Impact of Media Ownership on News Coverage

This paper examines whether ownership by media conglomerates impacts business news reporting. To address this question, we take advantage of a unique setting when in 2007 the ownership of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) was transferred to News Corp., a media conglomerate with broad business interests. We find that, after the acquisition, WSJ’s sentiment toward competitors of News Corp. became significantly negative in comparison with similar reporting conducted by The New York Times. Further, WSJ’s reporting influences stock prices and is associated with more profitable insider trading. This evidence suggests that ownership by media conglomerates likely influences the nature of business news coverage.

This paper was accepted by Brian Bushee, accounting.

Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00653.