Media dependency theory offers a helpful way of thinking about the relationship between media and the fulfillment of different audience needs and goals.
At the heart of the theory is the proposition that in industrialized and information-based societies, individuals come to rely on media to satisfy a range of different needs and goals, from learning about where they should go to vote to staying up-to-date about the latest fashion trends.
Before diving into this theory, it is helpful to consider that journalistic media are just one set of constituents within a broader system of information. This broader system includes other mass media, like movies and books. It includes other institutional actors, like politicians and corporations. It includes personal contacts, like your friends and family members. It includes your personal experiences, like your attendance at an event or a study abroad experience that exposed you to a different culture. There are many other potential constituents, but this helps illustrate the notion that journalistic media operate within an environment made up of different entities that can offer at least some information that might be of interest to a particular audience member.
This perspective is helpful because it underscores the importance of understanding the context around people’s interaction with information, which is crucial to understanding journalistic media’s role in informing people.
That, in turn, is an explicit rejection of earlier, more simplistic theories about the effects of mass media, such as the hypodermic needle paradigm from the 1930s, which argued that mass media are incredibly powerful and that people just accept the information disseminated by mass media as-is. At the same time, it rejects the view that mass media have little to no effect, as the magnitude of the effect is dependent on the context.
Returning to media dependency theory, it posits that the impacts of journalistic media on people (and of people on journalistic media) are contingent upon the given context and the nature of the relationships within this network of social actors, technological actants, and audiences that are relevant to that context.
The theory further posits that an individual’s characteristics and goals (e.g., how interested they are in some topic), their personal environment and interpersonal network (e.g., whether they know people with first-hand experience with that topic), and the dominant media and social systems they live within (e.g., how free they are to access news media they believe would be informative about that topic) all impact the extent to which they may depend on media for information about that topic.
For example, let’s consider the topic of foreign election interference in the 2020 election. Perhaps, as someone passionate about politics, you are very interested in that topic—and thus have a personal goal of learning more about it. However, because you are (most likely) not an intelligence officer and lack security clearance to review intelligence reports yourself, you probably don’t have the ability to gain first-hand knowledge about the issue. Moreover, you might not have any such people in your friend or familial networks, so you don’t personally know someone with first-hand knowledge, either. You must thus depend upon third parties—that is, people other than yourself or those close to you—for information. One such third party might be a journalist who has been covering this topic for months as a national security reporter at The Washington Post. As such, you might come to depend on that journalist for what you believe to be trustworthy information about the topic.
However, that could change over time. Perhaps an anonymous whistleblower leaks a series of intelligence reports online and uses cryptographic keys to demonstrate the authenticity of the documents and their chain of custody. Now, you may find yourself dependent on the whistleblower for access to the information, as they control which of the reports are made available to the public. However, you may also become independent of their interpretation of the information—and The Washington Post’s interpretation—once you’re able to review the documents yourself (provided you understand them).
Although journalistic media are just one of many sets of constituents within information systems, they are often important. That is because people generally need journalistic media to function in modern societies, which are more co-dependent than ever before due to specialization and globalization. Put another way, personal contacts and experience are no longer enough for all (or even most) things a person needs in order to fully participate in contemporary social life.
Crucially, media dependency theory contends that the degree of ambiguity about news information impacts the degree of media dependency. Specifically, the higher the degree of ambiguity, the greater the audience’s presumed dependence on journalistic media when it comes to news information.
Ambiguity can come from many different sources. It might involve lack of knowledge about some phenomenon, such as whether a new technology developed by a rival nation poses a threat to your nation’s security. It might involve rapid change associated with a phenomenon, such as whether a coup d’etat in a friendly nation might impact the diplomatic relationship between them and your nation. It might also involve simple disagreement among institutional elites about some phenomenon, such as which political group is more likely to be correct about the risks posed by climate change.
This proposition can be extended into an argument that journalism can be especially influential on people’s understanding of emerging international affairs. That is, people typically have less certainty (and thus more ambiguity) when it comes to the world beyond their immediate sphere because they might not have recent (or any) personal experience in those contexts, or personal contacts who have expert knowledge or experience in those contexts. Because of this, they become more dependent on media depictions of those places, peoples, and issues, and on journalistic media when information is breaking about those places, peoples, and issues.
Moreover, when a media organization has exclusive information, it tends to have more power within its relationship with an audience member (and the broader ecosystem) because it increases the degree of information asymmetry. This is particularly true if the information is in demand to satisfy that individual’s valued goals, and doubly so if access to such information is tightly controlled.
Exclusive information does not have to entail classified information, as with the earlier example. It might simply mean that they are the only source for that information at a given time, such as in the early hours following a chemical explosion at a local manufacturing plant. While local officials may eventually put out their account of the event via a televised press conference, people are likely to first hear about it from the breaking news coverage provided by journalists.
However, news media do not inherently have exclusive information about breaking news (or confidential affairs). Indeed, some institutional actors, such as governments or private companies, can restrict both media access to important resources and individuals' access to important media sources. In doing so, those institutional actors can try to reorient dependency away from news media and toward their own accounts.
For example, a private company may prevent news media from accessing that manufacturing plant or speaking to its employees, and government officials in some countries may even prevent journalistic media from broadcasting information about the incident until those officials give their approval.
It is important to note that this theory was first proposed during a time of high media concentration, when there were just a few major broadcast networks in places like the United States. Today’s media ecology is far more complex, though. In particular, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones) and networked media (e.g., social media and messaging apps) have become important elements in today’s media ecology. They allow individuals to serve as intermediaries between mass media and other people. That is, individuals with large online followings can become key brokers of news information during an event and thus gain power—even if only temporarily—by virtue of others' dependence on them. Additionally, people can now more easily find videos and accounts of that event posted by a range of other people who observed it first-hand, thus reducing the exclusivity that news organizations might otherwise have.
Media dependency theory is a systems-level theory that views journalistic media as just one set of constituents within a broader system of information.
Media dependency theory focuses on understanding relationships within a system, with the strength of the relationships impacting the degree of dependency.
Media dependency theory contends that the degree of ambiguity impacts the degree of media dependency. Journalism can be especially influential on people’s understanding of things they have limited personal experience with, such as international affairs.
When a media organization has exclusive information, it has more power in a relationship as the relationship becomes asymmetric. However, different institutional actors, like governments, can restrict access to important media resources.