Newspaper Ownership, Democracy and News Diversity: A Quantitative Content Homogeneity Study

Abstract

Scholarship is recognising that news diversity is jeopardised by heightened media ownership consolidation and a lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks. Using an automated quantitative content analysis of 658,493 articles published between 2018 and 2021 by two newspapers of the same recently emerged Belgian corporation that had to comply with stipulations to safeguard diversity for five years, we find that while overall content has actually not grown more homogenous, tabloid articles risk crowding out broadsheet news. We ultimately position and contextualise our study and its findings within news diversity and democratic theory and offer suggestions for additional research.