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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.”
Now experts warn that media capture has come to the United States. “We watch unbelievingly,” Mungiu-Pippidi said. “In the old days we thought capture was mostly a problem in Africa and Latin America and then in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” noted Anya Schiffrin, another scholar of media capture and the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University. “What’s happened in the last six months in the US is worse than anything we imagined.”
Schiffrin points to a range of examples—the fifteen-million-dollar payout by Disney, which chose to settle (and pay an extra million in legal fees) rather than litigate a libel claim brought by Donald Trump against ABC News; the decision by Jeff Bezos, in his capacity as the owner of the Washington Post, to spike an endorsement of Kamala Harris and subsequently pare back and revamp the entire Post opinion section; the similar decision made by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, whose main business interest is in biotech, an industry heavily dependent on government approval and regulation.
The most recent and for many most troubling example, however, involves CBS, whose parent company, Paramount, agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Harris was misleadingly edited. Legal scholars called the claim frivolous, noting that 60 Minutes was operating well within its First Amendment rights by editing the interview as it saw fit. The decision to settle was seen largely as an effort to pave the way for a merger between Paramount and Skydance, a deal backed by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and friend of Trump’s, and ultimately requiring the blessing of the FCC, controlled by Trump loyalists.
Press freedom organizations sounded the alarm. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which had invited Shari Redstone, the head of Paramount, to chair its annual Press Freedom Award Dinner, wrote to her urging that she reconsider. When she did not, the Freedom of the Press Foundation threatened to file suit, alleging that the settlement undermined shareholder value. Stephen Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe.” Three days later his show was canceled.
But while the deal was undoubtedly messy and terrible from a press freedom perspective, the question of whether and how it affected coverage of the news is more difficult to assess. Several CBS insiders with whom I spoke said that while they were dismayed by the settlement, which they viewed as deeply damaging to the network’s reputation, they saw it as a mostly misguided business decision. In April, the tearful resignation of Bill Owens, the longtime 60 Minutes executive producer, at a meeting where he alleged corporate interference, was viewed with tremendous alarm. But it likely had more to do with Redstone’s personal displeasure with a January segment on the Gaza war than any effort to appease Trump, according to media accounts and my own reporting.
Ultimately, the question of media capture at CBS is about the future of the network under its new owners now that the merger has been approved. David Ellison, the son of Larry, will run the new venture along with former NBCUniversal head Jeff Shell. Ellison has promised a major restructuring and is reportedly in negotiations with the pundit provocateur Bari Weiss to acquire Free Press, her startup, which has become a hub for center-right media malcontents. “There’s always been capture. There will always be capture,” Schiffrin told me. What’s unprecedented in the US, Schiffrin believes, is the willingness of media companies to so transparently put their business interests ahead of their public interest obligations. When one corporation does it, another might pull back on critical coverage to avoid regulatory pressure—a kind of anticipatory obedience or capture in advance.
Andrea Prat, a political economist at Columbia, was one of the first to apply the concept of state capture to the media sphere. He has found through decades of research that the key bulwark against it is media diversity. This is an area of tremendous strength in the US that, along with strong legal and constitutional protections, has historically limited the impact of capture in this country. “Media organizations had a commercial incentive to maintain their independence, and the government had limited leverage to exert influence over them,” Prat said.
But now Prat says he is concerned that the balance is shifting. “The weakening of checks and balances presents a growing opportunity for governments to shape or manipulate news coverage,” he told me. “I believe these new conditions make media capture more likely today than in the past.”
Mungiu-Pippidi, meanwhile, thinks the line may have already been crossed. She views the post-Watergate era, in which the US media exercised extraordinary independence and resistance to government pressure, as a historical anomaly. Around the world, Mungiu-Pippidi told me, “media capture, the unavoidable shaping of media contents by private interests, has increasingly become the rule.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the status of the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s possible suit against Paramount.
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