From Crisis to Continuum: Toward a Pluralistic Understanding of Media Capture

The 2025 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy, titled “Ouroboros: The Infinite Loop of Media, Democracy, and Diplomacy,” convened scholars, journalists, and diplomats from around the world to explore the intertwined futures of journalism, diplomacy, and democratic institutions. Across sessions, the narrative of apocalyptic crisis loomed large: declining public trust, intensifying media capture, the spread of misinformation, and the weaponization of digital tools in democratic backsliding. This apocalyptic framing feels especially resonant in the current U.S. political climate. In his farewell address earlier this year, outgoing President Joe Biden warned, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom” (Davies, 2025). 

However, the forces Biden described are hardly unique to the American experience. The global trajectory of media capture over the past decade reveals that this erosion of democratic infrastructure is neither new nor geographically confined. Since 2010, Hungary has become a cautionary emblem of centralized media control, where state-affiliated firms and oligarchic networks have acquired independent outlets and realigned their editorial stance to favor the regime. This model has since served as a blueprint for similar efforts in Serbia, Poland, Slovenia, and North Macedonia, reinforcing fears of a “media capture epidemic” (Dragomir, 2021).

Yet for many audiences in the Global South, what feels apocalyptic elsewhere may register simply as the status quo. As a political communication scholar focused on the West African context, I found myself asking: apocalypse for whom? Much of the seminar linked the global rise of illiberalism to media capture, framing it as a departure from a once-vibrant, independent, and trustworthy media landscape. However, this narrative does not translate neatly across all settings. 

In Nigeria, media capture is entrenched through a multi-layered system. The government controls 90 percent of broadcast media and 76 percent of licensed radio stations, while the print sector is largely dominated by private owners with partisan affiliations. This institutional capture is compounded by what is locally referred to as “brown envelope journalism,” where underpaid journalists rely on political patronage. These dynamics collectively undermine editorial independence and erode public trust in the media (Ojo, 2018). In such a context, one readily observes that media capture is sustained not only by elite interference but also by market pressures and journalistic survival strategies. Ghana offers a slight variation. There, media capture does not stem from centralized state dominance but rather takes the form of a bifurcated partisan ecosystem, in which the country’s two major political parties rely on affiliated media outlets to discredit opposing perspectives and marginalize non-partisan voices (Tettey & Anoff-Ntow, 2025).

These cases from both the Global North and Global South reveal that media capture is not a uniform phenomenon. Its triggers, mechanisms, and consequences vary across institutional, historical, and economic contexts. In many fragile democratic settings across West Africa, media capture is not an aberration, but a constitutive feature of the media system. This reflection draws on two key insights from the seminar to challenge apocalyptic framings of media capture. First, it underscores the need to situate media capture within specific political and institutional contexts. Second, it highlights the dual role of journalists as both potential agents of resistance and participants in systems of capture. Together, these insights support a more pluralistic framework, one that centers Global South realities and encourages more context-sensitive approaches to theorizing and addressing media capture.

I. Three Registers of Capture: Transition, Disruption, and State-Building

To fully grasp these distinctions, we must first revisit how media capture has been historically conceptualized across different regions. One of the earliest formal definitions comes from Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, who defines media capture as a condition in which the media lacks autonomy and is unable to fulfill its core role of informing the public. Drawing on post-communist contexts, she writes:
State capture in a postcommunist context designates the situation in which the post-communist state has not succeeded in becoming an autonomous actor towards interest groups or vested interests. Media capture in post-communist Europe is, therefore, not necessarily captured by the state. As the groups which capture the media either have already captured the state or seek to do so, capture of the media (either public or private) should be seen as a companion of state capture, a complementary phenomenon. (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2008, p.91).

While Mungiu-Pippidi anchors her argument in the post-communist experience, her framing suggests a broader conceptual relationship: media capture and state capture often go hand in hand, particularly in contexts where political and economic elites operate fluidly across both domains. Importantly, she emphasizes that media capture does not always involve direct state ownership. It may manifest through indirect control by actors who already hold (or aspire to hold) state power. Updating this concept for the contemporary digital era, Anya Schiffrin expands the concept to consider how digital media and platforms have reshaped the dynamics of media capture. As traditional media business models collapse, Schiffrin argues that the motivations for owning media have shifted from profit-seeking to influence-building. In the age of digital platforms, the cost of influencing public discourse has decreased dramatically, broadening access to capture for a wider range of politically motivated actors. In this environment, she notes, media capture has become both more pervasive and more difficult to detect and regulate (Schiffrin, 2021).

