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Ownership and Regulation

Newspaper groups and their titles-

  • DMGT / Associated Newspaper - The Daily Mail
  • EIS Media - The Independent
  • Guardian Media Group - Guardian and Observer
  • Trinity Mirror - The Mirror
  • News UK - The Sun, The Times
  • Northern & Shell - The Express and Daily Star
  • Press Holdings - The Telegraph
  • Pearson - Financial Times
The Guardian and The Observer are sister papers and have the same political standing because they are owned by the same company.

News International owns The Sun and The Times. They also owned The News of the World until it was closed in 2011. Both of these papers they produce are right-wing. News International is owned by Rupert Murdoch. The branch of the company that deals with news has been rebranded as News UK. The company owns 21st Century Fox, who don't have a good reputation with their news brand Fox News. When the Leveson Inquiry took place in 2011, it gave News International a lot of negative attention which is one of the main factors that Rupert Murdoch rebranded as News UK.

The Express and The Daily Star are both right-wing newspapers that are linked by the company that owns them. 

When a company owns more than one newspaper the papers seem to have the same political standpoint which is likely due to influence from the owner of the paper.

The Leicester Mercury is owned by Trinity Mirror.
The Nottingham Post and The Derby Telegraph are owned by Local World.

A number of companies own more than one Newspaper, this may be national, regional, or a mix of both. This fits Hesmondhalgh's theory on Cultural Industries it says that there is an increasing concentration in the number conglomerates that have vertically integrated a number of different news companies to reduce risk for themselves. Companies own multiple media outlets in order to reproduce news in different ways because it is low cost. 

Ownership may be something that is a cause for concern in the UK because if one company hold too much power and owns too many popular news outlets then consumers will only be subjected to one opinion, rather than a variety like there should be. Small numbers of different owners of outlets mean that quality and creativity will be neglected when producing the news because the owners only have one goal in mind: profit. I think that there needs to be a bigger range of owners with differing opinions in order to make the world of mass produced news non-biased, objective, and able to fairly and creatively represent different news stories.

The practice of self-regulating news corporations is important because if we didn't have free press then we would live in a government regulated society where the general public would not receive some news stories. As it currently stands, news corporations can release any story they want that they deem is in the public interest. If the news was government regulated news, then lots of public interest stories would not be published and opposing political views in stories would be pulled. Essentially, the government would own the newspapers because editors wouldn't necessarily be able to publish what they wanted. It is important that regulation is maintained and not exploited by news companies because else the current method of regulation will change.

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