Media

Richard Wolfram explores the regulatory concerns of Netflix and Paramount’s competing merger proposals for Warner Bros. Discovery. Based on current antitrust doctrine and guidelines, Paramount would appear to face comparatively fewer barriers to the transaction, but the analysis is hardly black-and-white.

Smartphones have become a primary gateway for consuming political news, but we know little about what individuals actually see on their phones. In new research, Guy Aridor, Tevel Dekel, Rafael Jiménez Durán, Ro’ee Levy, and Lena Song open the smartphone black box using novel content data and document individuals’ exposure to election-related content during the 2024 presidential election, as well as the drivers of this exposure.

Warner Bros. (“Warner”), a prized and consequential media company, is once again on the auction block, and both Netflix and Paramount Skydance are competing to buy it. Barak Orbach observes that bidders’ appetites for prized media enterprises often foster undue optimism about the feasibility of successfully integrating them. He argues that antitrust scrutiny of any acquisition of Warner would likely underscore the need to modernize certain antitrust doctrines and analytical frameworks.

In new research, Michele Fioretti, Victor Saint-Jean, and Simon Smith show that shareholders with potential reputational gains will push for corporate actions in the face of shocks like Covid-19 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine that reduce returns to other shareholders who have no reputational gains at stake.

In the 1930s, staffers at the newly established Federal Communications Commission devised a novel rationale for limiting network power in radio, telephony, and the press. While much has changed since the “age of radio,” the concerns they raised inform the present-day debate over the control that social media platforms exert over public discourse, writes Richard R. John.

Follow along live with the Stigler Center's 2025 Antitrust and Competition Conference focused on Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas. The conference takes place...

Luigi Zingales invites guest contributors to the Washington Post’s op-ed pages to boycott the opinion section in response to the recent decision by the...

Brooke Fox writes about ProMarket as a digital space where intellectual debate can take place without the influence of special interests. Who should control the...

Ula Furgal and Magali Eben review the United Kingdom’s efforts to address the lopsided balance of power between traditional news media and digital platforms,...

Excerpted from THE INFLUENCER INDUSTRY: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media © 2023 by Emily Hund. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.