Rate My Professor Rodney Benson

Rodney Benson is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School, with a cross appointment in the Department of Sociology. He formerly served as department chair. Benson holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in international affairs from Columbia University. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, he was assistant professor of international communications and sociology at The American University of Paris. He has been a visiting scholar or invited lecturer at numerous universities in Europe, including EHESS-Paris, CELSA-Sorbonne, University of Copenhagen, University of Stockholm, and University of Helsinki. Benson serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism, Poetics, Sociologica, and Politiques de Communication.

His research focuses on media ownership forms—commercial, private non-profit, civil society, and public—and their interactions with funding models and audiences to shape news coverage outcomes such as public service, partisanship, or advancement of owners’ economic interests. Additional areas include comparative studies of immigration news in France and the United States, public media autonomy and accountability across democracies, and the sociology of news media as a journalistic field drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts. Benson is lead author of How Media Ownership Matters (Oxford University Press, 2025; with Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel). He authored Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison (Cambridge University Press, 2013), winner of the 2020 Doris Graber American Political Science Association Award for the Best Book of the Decade in Political Communication, the 2015 International Journal of Press/Politics Best Book Award, the 2014 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Tankard Book Award, and the 2014 NYU Steinhardt Daniel Griffiths Research Award. Other key works are Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (Polity, 2005; editor with Erik Neveu) and Public Media and Political Independence (Free Press, 2011; with Matthew Powers). His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, Journal of Communication, Political Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, and Journalism. Benson’s research has been covered in The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, Le Monde, Al Jazeera English, and other outlets.