000	1.000
Publicly traded (yes/no)	0.008	0.089	0.000	1.000
Part of newspaper chain (yes/no)	0.840	0.367	0.000	1.000
Number of co-owned newspapers	8.706	7.060	0.000	23.000
Local market leader (yes/no)	0.619	0.486	0.000	1.000
Yearly subscription revenue (in 10 M SEK)	5.352	13.586	0.061	150.883
Publication frequency (# of days per week)	4.274	2.173	1.000	7.000
Average number of pages	31.783	8.417	8.000	64.000

Note. The data refer to six years between 2014 and 2019 and up to 130 newspapers (N = 756). SD = standard deviation.

To construct a corresponding market-level measure, we defined local markets according to the 290 municipalities in Sweden, established which newspaper targets which municipality, and calculated the index of external concentration of political viewpoints by taking the average over the relevant newspapers in the municipality in question. This index is constructed analogously to the index of internal concentration but evaluates the combined news coverage of the newspapers in a municipality.

Explanatory Variables

We constructed the following variables to evaluate the hypotheses and research questions. First, we created the binary variables foundation ownership, private ownership, and publicly traded to distinguish newspapers according to their ownership form.

We constructed another binary variable that separates individual newspapers and newspapers that are part of a chain. The variable takes the value 1 if the owner of a newspaper holds at least two papers in total. Most newspapers in the sample are chain owned (84%). To account for differences in chain size, we created a variable that counts the number of co-owned newspapers. This variable has an average value of 8.7, the largest newspaper chain consisting of twenty-six outlets.

The binary variable local market leader takes the value of 1 if the newspaper has the highest circulation share in the municipality of publication (compared to all other papers circulating in that municipality) in a given year, otherwise 0. Table 1 indicates that approximately 62 percent of newspapers are market leaders.

The following proxies were used to capture newspapers’ resources. We computed the yearly subscription revenue (scaled in 10 M Swedish kroner (SEK)) by multiplying the annual subscription price by the total number of subscribers, based on the assumption that greater revenue from subscription sales implies greater resources to cover the cost of producing diverse content. Publication frequency counts the number of days per week a newspaper is published, assuming that papers with daily publication have more resources than papers published once or twice a week. We also count the average number of pages per issue, as newspapers with many pages likely have more resources to fill these pages.

Results

We estimated a linear panel data model at the newspaper-year level to evaluate Research Question 1 and Hypotheses 1 to 4. The model included the index of internal concentration of political viewpoints as the dependent variable and the explanatory variables listed above as predictors. We also included year dummies to account for common factors that might affect newspapers’ diversity over time. We refrained from including newspaper fixed or random effects because many explanatory variables do not exhibit much variation over time (e.g., local market leader and publication frequency). Hence, the model was estimated using the pooled ordinary least squares estimator (Wooldridge 2002: 150). The lack of fixed or random effects is unproblematic in our context, as there is no reason to expect for time-invariant, unobserved factors to be strong confounders in an investigation of the structural determinants of newspapers’ concentration of political viewpoints. We clustered the standard errors of the regression by newspaper, to account for error correlation within different observations on the same newspaper.

Regression results are presented in Table 2. Columns (1) and (2) are versions of the same model, which differ in the way we measure the role of newspaper chains. We evaluate whether different forms of ownership are associated with different levels of diversity of political viewpoints (Research Question 1) by comparing private ownership and publicly traded, respectively, to foundation ownership. The coefficient on private ownership is negative, which suggests that these newspapers offer more diversity of political viewpoints than papers owned by foundations. However, this result is not necessarily robust, as the relevant coefficient is statistically significant in Column (2) but not in Column (1). The coefficient on publicly traded is negative and significant at the 1 percent and 10 percent levels, but we refrain from interpreting this result because there is only one newspaper in this category. Results in Supplemental Table S1 indicate that our results remain the same when we use alternative operationalizations of ownership form.

Table 2.

Ordinary Least Squares Regression Predicting Newspapers’ Concentration of Political Viewpoints.

