Measuring Organizational Influence on Digital News: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Media Pluralism and Editorial Independence

Peter Carragher; Kathleen M. Carley

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arXiv · 2610.40172

Measuring Organizational Influence on Digital News: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Media Pluralism and Editorial Independence

Peter Carragher·Kathleen M. Carley

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Abstract

News consolidation is accelerating, yet regulators have no measurement frameworks for determining whether owners shape editorial decisions. Existing evidence comes from single cases, where pluralism and independence are measured separately, if at all. We ask whether ownership impacts editorial decisions across the digital news ecosystem, and if so, how acquisitions affect this. We derive editorial independence and internal pluralism using partial information decomposition, which separates news coverage overlap with sister outlets from coverage overlap with all outlets. Using public datasets, we apply our measures monthly from 2018 to 2026 to 1,364 US news websites on three editorial decisions: which events they cover, which sources they link to, and what they put on their front pages. We find that co-owned outlets share up to 40 times more information about these decisions than expected by chance. Ownership accounts for far more variation in independence than network affiliation does and, upon being acquired, outlets lose independence sooner than matched controls, quickly converging on their new owner. In broadcast news, by comparison, we find that it is network affiliation, not ownership, that accounts for more content overlap. Finally, we discuss policy implications and suggest that media regulators have blocked large deals rather than editorially detrimental ones. We hope that this work can serve as a framework for comparative media analyses going forward.

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Peter Carragher, Kathleen M. Carley. 2026-10-29. Measuring Organizational Influence on Digital News: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Media Pluralism and Editorial Independence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40172

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