Media Capture in the Digital Age
NEW YORK – The last couple of years have not been good for freedom of expression. The governments of Poland, Hungary, and Turkey have become increasingly authoritarian and – like leaders in the Balkans, China, and Russia – increasingly eager to control public discourse. In the United States, too, President Donald Trump relentlessly attempts to discredit the news media, and his administration is unprecedentedly inaccessible to the press.
Economists used the term “capture” after the financial crisis of 2008 to describe how regulators, who often came from (and returned to) the industry they were supposed to oversee, failed to police the sector properly. Media capture works in much the same way, with political leaders either owning media outlets outright (think of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi) or ensuring that media leaders are loyal to them, whether through cronyism or punishment.
One of the first orders of business for Poland’s far-right government, led unofficially by Jarosław Kaczyński, was to adopt a new media law allowing it to hire and fire the heads of public broadcasting networks. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has jailed critical journalists – such as the well-known columnist Ahmet Altan and his brother Mehmet, a professor – and closed down or seized control of media companies, using fear to shape reporting.
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