	(1)	(2)
Ownership form (reference category: Foundation)
Private	−0.073 (0.046)	−0.116** (0.057)
Publicly traded	−0.461*** (0.143)	−0.206* (0.107)
Part of newspaper chain (yes/no)	−0.407*** (0.115)
Number of co-owned newspapers		−0.014*** (0.005)
Local market leader (yes/no)	−0.259*** (0.059)	−0.269*** (0.069)
Yearly subscription revenue (in 10 M SEK)	0.004*** (0.002)	0.003 (0.002)
Publication frequency (# of days per week)	0.042** (0.017)	0.038** (0.019)
Average number of pages	−0.002 (0.003)	−0.002 (0.003)
Year dummies (reference category: 2014)
2015	0.033 (0.022)	0.032 (0.021)
2016	0.041* (0.022)	0.069*** (0.023)
2017	0.113*** (0.021)	0.139*** (0.023)
2018	0.130*** (0.023)	0.157*** (0.023)
2019	0.130*** (0.031)	0.164*** (0.033)
Constant	16.167*** (0.145)	15.994*** (0.125)
Adj. R²	0.271	0.186
Number of newspapers	130	130
Number of observations	756	756

Note. The regressions use data at the newspaper-year level. The dependent variable is the index of internal concentration of political viewpoints. Standard errors (in parentheses) are clustered by newspaper.

p < .10. **p < .05. ***p < .01.

To evaluate the role of chain ownership (Hypotheses 1a and 1b), we used the variables part of newspaper chain and number of co-owned newspapers. Both variables are strongly correlated (Pearson correlation coefficient = 0.54) because they measure different aspects of the same construct, which makes it necessary to include them one at a time in the regression. As Column (1) shows, the coefficient on part of newspaper chain is negative and significant at the 1 percent level. According to the point estimate, the concentration of political viewpoints in the coverage of chain-owned newspapers is 0.407 points lower than in the case of independent newspapers, which corresponds to a difference of 0.407/0.373 = 1.091 standard deviations of the concentration index. Hence, we confirm Hypothesis 1a, that chain-owned newspapers offer more diversity than individual papers. Column (2) summarizes the results pertaining to Hypothesis 1b, that newspapers offer more diversity, the larger a newspaper chain. The coefficient on the number of co-owned newspapers is also negative and significant at the 1 percent level. The size of the coefficient implies that the concentration index decreases by 0.014 points with each additional newspaper held by an owner, which confirms Hypothesis 1b.

The coefficient on local market leader is negative and statistically significant at the 1 percent level. According to the point estimate in Column (1), the concentration of political viewpoints in the coverage of local market leaders is 0.259 points lower than in the case of newspapers that are not market leaders. The difference is substantial as it equals 0.259/0.373 = 0.694 standard deviations of the concentration index. Hence, we confirm Hypothesis 2, that local market leaders offer a greater diversity of political viewpoints than secondary newspapers.

We evaluate Hypothesis 3, that newspapers with greater resources offer more diversity, by interpreting the coefficients on yearly subscription revenue, publication frequency, and average number of pages. The coefficients are (not consistently) significant except for publication frequency, where the point estimate implies that newspapers with a higher number of issues per week offer a higher level of concentration of political viewpoints. Thus, we reject Hypothesis 3.

We used the index of external concentration of political viewpoints to address Research Question 2 and examine the relationship between the number of newspapers in a local market and aggregate market-level diversity of political viewpoints. As Figure 1 shows, we do not find statistically significant differences between markets with a newspaper monopoly versus duopoly. However, the degree of concentration of political viewpoints tends to be slightly but statistically significantly higher in markets with a newspaper oligopoly (i.e., where at least three papers compete) than in monopolist and duopolistic markets. This finding contradicts the notion that the external diversity of viewpoints can be raised by increasing the number of sources. As Supplemental Figure S1 shows, we confirm this finding when we use alternative measures of local market structure.

Figure 1.

Market-level diversity, by number of newspapers in the market.

