The Problems with Avoiding Conflicts of Interest in a Conglomerate World

Charlene Pepiot

cp872117@ohio.edu

Generally, journalists avoid covering topics that they have a bias toward to avoid conflicts of interest. For example, covering a scandal in the school their spouse works in may influence how they report the story, as from a personal standpoint they wouldn't want to potentially harm their spouse's career. While avoiding potential conflicts of interest is fairly easy with local news, when it comes to covering national stories, the constant buying and merging of companies makes remaining neutral increasingly difficult. 

Someone writing for NBC News may wish to investigate alledged malpractices by DreamWorks, for instance. There should be no conflict of interest between NBC News and the animation studio, but DreamWorks and NBC News are both owned by Comcast. Comcast will likely not approve of having one of its assets called out and potentially lose business, which may lead the journalist to undersell the severity of the story so as to not provoke Comcast, assuming they let the journalist cover the story at all. 

Even if the journalist reports a story in a fair way regardless of who they work for, skeptics can be quick to assume that the journalist is telling half-truths due to them working for an organization owned by the conglomerate they are speaking out against. With trust in journalists at an all-time low, an otherwise fair and informative article could be discounted for reasons beyond the journalist's control. 

To avoid these company conflicts of interest, Journalists find themselves greatly limited on what content they can cover without potentially risking their job. Comcast is far from the only media conglomerate. Outside of Walt Disney Studios, Disney, for example, owns networks like ESPN and ABC among others.

The companies Disney owns from www.titlemax.com

As seen with the multitude of franchises and networks shown above, the issue with many of these conglomerates is that it is not always easy to tell which conglomerate owns what piece of media. While Disney+ is easy to associate with Disney due to its name and Disney-owned catalog, Hulu provides a variety of films from multiple studios, yet it too is owned by Disney.

Because of this, Journalists should research who owns what company to ensure that they can cover it with as little bias as possible. However, this is hardly realistic in a time when new content is demanded more than ever and journalists are already underpaid. Journalists must use their best judgment and journalist code of ethics to ensure the truth is still being told despite these conflicts of interest.