Media Concentration and Journalistic Independence in Pakistan Audience and Journalists’ Perspectives

Media concentration has often been mechanized to weaken the culture of media competition and journalistic independence to safeguard media’s commercial and ideological interests. Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model is utilized to measure the content creation, dissemination and consumption in terms of hegemony of media and public trust. Two questionnaires have been developed to get the responses on media ownership, media and content concentration, journalistic independence, and public trust in media from journalists and media consumers. Results of the study and ownership patterns and practices show that Pakistani media platforms; print, electronic and social are highly concentrated in terms of ownership and audience share. The majority 70% of the audiences have shown low confidence in the media. Regarding the influence of cross-media ownership on content diversity, the majority 64% of audiences viewed that cross-media ownership has a significant negative impact on content diversity and journalistic independence across the mediums. 60% of the journalists do not feel free to express their personal opinion on any issue if it differs from official line of the outlets. Majority 75% journalists feel influence from the political and religious groups on the overall journalistic independence and 61% of audiences have the opinion that media do involve in partisanship on political, religious, ethnic, and ideological grounds. 38% of journalists say that media associations do not support them at the time of pressure on them while 35% observed that the associations do helpful to some extent. A perfect correlation of ˃.92 between journalists and audience opinion on content concentration has been observed. Audiences are considered TV medium as the most trusted media platform with a 48% score while social media is remained at second place having a score of 26%.