Discussion

Literature has suggested that the distribution of ownership power impacts the distribution of political viewpoint diversity in the news (Hallin and Mancini 2004), and that chain ownership could lead to a homogenization of content (Hendrickx 2020). In the Swedish context, however, we find that ownership concentration through chain formation impacts newspapers’ internal diversity positively, not negatively. Chain formations thus seem to contribute to political viewpoint diversity (cf. Beckers et al. 2019; Hendrickx and Ranaivoson 2021)—and bigger chains contribute more. In other words, the larger the chain, the higher the diversity of political viewpoints in each of its newspapers. The modes of power enabled by these for-profit ownership forms thus seem to be cancelled out by scale. If we see this in conjunction with the positive effects of market leadership on political viewpoint diversity, newspaper chains, as a form of media ownership, seem to support the exchange of political views in the public more so than single-owned newspapers. In addition, we find that a greater number of competing newspapers does not mean more external diversity of political viewpoints in the news at the market level (Berry and Waldfogel 2001; Hollifield 2006; Perloff and Salop 1985). If at all, our findings indicate slightly lower levels of diversity with three or more newspapers in the market.

The results of our analysis therefore add important nuance to prior knowledge. Two realities could serve to temper the challenge that these findings represent. The first is that while our findings indicate that a greater number of newspapers does not lead to more external diversity of political viewpoints, this does not take away the value of having multiple senders in a media landscape. As Baker (2006) explains, it does not matter that the news output is similar or dissimilar, but that there is the possibility of a differentiated news agenda through a diversity of editorial sources available. The second is that while competition between different news producers theoretically should lead to more external diversity in a market (Baum and Zhukov 2019; Neff and Benson 2021), differentiation strategies are also costly. If the newspapers competing in a market lack the funds to differentiate, low resources may cancel out the incentives to differentiate, due to competition (Doyle 2002). Hence, a high level of ownership diversity among weak suppliers does not necessarily increase the external, market-level diversity of content supplied (Van der Wurff 2004). In our case, however, we can show that it is not the lack of resources that cause this lack of political viewpoint diversity. Larger organizational resources in the form of higher subscription revenue, more issues published, and larger volume, do not lead to more internal diversity of political viewpoints in newspapers. Subsequently, it would seem that financially successful newspapers in the Swedish newspaper market do not necessarily reinvest their earnings into politically more diverse content.

How commercial ownership is organized thus seems to matter more to political viewpoint diversity in Swedish newspaper coverage than ownership form in itself (Benson 2016), or organizational resources per se. The benefits of scale outweigh the varieties of powers that different ownership forms allow (McManus 1994; Picard and Van Weezel 2008). This could be explained by the peculiarities of the Swedish context, especially the substantial presence of for-profit foundations as an idiosyncratic ownership form, and the market-wide trend toward consolidation and chain ownership (Leckner et al. 2019). Furthermore, while chains, as a particular form of organizing news production, can homogenize content across outlets by centralizing production and mandating copy use (Hendrickx 2020), the nature of local Swedish markets could explain why this effect is not seen in our analysis. With a highly dispersed newspaper market, consisting largely of local monopolistic newspapers, local political information, which is non-substitutable in nature (cf. Lacy 1984), is hard to centralize. The homogenizing effect of chain formations is therefore limited, due to the properties of the Swedish newspaper landscape.

The contribution of this study lies with its finding that ownership power largely resides at the level at which ownership is organized, rather than with the operational powers that ownership forms provide. This conclusion must thus be seen in context with the for-profit orientation of ownership forms in the Swedish newspaper landscape. The positive effects of market leadership on a newspaper’s internal diversity of political viewpoints speak to the ability of, and benefits from, market leaders’ pursuit of mass-market content strategies. The finding that chains provide more political viewpoint diversity should give recourse to support the development of chain formations in media landscapes with dispersed monopolistic local newspapers like the Swedish one. Local affiliation tends to anchor newspapers to local political structures. The fact that Swedish newspaper chains do not have a homogenizing effect on the provision of political viewpoints should speak to the value of dispersed newspaper structures for a pluralistic media system, even in a system with minimal empirical variation in political viewpoint diversity.

