By Bissera Zankova & Ivo Indzhov
Last year, 451 million people in 10 countries experienced a restriction of their freedom of expression; only 335 million people in 5 countries experienced an improvement. The Global Expression Report 2024 shows a worsening of the situation in 78 countries worldwide. This means that more and more people live in places where freedom of expression and communication are in crisis. A new publication on media capture highlights the dynamics behind this.
One of the serious threats to freedom of expression as a fundamental human right and value in a democracy is the loss of independence of the media and its function as the ‘fourth estate’. The concept of ‘media capture’ describes such dynamics, which paralyse the media in the exercise of their roles. As early as 2007, Alina Mungiu-Pipidi (2007) defined media capture as a situation in which the news media are controlled ‘directly by governments or by self-serving interests that are intertwined with politics’.
In 2018, Sage Journals published a special edition on this topic entitled ‘Seizing the Media: Government and Corporate Capture in the 21st Century’. The political change and digital technologies that were hoped would free the media from restrictions and other evils have not fulfilled their role. Instead, various forms of control by governments and authorities in collaboration with economic actors have increased enormously and have become powerful instruments of oppression and disinformation in both old and new democracies.
The phenomenon has spread, and twelve years after this warning, a new special edition of the Central European Journal of Communication is now being published, discussing cases of media capture on four continents. The current situation is commented on by international experts who have studied various counterproductive media practices. Readers will once again encounter Prof. Alina Mungui-Pippidi, who, in her interview with Dr. Bissera Zankova, links ‘captured media to the era of disinformation’.
Complex expressions of media scrutiny
‘In a variety of disciplines – from economics and political science to media and journalism research – media capture has emerged as a significant concept that typifies some of the most pressing issues related to media control and power,’ conclude the , Mireya Márquez-Ramírez, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico, and Nelson Costa Ribeiro, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal, in their editorial ‘Media Capture in Transitional Contexts: Theoretical and Empirical Developments’. According to Ribeiro and Márquez-Ramírez, the publication uses theoretical analyses and case studies to show ‘the strength of the concept as an analytical tool, but also argues for its limitations and its interrelations with other theoretical constructs to be reconsidered and re-evaluated’.
In his opening article ‘The Capture Effect. How media capture influences journalists, markets and target groups’, Marius Dragomir adds to the discussion on the development of the concept and offers four key components: regulatory capture, control of state and public media, and state or private financing as a control instrument. According to Dragomir, these indicators can be used to assess the extent to which media can deliver the services expected of them.
Ivo Indzhov’s essay ‘Bulgarian Media since 1989: From Instrumentalisation to Capture’ deals with media capture in a South-Eastern European country where European funding is the main source of corruption and oligarchic symbiosis, as the state no longer fulfils its neutral role but exercises a management and distribution function. The author concludes that the political-oligarchic dependencies have become a central feature of the national media market, posing a serious threat to the quality of democracy.
In this paper, the current state of the Bulgarian media is examined on the basis of two research concepts: the more traditional threat, instrumentalisation, and the newer, more dangerous one, co-optation of the media. The latter is better suited for research in countries with serious deficits in their democratic development, especially when it comes to the specifics and consequences of political-oligarchic pressure on the media.
Johanna Mack of the Technical University of Dortmund (Germany) presents findings on the transformation of the national media system in Guinea-Bissau, which is unstable and susceptible to change (whether positive or negative). Among other things, the government is taking advantage of the situation to tightly control the media. The role of international cooperation in media development is proving to be important in this regard. However, support can also be double-edged. The case of Guinea-Bissau, which is an example of media capture by regulators, is similar to other sub-Saharan countries where the media is captured by legislation and the few independent media outlets depend on subsidies from non-governmental and religious groups.
In ‘Co-opted by Elites – the Portuguese System during Liberalisation (1820-1926)’, Isadora Ataíde Fonseca highlights another aspect of media capture. Based on the discussion of various cases in Macau, Angola and a newspaper published in Lisbon that was aimed at the inhabitants of the Portuguese colonial empire, the article shows how newspapers that were published by or targeted the economic, political and military elites were captured by them and thus offered a distorted view of social conditions in the colonies.
Péter Bajomi-Lázár’s article ‘Media Capture Theory: A Paradigm Shift?’ argues for a reconsideration of the concept of media capture and for taking its limitations into account. It is published in the ‘Methods and Concepts’ section, through which the Central European Journal of Communication aims to contribute to the discussion of new methodological and theoretical approaches that could open up new avenues for research and research projects. Bajomi-Lázár questions the concept of media capture and its relevance in a context where social media allows political elites to bypass traditional media systems and communicate directly with the audience.
In addition to the research articles, the special issue also features a section with two research notes examining the media systems in Mongolia and Greece in the aftermath of the 2010 crisis. Both bring the reader closer to new features of these media systems through the lens of media capture. In the first article, Undrah Baasanjav, Poul Erik Nielsen and Munkhmandakh Myagmar analyse the Mongolian media system from the perspective of the country’s transition to liberal democracy to the present day. The authors note that few independent media outlets have been able to establish themselves, while most Mongolian media are owned by politicians and business people. However, the political culture, which is prone to clientelism, corruption and the intellectual legacy of communism, provides the main conditions for the emergence of a media sector with significant market failures, dominated by media that are subordinate to political and business interests (‘Patronage Media in Post-Communist Mongolia’).
The second research report by Michael Nevradakis places a particular focus on the role of social media in the ‘strengthening’ of the Greek public sphere in the wake of the economic crisis of the 2010s. Nevradakis examines two case studies in detail, the social media presence of Independent Greek and the news blog Nikos.gr, and concludes that despite the initial idea that these portals could enrich the public sphere by expanding the diversity of voices in it, both initiatives fell victim to the same political and economic elites that had already conquered the traditional media.
Combining theoretical insights and practical models and presenting the work of well-known and young authors, the CEJC special issue is a further step towards a broader and more structured debate on the co-optation of the media and its dangerous consequences for the media ecosystem.
This article, Media Capture: What dynamics control the media worldwide? was originally published by the European Journalism Observatory on October, 28 2024