Corporate dominance in media: killing plurality of expression
Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Counterbalance. This week, we’re taking a look at the media sector, and studying the consequences of concentrated power during a pivotal time.
Without media pluralism and editorial independence, diversity of voice and expression goes unheard.
“There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard,” said author Arundhati Roy.
In the UK and far beyond, journalism is under siege. Not only by censorship or authoritarian clampdowns, but by something more quietly corrosive: monopoly power and excessive market concentration.
The UK media landscape has become a textbook case of unchecked corporate power degrading an entire sector. A 2023 report by the Media Reform Coalition revealed that just three companies — DMG Media, News UK, and Reach — now control a staggering 90% of national newspapers. Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch hold controlling shares in the first two companies, respectively.
In the digital sphere, those same three companies dominate over 40% of the top 50 digital news brands, and when it comes to local journalism, the picture is even bleaker. Six companies — according to the same Media Reform Coalition report — own 71% of local publications.
“Media ownership matters because ultimately, money always influences editorial direction — subtly or otherwise,” said Izabella Kaminska, a former Financial Times journalist and founder of The Blindspot, which seeks to reconfigure how journalistic information is organised on the internet.
“However, many arm’s-length protections you build between commercial and editorial departments, the person who pays your salary shapes the culture, sets the incentives, and influences which stories get pursued or buried,” Kaminska added.
The concentrated nature of the media landscape in the UK has also given rise to “news deserts”, a term that describes areas lacking in a dedicated local news outlet.
According to the latest data shared by The Public Interest News Foundation, 4.7 million in the UK live in a news desert, translating to roughly 7% of the country’s population.
The City of London —which dominates the UK’s highly touted financial sector — is a “news oasis” surrounded by districts that have been largely ignored by the UK’s concentrated media industry, evidencing how concentrated market power can aggravate regional inequality.
This isn’t just a UK problem, either. Concentrated ownership is becoming an existential threat to journalism across the globe.
In the US, almost 55 million people — roughly 16% of the population — have “limited to no access to local news,” according to Northwestern University. In 2024, just 10 companies controlled a quarter of all US newspapers, and three of these — Alden, Lee Enterprises and CNHI — are either partially or fully owned by private equity groups or hedge funds.
In Europe, the Media Pluralism Monitor found in 2023 and 2024 that no EU country could be classified as “low risk” for “media plurality”, which measures risks related to a) opacity of media ownership; b) concentration of the market; and c) the economic sustainability of the media from the influence of commercial interests and ownership of editorial content:
“Quality journalism is expensive, and achieving scale can be the only way to sustain newsrooms with the capacity to do serious, long-form work. Smaller outlets can exist, but it’s incredibly hard to operate profitably at a niche level. That said, consolidation does risk creating an oligarchy of influence — and so the key is diversity within that concentrated group,” said Kaminska.
But the danger is more real now than ever. Disinformation has evolved into a valuable political currency and authoritarian populists rely on undermining trust in institutions for political ends.
Highly concentrated media markets therefore don’t just distort markets, they risk a distortion of reality. Editorial lines blur with corporate interests and local journalism — which once served as the bedrock of the broader media industry — vanish.
It’s not just the journalism that suffers, but the journalists, too. A 2024 report by The IIJ Foundation found that over 8,000 roles had been lost in recent years, particularly among women and journalists of colour.
Journalism needs bold, structural reform. We must break up excessive concentration in the sector, but more fundamentally, the narrative around journalism must change. It must no longer be seen as a business like any other, but instead as critical infrastructure. Squashing journalism under the weight of unchecked corporate power is not just bad economics, but it risks the very democracies within which it operates.
Weekly highlights:
This week, the UK Competition and Markets Authority published its proposed decision to designate Google Search as having “Strategic Market Status” (SMS), along with a roadmap of possible measures to improve competition in the market. In response, Google warned that “punitive regulation” could stop it bringing new features and services to Britain. However, others said the CMA should use its powerful tools under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act 2024 (DMCC) to open search competition. Competition lawyer Thomas Höppner said “it doesn’t promise to change much — and seems to be shaped more by “the government’s recent strategic steer” to align with US AI interests than by a bold and coherent regulatory agenda to restore competition and protect business.” Balanced Economy Project agrees, going further to say regulators like the CMA should be breaking up the powerful Big Tech companies, like Google, that have a stranglehold over our digital world, not waiting to see how they respond to timid behavioural remedies. It has been 5 years since the market study report and three years after the CMA/Ofcom report on payment for content and it is disappointing that it says these issues still need “further consideration”, which just emboldens Big Tech in its response to regulatory challenge.
A Wall Street Journal report earlier this week revealed that a number of EU regulations — including the Digital Markets Act — were part of discussions with the US to try and ease the US’s stance on tariffs. As observed by Politico: “the red lines around regulation drawn by the EU in the first few months of trade tensions with the US don’t seem so firm anymore.”
Merger watch: Spain’s BBVA bank will not be allowed to integrate its operations with smaller rival Sabadell for at least three years, according to new conditions on the proposed merger imposed by the Spanish government. The hostile takeover is reportedly worth €14 billion, and while the deal has already been cleared by antitrust watchdogs in the country, the government has a right to impose further conditions over concerns of potential job losses.
Soundbite of the week: Big tech’s stealthy takeover of finance
Earlier this year Finanzwende published a report that examined the growing involvement of Big Tech companies in financial services across Europe.
This week Finanzwende hosted an online seminar to discuss the paper with members of civil society, including The Balanced Economy Project. The session emphasised the risks of stablecoins — a kind of cryptocurrency designed to track the price of a real currency, often the US dollar.
These digital assets have a perilous history of being anything but stable, causing market havoc and inflicting severe consumer harm on the many occasions that they have plummeted in value.
But earlier this month, the US Senate passed legislation that created a pathway for private tech companies to issue these assets to consumers, indicating the urgency of Finanzwende’s calls on Europe to clamp down on the risks presented by Big Tech’s foray into finance.
“Big tech’s entry into financial services offers tremendous opportunities for the companies themselves - but poses tremendous challenges with respect to their supervision and regulation…in light of their rapid growth and often questionable market power, a regulatory response must be found.”
Data mining: A final word on the journalism sector
Highly concentrated media markets give rise to a plethora of risks and harms. As we have seen, they can lead to large swaths of populations living in areas wholly untouched by news coverage, while gutting resources for local journalism and undermining editorial independence.
The upshot of these harms is a declining confidence in journalism itself. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report (2025), over half of respondents worldwide (58%) are concerned about what is real and fake when it comes to online news.
There will be no edition of The Counterbalance next week. Please look forward to our next edition which will be published on Thursday 10th July. Please send any thoughts and feedback to scott@balancedeconomy.org.