Rodney Benson

Thank you, Kimberly.

Happy to be here.

Media capture is a term that comes from economics.

The original term was regulatory capture, right?

So this is when you have government agencies that are captured by the industries that they're supposed to regulate.

So in other words, instead of providing independent oversight and enforcing regulations, these agencies look the other way or they interpret the regulations only in a way that the industry wants.

So the classic example would be the EPA going easy on industry pollution.

So media capture is an extension of that.

It's by analogy, you can say that the news media also exercise oversight.

That's why...

That's why, of course, they're protected by the First Amendment, because they have that responsibility to serve as a watchdog on government abuse of power.

So if the government captures the media, then you can talk about media capture.

And the media is no longer exercising its oversight role.

It's no longer serving democracy as it should.

Instead, it's been captured by the government.

That takeover can be not only directed, it can also be exercised indirectly through allies of the government, through businesses.

It's clearly, you know, this process is happening in the US.

You know, capture is a very strong term.

If I could just make a couple of caveats, if we use the term capture, that it can be used to imply that state involvement with media is always bad.

But in fact, you know, if you look at some of the strong democracies in Europe, there is a lot of state intervention.