These two perspectives represent some of the most widely cited frameworks for understanding media capture. Mungiu-Pippidi highlights capture as a byproduct of institutional corruption and elite entanglement, while Schiffrin underscores how digital disruption, and the collapse of legacy media models has opened new avenues for influence. One is rooted in a context of political transition, the other in market transformation. Taken together, they provide a conceptual baseline for how media capture is commonly theorized across different contexts. 

Conversely, in many African postcolonial states, the state itself serves as the primary engine of media capture. In addition to frameworks rooted in post-communist transition and digital disruption, a third lens is needed to explain how media capture takes shape in these postcolonial settings. Scholars of African media systems have long observed that colonial legacies continue to influence both the institutional foundations and the normative expectations of the press. Across much of the continent, the state historically positioned the media as a tool for political control, and this legacy continues to inform environments where government influence remains deeply embedded (Wasserman, 2021). 

In South Africa, for instance, the media has historically functioned as both a tool of governance and a means of maintaining political dominance. This continuity spans the postcolonial period, the apartheid regime, and the democratic era that followed, revealing how media capture in such contexts is not episodic but structurally embedded within broader state-building processes (Jones & Hadland, 2024). Recognizing this helps shift the conversation from how to restore trust to how to earn it within structurally constrained environments. In Guinea-Bissau, Mack (2024) draws on Mabweazara et al. (2020) insight that, despite national variation, media capture in Africa is deeply shaped by systems of political patronage. He identifies three primary engines of capture across the continent: regulatory interference, ownership concentration, and fiscal control. 

These patterns challenge the relevance of Global North typologies and call for greater attention to how weak institutional autonomy, overlapping political and economic interests, and the historical convergence of media and state power continue to limit press independence. In such contexts, media capture is not merely a byproduct of democratic erosion or digital influence. It is often a core feature of how the state operates and sustains legitimacy.

II. Negotiating Survival: Journalists in Captured Systems

During Session 2: Trust and the International System, participants considered a powerful intervention against viewing journalists solely as victims of media capture. Ricardo Ferreira’s taxonomy of “soft steering,” “hard steering,” and “anticipatory steering” illustrated how newsroom pressures are not merely imposed from the outside. They are often internalized, reproduced, and strategically navigated by journalists themselves. Ferreira presented a snapshot of his work, "The Precocity Trap: Modeling Non-Democratic Journalistic Practices Beyond Media Capture," which draws on the Brazilian context to explore these dynamics. His work invites us to reimagine capture not as a one-way, top-down imposition, but as a dynamic relationship shaped by incentives, survival strategies, and institutional histories. 

This reframing resonates deeply with many African contexts, where journalists do not simply fall into political or commercial entanglements. Many emerge from them. The structural precarity of the media landscape, marked by underfunded outlets, politicized ownership, and limited protections, means that journalistic autonomy has always been partial, negotiated, and conditional. The strategies that journalists adopt to survive within these constrained environments also help explain persistent levels of public skepticism toward the media. In systems where state ownership dominates, partisan-aligned outlets polarize, and economic insecurity disincentivizes watchdog reporting, public distrust is not mere cynicism. It reflects historical memory and structural recognition. 

Conclusion: Making Room Beyond Crisis

Across sessions, the Milton Wolf Seminar made clear that we are living through a profound reordering of the information landscape. Ample discussions revealed that if we wish to theorize this apocalyptic moment productively, we must begin by acknowledging that the Global South has long been living in this future. The media ecologies of Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau, or Brazil are not apocalyptic anomalies. They may very well be instructive prototypes.

By broadening our frameworks of media capture to include these contextual variations, we gain not only conceptual clarity concerning the phenomenon of media capture, but also richer empirical insights. We learn how journalistic agency persists under constraint, and how publics remain engaged even when official media channels fail them. The invitation, then, is not to mourn the loss of an idealized past, but to reimagine what is possible when we start from where most of the world already is.