Media Capture

Interest in the problem of “media capture,” as well as academic research on this subject, has grown tremendously since 2015. Worries about media bias and the influence of owners and advertisers have been around since at least the 1800s. What has changed is the rise of autocratic governments that seek to shape public opinion and the financial troubles facing many media outlets. This has made it easier, and cheaper, for oligarchs to buy struggling outlets, giving rise to media capture. Financial woes have also shaped the incentives for such takeovers. Previously, media owners may have had financial motives but, as profit margins are squeezed, the main reason to own an outlet is to further one’s political agenda. Hence the fear that capture is worsening. The term “media capture” was first defined by a small group of economists at the beginning of the 21st century. These economists built on previous theories of regulatory capture often associated with George Stigler. Stigler used the term to explain why, instead of regulators doing their jobs, they become allied with the entities they were meant to be regulating. For the first few years, the term was not known widely in the journalism and communication fields but that has now changed. Indeed, it was political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (for more information, see: Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. 2008. “How Media and Politics Shape Each Other in the New Europe.” In: Karol Jakubowicz and Miklós Sükösd, eds. Finding the Right Place on the Map: Central and Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective, Chicago: Intellect, pp. 87–100), who came up with a widely used working definition of media capture, describing it as a situation in which the news media are controlled “either directly by governments or by vested interests networked with politics” (p. 91). In this definition, it is important to focus not just on “government” but on “vested interests.” Thinking about how the state of media capture has evolved, Mungiu-Pippidi has refined her definition to distinguish between outcomes and mechanisms, noting that capture is the outcome and problems like self-censorship or soft-pressures are mechanisms by which capture is achieved. Other definitions include political scientists Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s descriptions of “instrumentalization of the media,” while economist Maria Petrova defines media capture as “one possible form of institutional subversion used by the rich to grasp benefits in the struggle for resources in an economy” (Petrova, Maria. 2008. Inequality and Media Capture. Journal of Public Economics 92:187). The author thanks Chloe Oldham and Sofia Bennett for their research.