About
Rodney Benson is a Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, with a cross appointment in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on media ownership, the political economy of news, and the sociology of media institutions. Benson is the lead author of the forthcoming book, How Media Ownership Matters, and the author of Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison, which has received multiple awards including the Doris Graber American Political Science Association Award for the Best Book of the Decade in Political Communication. His work has been praised for its sophisticated, cross-national analysis and its contribution to understanding media systems and their impact on democracy. Benson holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California-Berkeley and an MA in international affairs from Columbia University. Prior to his current position, he was an assistant professor at The American University of Paris. His research and theoretical articles have appeared in leading sociological and media/communications journals, and his work has been featured in numerous prominent media outlets.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Social Science
- Law
- Computer Science
- Public relations
- Sociology
- Mathematics
- Physics
- Reliability engineering
- Statistics
- Engineering
- Business
Selected publications
Media Independence is About More Than Courage
Contexts · 2026-02-01
article1st authorCorrespondingRodney Benson on the ownership forms that constrain journalistic independence
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-12-16 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingEconomic Instrumentalism: The Ultimate Taboo
2024-11-27
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter examines economic instrumentalism as it manifests itself in the self-promotion of positive information and the suppression of negative information about owner economic interests. Drawing on a sample of US, Swedish, and French news outlets’ total news output over lengthy time periods, the chapter finds that ownership interests are mentioned most often by outlets with stock market widely held or conglomerate ownership. Across all outlets, coverage of ownership interests is on balance positive in marked contrast to overall business coverage, which tends to be negative, suggesting that investing in media is an effective way to lessen critical journalistic scrutiny. The chapter also examines economic instrumentalist “public scandals” over the past decade: stock market-traded and privately owned media are most often publicly associated with promotion and suppression. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how economic instrumentalist goals may be achieved by owners even in the absence of frequent promotion or suppression in news content.
2024-11-27
other1st authorCorrespondingAchieving Sustainability: Funding-Audience Adjustment Strategies
2024-11-27
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Drawing on in-depth interviews and news industry and professional sources, this chapter identifies distinct media management funding-audience adjustment strategies: serving either omnibus or elite audiences, with funding from advertising, audience subscriptions, philanthropy, and/or citizen-taxpayers. Funding-audience adjustment models tend to be affiliated with particular ownership forms, constituting ownership complexes. Omnibus audience targeting is most commonly found under stock market ownership with advertising funding or public ownership with public funding. With the decline in advertising revenues, some stock market-traded and many privately held and civil society-owned news outlets seek financial sustainability through audience digital subscriptions. The result has been a shift toward creating high quality news content for elite audiences, excluding much of the public. While philanthropy has provided crucial support for some civil society-owned outlets, especially in the US, it mostly reinforces this tendency toward exclusion. For some commercial media in Sweden and especially France, public subsidies help bridge the gap between ambitious public service aspirations and financial survival.
2024-11-27 · 8 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingAbstract How Media Ownership Matters provides a new approach to understanding news media ownership, going beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls to examine the influence of different forms of ownership on the production of news. The book identifies four broad ownership forms—market, private, civil society, and public. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews of top executives and editors, an original and extensive collection of industry data, and a comprehensive content analysis of more than fifty news outlets in the United States (US), Sweden, and France, the book analyzes how these ownership forms—along with associated funding models and the social and political characteristics of owners and audiences—contribute to three civically consequential modes of power: public service orientation, political instrumentalism, and economic instrumentalism. It finds that civil society ownership is associated with the strongest overall focus on public service; public ownership is distinctive in providing public service information for a broad omnibus audience. The book counters previous research by showing that particular owners, as well as audiences, influence the direction and intensity of partisan slant in the news. Economic instrumentalism is associated most strongly with stock market-traded outlets, especially conglomerates with non-business interests. Challenging previous claims that media ownership research has been “inconclusive,” the book’s findings and review of the literature show that media ownership does indeed matter and in patterned ways. This book provides a road map to understanding how ownership is shaping the future of journalism and democracy.
2024-11-27
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingSaving the news media means moving beyond the benevolence of billionaires
2024-02-13 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingEuropean Journal of Sociology · 2024-12-01
article1st authorCorrespondingWhat Can Comparisons Tell Us? International Research on Contemporary Journalism - Matthew Powers and Sandra Vera-Zambrano, The Journalist’s Predicament: Difficult Choices in a Declining Profession (New York, Columbia University Press, 2023, 302 p.) - Sylvain Parasie, Computing the News: Data Journalism and the Search for Objectivity (New York, Columbia University Press, 2022, 299 p.) - Elena Raviola, Organizing Independence: Negotiations between Journalism and Management in News Organizations (Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar, 2022, 163 p.)
Ownership Forms and Modes of Power: A New Framework
2024-11-27
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter identifies the limitations of previous media ownership research, focused on media concentration or individual media moguls. Drawing on theories of institutional logics, fields, and media management, the chapter offers a new conceptual framework. First, it specifies and identifies the unique logics of practice of the major media ownership forms and subforms: market (stock market widely held or dominant shareholder, private equity/hedge funds); private (family/individual, employee, non-traded corporations, founder with venture capital support); civil society (nonprofit association, foundation, religious, partisan-affiliated), and public; as well as the subforms of conglomerate ownership and current/legacy journalist control. The chapter also develops a model of ownership complexes—forms accompanied by distinct funding-audience adjustment models—that are implemented to achieve goals of economic sustainability (however defined) by owners and managers. It concludes by elaborating the concept of modes of power as normatively consequential dimensions of journalistic performance.
Frequent coauthors
- 25 shared
Philip H. Gordon
- 25 shared
Sophie Meunier
Princeton University
- 25 shared
Olivier Dard
Princeton University
- 25 shared
Débat Josselin
Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique (CNRST)
- 25 shared
Pierre Grémion
Centre de Sociologie des Organisations
- 25 shared
James Shields
Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique (CNRST)
- 7 shared
Matthew Powers
Seattle University
- 4 shared
Darryl Kellner
Awards & honors
- 2020 Doris Graber American Political Science Association Awa…
- 2015 International Journal of Press/Politics Best Book Award
- 2014 Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communic…
- 2014 NYU Steinhardt Daniel Griffiths Research Award
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