Rodney Benson
· Professor of Media, Culture, and CommunicationNew York University · Communication Studies
Active 1992–2026
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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
Selected publications
News You Can Use to Promote Your Interests: Media Ownership Forms and Economic Instrumentalism
Journalism Studies · 2021 · 30 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingWhile media ownership has often been studied, too little attention has been accorded to one aspect of news coverage—promotional economic instrumentalism (EI)—evident in a news organization's tendency to mention and praise its ownership interests (owners, investors, and associated economic interests). Such distorted news coverage may constitute an ethical conflict of interest and a failure to provide complete information needed by citizens in a democracy. Drawing on a sample of 19 U.S. news outle…
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020 · 18 citations
1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter asks whether news organizations, organizations, in their search for sustainable business models, are acting increasingly as a force for exclusion. Rodney Benson identifies two forms this exclusion takes. In some cases, the exclusion is economic, as happens when subscriptions are too expensive for audience members who might otherwise consume such news. In other cases, the exclusion is cultural, which can be seen in publications freely available to all but in fact only attract the int…
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 c…
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-12-16 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingSaving the news media means moving beyond the benevolence of billionaires
2024-02-13 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorresponding
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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