Media capture
Gaining control over the outlets that inform the public, by ownership, advertising, license, or favor, so that what they publish serves the controlling interest without anyone having to be told what to write.
A journalist who knows who pays does not need instructions. Media capture works through incentive: the owner's interests, the largest advertiser's sensitivities, the license that the ministry can revoke, the access that can be withdrawn. Nothing is banned and no memo is sent; the outlet learns what not to run and stops running it. The public sees a free press and reads a managed one.
The economist George Stigler described regulatory capture in 1971, the process by which an industry comes to control the agency meant to oversee it; media capture is the same process applied to the press. Ben Bagdikian counted the shrinking number of owners in The Media Monopoly; a 2017 volume from Columbia's journalism school cataloged the forms the capture now takes. Exploits Availability Heuristic and the invisibility of what is not published.
Historical examples
William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers gave one owner a direct channel to millions of readers and, with it, the power to run campaigns, against Spain in 1898, against Mexico in the 1920s, for and against candidates, as news. Hearst's editorials were telegraphed to every paper in the chain; his rivals' reporting on him was not.
Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Campbell, W. Joseph. Yellow Journalism. Westport: Praeger, 2001.
Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly counted fifty corporations controlling most of American media in 1983 and, in successive editions, watched the number fall to five. His argument was not that owners dictate stories but that concentration makes the owners' interests the environment in which every story is chosen, and that readers cannot see the choices.
Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983; Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
In advertising and commerce
Studies of magazine and newspaper content have found that outlets dependent on a category of advertising, tobacco, automobiles, real estate, run fewer critical stories about that category, and that editors report advertiser pressure as routine. Baker's Advertising and a Democratic Press documented the mechanism; the Schiffrin volume updated it for the platform era.
Baker, C. Edwin. Advertising and a Democratic Press. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Schiffrin, Anya, ed. In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy. Washington: Center for International Media Assistance, 2017.
Find out who owns three news sources you use. Search each for stories about its owner's other businesses. What do you find, and what don't you?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
The city's only daily is owned by the developer whose stadium is under review; the paper has run eleven stories on the stadium, all favorable.
What to notice. Ownership shapes coverage without any instruction; the pattern is the evidence.
The magazine's investigation into car safety was dropped the month after its largest advertiser, a car maker, renewed its contract.
What to notice. Advertiser dependence decides what is not published.
Every broadcaster in the country holds a license renewable annually by the ministry, and none has criticized the minister in a decade.
What to notice. Capture by license: no censor needed when the outlet can be shut by not renewing.
Sources
- Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0807061879
- Baker, C. Edwin. Advertising and a Democratic Press. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN 978-0691021638
- Schiffrin, Anya, ed. In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy. Washington: Center for International Media Assistance, 2017.
- Stigler, George J. "The Theory of Economic Regulation." Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3–21. doi:10.2307/3003160