Capture of media threatens press freedom

Anya Schiffrin | Photo Credits

Anya Schiffrin is the Director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. She is the leading force behind creating "Media Capture: How Money, Digital Platforms, and Governments Control the News" - a subject in which she has been working for years. As it brings together experts from journalism, free expression, media, and academia, the book provides a unique perspective on how media are being held hostage by special interests and how technology has accelerated this problem. Schiffrin spoke with “Foreign Press” about some of the broader issues discussed in the book.

What do you hope to share as a unique knowledge about media capture with the readers of this book?

"Media Capture" is an economics term that has, unfortunately, become used around the world. Originally the idea was to understand societies that were seemingly Democratic still had media that was not fully free. Economists Tim Besley and Andrea Prat looked at Mexico, Italy, India, and Russia to explain the contradiction. The economists found something that journalists had long understood: capture occurs when private sector business cronies buy and control news outlets in order to further a political and often business agenda. The result is a sort of soft censorship and coverage that supports government aims.

Rupert Murdoch and Fox News or Sheldon Adelson would be US examples, but there are hundreds of similar arrangements worldwide. Political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi  defined capture as a situation when the news media are controlled "either directly by governments or by vested interests networked with governments."

You edited the book Media Capture about media monopolies, digital platforms, and governmental control over news. What prompted the creation of this book?  

It’s a subject that I have been working on for several years. In 2016, we hosted a conference on the topic at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where I teach. We brought together journalists, people from free expression, and media development groups with historians and economists. Since then, I’ve edited three volumes on the subject, and this is the third.

What role have the technology and social media played in the media capture? 

Since 2016 I’ve been arguing that the rise of the tech companies and the decline of revenue for media outlets meant that capture would be more likely. If you are a newspaper owner, for example, and you aren’t going to make as much money as you used to, then the main incentive for owning an outlet is if you have a political agenda. Hence capture is more likely now than before the rise of big tech.  Rasmus Kleis Nielsen wrote a chapter on this idea in the second volume I edited, In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy, published by the Center for International Media Assistance. 

The book includes a special chapter dedicated to the transition from media capture to platform capture. How would you like to explain this to our readers? 

Many of the book’s chapters are written by journalists, and part of what we try to show in the book is the lived experience of capture—the soft pressure that is now being exerted. In terms of platform capture, there are many ways this comes about: journalists now depend on tools provided by Google and Facebook; they use Twitter as part of their daily routine. These companies fund journalism conferences, research, think tanks, and outlets (even as they avoid taxes). So we saw during the pandemic that Google and Facebook created new funds to support journalism. You can say that it’s nice of them to help out in an emergency, but we know from experience that this can lead to control over what is being written and said about these companies. It’s insidious.

How feasible would it be to implement a global strategy to combat media capture?

I don’t know that a global strategy would be feasible or desirable, but there are certainly plenty of things that can be done to support independent journalism. In our book, we have chapters on solutions written by Mark Nelson from CIMA, Dean Starkman, and Ryan Chittum, who look at a case of public funding in Hungary, and Andrew Sullivan from the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, who proposes creating a trust to support independent journalism. Andrea Prat, my colleague from Columbia, has written extensively on the need to update competition law, and McGill University’s Taylor Owen and my colleague Emily Bell are both members of “team regulation” who believe in supporting publicly-owned media. 

Reading the book, one might get the impression that technology companies are responsible for journalism decline. On the other hand, tech companies are responding by providing journalist assistance in training and funding. What are your thoughts about their response?

As mentioned above, these are powerful companies, and they are centrally involved in disseminating journalism. As a result, they are key to our democracy, and they need to face that responsibility. My father and grandfather both lost their jobs in publishing after larger companies acquired their small family-run publishing houses. Studs Terkel used to say, ‘If S.I. Newhouse wants a 15% return, then why doesn’t he go ahead and buy a soap factory instead?”  

In its pursuit of profit above else, big tech has shown it is not responsible and can not be trusted to self-regulate, so now the government needs to get it together to regulate.