Conclusions

This study asked to what extent diverse newspaper and ownership forms matter for the diversity of political viewpoints represented in the news content. Using a corpus of newspaper coverage in Sweden from 2014 to 2019, coupled with an index of political slant developed from the speeches of parliamentary representatives in the same period, the study finds that newspaper chains offer more political viewpoint diversity than single-owned papers. The larger the chain, the more diverse the political content. We find little difference in political viewpoint diversity between foundation, private and publicly traded for-profit newspaper ownership in Sweden, suggesting that the organization of newspaper ownership (chains) matters more for newspapers’ internal diversity of political viewpoints than their for-profit ownership form. While organizational resources by themselves do not affect internal viewpoint diversity, local market leadership seems to allow or induce papers to offer more political viewpoint diversity. Hence, catering to large, omnibus reader markets has a positive effect on newspapers’ internal diversity, whereas incentives to differentiate from competitors do not necessarily lead to greater external diversity. The latter finding implies that functional competition is insufficient to ensure political diversity in the news in the Swedish context. These findings are generalizable to the extent that they should inform conceptualizations about ownership and market effects on political viewpoint diversity in media systems with dispersed, chain-dominated, and profit-oriented newspaper landscapes covering parliamentary political systems.

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

Like any academic study, this one comes with limitations. First, our analysis only concerns political viewpoints and does not extend to the quality or representativeness of political debates, or to other categories of news content, such as topic diversity, the provision of political reporting overall, hard versus soft news, or political speech outside of the parliamentary context. A promising avenue for future research could be to use more sophisticated language models and more comprehensive sources of political text to better capture those aspects. Moreover, our analysis cannot speak to the effects of chain ownership on other aspects of news diversity, or how it relates to economic instrumentalism. Second, while our investigation refers to Sweden and may therefore be only representative of Democratic Corporatist systems, further research is necessary to test whether our findings hold in other contexts, such as in Liberal media systems where market forces play a larger role. In addition, it is unclear whether the findings hold in a setting where the variation in political viewpoint diversity is bigger. Furthermore, due to the empirical limitations of the Swedish newspaper market context, that is, the absence of nonprofit ownership forms, our findings can only speak to profit-driven newspaper ownership landscapes. Markets with nonprofit trust ownership and those with more publicly traded media companies may show different results. Third, we consider the market and ownership conditions in the entire segment of subscribed papers but abstract from the possibility that forces outside of this segment influence newspapers’ diversity of political viewpoints, such as activities of the owners in our sample in television markets or online. Future research is also necessary to evaluate how algorithms and automation influence editorial decisions and content diversity of newspapers’ print editions. Moreover, to further substantiate the impacts of concentration and market dispersal, future research could investigate what, if any, tipping points or benchmarks influence external pluralism at the media system level. As chains continue to proliferate, it would be particularly important to keep an eye on the impact of this organizational form on external pluralism.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612231178254 – Supplemental material for Political Viewpoint Diversity in the News: Market and Ownership Conditions for a Pluralistic Media System

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612231178254 for Political Viewpoint Diversity in the News: Market and Ownership Conditions for a Pluralistic Media System by Marcel Garz, Mart Ots and Helle Sjøvaag in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is funded by the Swedish Competition Authority (Konkurrensverket Dnr 406/2019).

ORCID iD

Helle Sjøvaag

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at .

Notes

Author Biographies

Marcel Garz is an associate professor of economics at Jönköping University, Sweden. His research focuses on the economics of news markets and the role of social platforms for the dissemination and consumption of media stories.

Mart Ots is an associate professor at Jönköping International Business School. His research interests involve the digital transformation of media and communication, and its implications for legacy media businesses, emerging media professions, and makers of media policy.

Helle Sjøvaag is a professor of journalism at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research focuses on journalism, media industries, media diversity, and media systems and regulation.

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