Media concentration per Columbia History Professor Richard John

This discusses a 2025-06-08 interview with Columbia University History Professor Richard R. John about problems with consolidation of ownership of the communications media. A video and 29:00 mm:ss podcast excerpted from the interview will be added when available. The podcast will be released 2025-06-14 to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations.

It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources and treating others with respect.

Interview conducted 2025-06-08 with Columbia University History Professor Richard John about media consolidation: Advertising revenue has been in freefall, and we need local news.

29:00 mm:ss podcast from interview conducted 2025-06-08 of Columbia University History Professor Richard John by Spencer Graves about media concentration and how that invites political corruption

Columbia University History Professor Richard R. John discusses the business of communications in the US focusing especially problems stemming from media concentration. Professor John is the author of two books and an editor of eight others related to the business of media and democracy. His two books are:

• (1995) Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse.
• (2010) Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications.

More recently, he edited

• with Silberstein-Loeb (2015) Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet.
• with Phillip-Fein (2016) Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America.

Prof. John discusses his work with Spencer Graves.

US led the world in numbers of independent newspaper publishers in the nineteenth century

Graves said he had seen claims that in the first half of the nineteenth century the US had more independent newspaper publishers than at any other time or place in human history, at least according to Professor John's book with Silberstein-Loeb (2015) on The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet. He agreed: "We had an informational environment that fostered decentralization, encouraged the circulation of newspapers to a far flung citizenry with subsidies ... . [I]t was an informational environment in which there were a lot of voices. It was an informational environment in which the total volume of information, in this case printed newspapers, magazines, was much greater than in other countries, and that was understood by Alexis de Tocqueville and others to be a positive good."

Graves asked where he might find numbers to support those claims. Professor John recommended his 1995 book on the early American post office.

The media in the US, UK and Germany between the wars

When asked to describe the differences between the US, Germany and Britain during the Great Depression and World War II, Professor John began by noting that the information infrastructure in the US was more decentralized. New York City and Chicago were very important, and there was a sharp divide between newspapers and radio. In Great Britain, the BBC had not been a leader in news before the Second World War, and the newspaper press was more consolidated.

For Germany, Heidi J.S. Tworek, a fine historian in British Columbia, has written about Germany under Weimar. In the 1920, government administrators wanted to limit what they perceived to be speech that was outside the range of public discourse, and they centralized radio further than it was in the US. This made it easy for Hitler to take it over.

There were clear differences. The US was the most decentralized. By principle, Germany was in the middle. Britain as most centralized. However, in practice, the German infrastructure was the most fragile, easiest to manipulate.

Trump

When asked to describe President Trump's relations with the media, Professor John replied,

“ He's a master of online media. He's like Franklin Roosevelt in that regard with radio or Teddy Roosevelt with newspapers and and photography. He has the rhythms. The cadence of his speech is closely attuned to the affordances of what used to be called Twitter, now X. He now has his own social network, a platform, Truth Social. And he recognizes that the most effective online communication is often agonistic. It's often critical. It's often very opinionated, very sharply worded. And that has enabled him to dominate many a news cycle. ”

When asked to describe the settlement of President Trump's lawsuits against Meta / Facebook, Professor John replied, "I'm not going to speak on those issues specifically. I don't know enough about them."

Mayflower and Fairness Doctrines

Professor John discussed the Mayflower doctrine, published by the FCC 1941-01-16, after the second world war began but before the US became an official party. This doctrine prohibited radio stations from taking political positions themselves. The FCC hoped thereby to officially encourage the airing of a broad range of opinions without allowing media owners to dominate political discourse.

At that time, radio was a powerful new medium that had already transformed Germany and was transforming Britain. President Roosevelt wanted it to be a conduit for news and not opinion.

After the war, hearings were held in 1948 on the Mayflower doctrine. This led to a decision in 1949 to repeal that doctrine. Later that year it was replace by the Fairness doctrine, which was itself repealed in the late 1980s.

Since that time there has been no effort to police the boundaries of the airwaves. Some say that's good. However, one of the consequences is that it has become very hard to find any legal recourse against those broadcasters, who are challenging norms in ways that can be deleterious to the project of the nation.

Local News

Graves noted that Gao et al. (2018) reported that when local newspapers have died, the cost of local government has increased with increases in head count, executive compensation and the cost of borrowing as the bond rating tended to decline. Those effects lead to increased costs averaging $85 per human per year, which is roughly 0.13 percent of Gross domestic product (GDP).

Professor John was asked for his comment. He said, "Paul Starr, a sociologist at Princeton, argued some time ago that if you weaken local news coverage, if you weaken reporting on state houses and city councils, you are inviting political corruption. I think that's a pretty durable generalization."

