Media Capture

This introduction discusses the idea of 'media capture'. It argues that media capture is a useful concept for understanding today's state of the media. Media capture refers to a situation in which governments or vested interests networked with politics control the media. While traditional forms of prepublication censorship no longer exist in many parts of the world, the media are still not truly free. Political transition and digital technology, which were expected to free the media, did not. Instead, forms of control by government in tandem with business evolved along with changes in the media. This Special Issue explores recent cases of media capture and discusses how to update theories of media capture in light of transformations caused by digital technology and political transition.

This article examines the distribution of advertising in newspapers in Turkey and the impact of the government on the allocation, in particular, of official announcements and of advertising by partially state-owned enterprises and private companies loyal to the ruling party, as well as pressure on other commercial advertisers, during the rule of the Justice and Development Party between 2002 and 2020. It demonstrates that the government has, in the last decade, largely used the advertising sector as a “carrot and stick” tactic to control newspapers through the distribution of official announcements and advertising by state-owned enterprises. It further finds that the state has emerged in recent years as the largest advertiser financing the “captured media,” control of media ownership has proved to be not enough to ensure docile news media. Turkey has shifted to competitive authoritarianism in recent years, and this article demonstrates the selective allocation of advertising, which is a strong component of suppressing the independent media. The article uncovers the impact of government on advertising, using two data sets to show: (i) the total spend on official announcements received by each newspaper and (ii) how much advertising space in square centimeters state-owned enterprises have placed in each newspaper. Interviews with editors-in-chief of newspapers also expose the direct role of government in the distribution of advertising.

This article traces a genealogy of regulatory and other tactics through which the Pakistani broadcast media is controlled, comparing the colonial context of the development of these tactics with the postcolonial circumstances of their re-deployment. Archival research into the East India Company’s documents from the turn of the nineteenth century uncovers the development of regulatory regimes referred to as Censorship, Self-Regulation, and Licensing, in addition to extra-legal techniques. The article argues that colonial tactics still form key components of Pakistan’s postcolonial broadcast regulations. However, in the past, one regime was replaced by another in a linear progression; today these regulatory techniques appear concomitantly stacked, selectively deployable and enfolded within an expanding array of extralegal techniques. The article seeks to move beyond conceptions of ‘regulatory capture’ or ‘media capture’ by applying the Deleuzian concept of ‘double capture’: in the case of the Pakistani broadcast media, the government regulator (and to some extent the government itself) is captured by ‘media power’ in the same instance that the media assemblage itself becomes subject to ‘state capture’ through extralegal means. Part one focuses on the decades when the colonial state first regulated newsprint (1780–1823), tracing the development from extralegal controls to a succession of legal regulations through which Company administrators could regulate – rather than be regulated by – colonial newsprint. Part two considers the paradoxical situation in Pakistan’s contemporary broadcast regulations (2002–2018), where PEMRA seems powerless to regulate the media, yet the media is subject to a ‘double capture’ through a combination of legal and extralegal modes of control.

Preventing capture, and ensuring that the media can perform their
societal function, requires an understanding of the myriad and
sometimes subtle ways the media can be compromised by the
very actors they are supposed to monitor. To that end, this chapter
proposes four somewhat overlapping forms of capture–(a) ownership,
(b) financial incentives, (c) censorship, and (d) cognitive capture–
arguing that a broader view of what constitutes capture usefully
highlights less obvious but equally insidious threats to journalistic
independence.

Several Latin American countries present a textbook example of a captured media system. In many instances, seemingly free and independent media outlets remain owned or buoyed by the same corporate interests that supported the region's past authoritarian regimes. But the region also offers a study in contrasts where new, high-quality digital media funded by foreign donors exist alongside corporate-owned media outlets. This chapter surveys the Latin American media landscape, discusses its legacy of clientelism and capture, and looks at how digital start-ups and non-profit resources could still change it all.

Hungary and Poland have seen the most widespread erosion of democracy in the European Union since Fidesz and Law and Justice started their authoritarian remaking in 2010 and 2015, respectively. Despite the EU's introduction of various doctrinal innovations, it could not force these regimes to comply with the core values of the EU. While the literature has focused on the formal violation of the rule of law, the links between informal power and the limited constraining role of the EU have remained undertheorized. This article aims to fill the gap by studying the informal exercise power of the Fidesz and PiS governments that helped them to create an uneven political playing field. Connecting the literature on hybrid authoritarian regimes and informality, it will be shown through three main domains how the Hungarian and Polish governments (1) distributed informal political-economic decisionmaking power informally throughout clientelist corruption, (2) captured the media through loyal oligarchs/allies, and (3) employed electoral clientelism to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor. While the study proposes a theoretical framework related to the Hungarian and Polish examples, it is also a warning for the EU to take the informal exercise of power seriously.

Este capítulo propone un diálogo entre el concepto de captura mediática y las dificultades que enfrenta la práctica del periodismo en Chile. A partir del análisis de resultados a preguntas abiertas incluidas en la última Encuesta Estado del Periodismo Nacional, se construye inductivamente un diagnóstico respecto a la práctica de la profesión en la actualidad, revelando claros puntos de tensión y una dificultad general del campo periodístico para operar bajo criterios propios en un sistema de medios que se percibe como restrictivo y limitante. Teniendo en cuenta lo anterior y a partir de la revisión de literatura sobre captura mediática, se propone la necesidad de distinguir entre los medios como campo institucional y el periodismo como campo profesional, reconociendo que un periodismo que opera al interior de medios capturados es uno devaluado y con una capacidad disminuida de aportar al ejercicio del derecho a la comunicación.

This paper builds a simple political agency model to demonstrate that there is a possible collective bias in the reporting of political issues, and suggests that this bias may lead society to a collective failure, in which overall social welfare is harmed. In our model, media outlets aim to build a reputation of high adeptness at policy forecasting, and audiences rely on policy information to make better decisions and update their beliefs regarding the quality of each outlet after the election outcome is revealed. The role of social media is incorporated into our model’s framework; thus, the chance of a non-partisan individual being informed about each political candidate’s proposed agenda depends on the collective mass media coverage of that
candidate as well as the number of partisan individuals in favor of that candidate, since it is assumed that partisan voters post politically relevant information on social networks.