What knowing about media ownership does to media consumers

One aspect of media literacy that I didn’t hear very much about during my thesis was that of understanding media ownership. There were laments from journalists in my study about the lack of resources sometimes available to them to do their job, but few talked at length about understanding ownership structures as a way to more critically analyze the news.

Then I stumbled upon a study in the Journal of Media Literacy Education about this very issue.

(Full disclosure: I know one of the study authors — Seth Ashley. We met during Stony Brook University’s 2010 summer news literacy institute. He’s a fan of McLuhan, so we got along.)

Researchers at the University of Missouri asked 80 undergraduate journalism students to read either a piece of poetry or an article about media ownership, then read and analyze four news stories and critically judge the credibility of each piece.

When students in the study read about media ownership in relation to the stories they were asked to critique, the researchers found that students thought more critically about the accuracy of the story and whether the story went deep enough. This accuracy and superficiality factor, as the researchers called it, were the two with statistically notable results. The remaining two factor scales — truth and comprehensiveness or completeness —  did not yield statistically notable results, meaning that students in a control group scored almost the same as those in the test group.

The researchers concluded that reading about media ownership may lower the credibility of print news in the eyes of the consumer. This isn’t unheard of: the concentration of media ownership in Canada already breeds distrust among news consumers. But breeding distrust is not the goal of media literacy, nor is it the goal of teaching students about who owns what.

The goal is to teach critical thinking skills that will help citizens evaluate media content and make judgements based on a more complete understanding of how the news is produced. A media literate citizenry is better equipped to demand and appreciate quality journalism that truly adheres to the norms to which it aspires. (Ashley, Poepsel, & Willis, 2010)

That’s pretty much the sentiments of two participants in my thesis. One participant in my thesis said that understanding media ownership was important because “one company can own two different newspapers, but they can share a whole lot of content and there’s a very good chance they’ll have the same stuff in each outlet.” He believed that when you have a variety of owners, you also have a variety of points of view. That’s one of the findings of the Kent Commission, which reviewed concerns about media ownership 30 years ago.

As media ownership concentrates further, the diversity of perspectives decreases and, ultimately, erodes democracy (Mercado & Torres, 2006). I wrote once before that the federal government should revisit the Kent Commission and Davey Report recommendations. Canadians have already shown concern for the Sun Media’s television news channel. Maybe they might prod the federal parties to look into the issue of media ownership in the coming year. Consider such an act one for the good of Canadian democracy.