Graves then noted that McChesney and Nichols have recommended 0.15 percent of GDP be distributed to local news nonprofits with a firewall to prevent political interference and asked for Professor John's comment. He replied,

“ This is a tricky question. [McChesney and Nichols] have done good work. They are committed to a particular non-commercial or anti-commercial vision of the media ecology. I don't share that normative assumption. I think that media have been commercially based in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. It was commercially based in Britain from the seventeenth century to the present, and, in fact, advertising can serve as a counterweight to tight control. But I do believe that we're at a moment in time when support for local news ... would be beneficial not only to public discourse, but it would also improve the functioning of American institutions. ”

Graves then noted that he had recently interviewed Dean Starkman, who makes a distinction between accountability and access journalism. He asked for Professor John's comment. John replied,

“ One of my colleagues, Todd Gitlin, used to say that journalists should never interview. They should never curry favor, because if they do, they're inevitably going to see the world through the point of view of whoever it is they're in touch with. I think that's true for some journalists. ... I think it's important that [other journalists] cultivate access, that they're accessible in times of crisis. ... So access journalism has its place. ”

The need for media reform to improve democracy

This article is part of category:Media reform to improve democracy. We describe here briefly the motivation for this series.

One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, “There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper.” McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.

At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. This encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which contributed to making the US a leader in the rate of growth in average annual income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita). Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.

That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.

In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father’s San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet. This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence worldwide, threatening democracy itself.

The threat from loss of newspapers

A previous Media & Democracy interview with Arizona State University accounting professor Roger White on "Local newspapers limit malfeasance" describes problems that increase as the quality and quantity of news declines and ownership and control of the media become more highly concentrated: Major media too often deflect the public's attention from political corruption enabled by poor media. This too often contributes to other problems like scapegoating immigrants and attacking Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) while also facilitating increases in pollution, the cost of borrowing, political polarization and violence, and decreases in workplace safety. More on this is included in other interviews in this Media & Democracy series available on Wikiversity under Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

An important quantitative analysis of the problems associated with deficiencies in news is Neff and Pickard (2024). They analyzed data on media funding and democracy in 33 countries. The US has been rated as a "flawed democracy" according to the Economist Democracy Index and spends substantially less per capita on media compared to the world's leading democracies in Scandinavia and Commonweath countries. They note that commercial media focus primarily on people with money, while publicly-funded media try harder to serve everyone. Public funding is more strongly correlated with democracy than private funding. This recommends increasing public funding for media as a means of strengthening democracy. See also "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government".

Discussion

[Interested readers are invited to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources and treating others with respect.]

Regarding Trump's lawsuits against Meta, a naive reading of Section 230 of Title 47 of the US Code would give Meta a blanked immunity from lawsuits over the content. However, that may not be accurate. The Wikipedia Lawsuits involving Meta Platforms, accessed 2025-06-11, mentions a suit filed 2019-03-28 by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) against Facebook over housing discrimination by allowing advertisers to restrict who can see their ads based on certain characteristics, thus violating the federal Fair Housing Act. Facebook agreed to change their system for housing ads and pay $115,000 in penalties, the maximum penalty under the FHA.

Bibliography

• Pengjie Gao; Chang Lee; Dermot Murphy (15 May 2018). "Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance". Social Science Research Network. Wikidata Q55670016. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Murphy-et-al..pdf. 
• Richard R. John (1995), Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Harvard University Press, OL 2926034W, Wikidata Q54641943
• Richard R. John, ed (2001). "Computers and Communications Networks". Business History Review 75. Wikidata Q134679967. ISSN 0007-6805. 
• Richard R. John, ed (2006). Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth Century America (in en). Penn State University Press. Wikidata Q134674693. ISBN 0-271-02897-1. 
• Richard R. John (2010). Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (in en). Harvard University Press. Wikidata Q54641191. ISBN 978-0-674-02429-8. 
• Richard R. John, ed. (2012), The American Postal Network, 1792-1914, Routledge, Wikidata Q134670536
• Richard R. John; Kim Phillips-Fein, eds. (2016), Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America, JSTOR 10.2307/j.ctv2t4bwq, OL 20255162W, Wikidata Q134669392
• Richard R. John; Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, eds. (2015), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet, Oxford University Press, OL 21101955W, Wikidata Q131468166
• Robert W. McChesney; John Nichols (2010), The Death and Life of American Journalism, Bold Type Books, OL 16603880W, Wikidata Q104888067.
• Richard S. Tedlow and Richard R. John, eds (1986). Managing big business : essays from the Business history review (in en). Harvard Business Publishing. Wikidata Q134680369. ISBN 0-87584-142-2. 
• Alexis de Tocqueville (1835, 1840; trad. 2001), Democracy in America, translated by Richard Heffner, New American Library, Wikidata Q112166602{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)