Is the US Media Captured?

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who was born in Romania and today is a leading scholar of democracy, first observed “media capture” two decades ago in Eastern Europe. The press there was not facing active repression. But it was far from free. Governments, she realized, were exercising control through indirect means—collusion and corruption. Captured media, Mungiu-Pippidi wrote in a 2013 paper, “trade influence and manipulate rather than inform the public.”

Other scholars of media capture have since examined the phenomenon in different parts of the world—Mexico, Kenya, Hungary—highlighting government strategies ranging from manipulation of advertising to economic and regulatory pressure to the exploitation of informal relationships with media owners. In Turkey, many media outlets are part of large industrial conglomerates with diverse interests. Owners of these conglomerates see their media holdings as a kind of tax, journalists told me when I visited. Turkish business tycoons operate news organizations at a loss, knowing that publishing positive stories about Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan is the price to secure lucrative government contracts for their other businesses.

The concept of media capture has taken hold among scholars, press freedom advocates, and pro-democracy organizations because it explains why media may not truly be free even in places around the world where journalists are not being hauled off to jail or gunned down in the streets. The US government-funded Center for Independent Media Assistance, part of the National Endowment for Democracy, produced a video in 2019 describing how government cronies buy up struggling media outlets and bring them to heel. “Captured media outlets can go from vigilant watchdogs to toothless public relations machines,” the narration goes. “It’s no accident the erosion of the media freedoms is going hand in hand with the erosion of democracy.”