Impacts of Cross-Ownership Between Newspapers and Television on Viewpoint Diversity: Testing One-Owner-One-Voice Thesis

The growing phenomenon of media cross-ownership and its impact on news content is receiving international attention. This study tests one-owner-one-voice thesis, which posits that a single owner represents a single voice regardless of how many media outlets the owner operates, in the context of South Korea. To do this, the current study analyzed 18,037 TV news reports and 1893 newspaper articles about the 2012 and 2017 presidential campaigns of South Korea published by three cross-owned newspaper and television clusters. The results reveal that each cross-owned newspaper and television station showed a very similar slant in covering the presidential candidates and political ideology. The findings offer strong evidence that one-owner-one-voice holds up in South Korea and suggest that it is fallacious to assume that cross-ownership ensures viewpoint diversity.