Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. Today, we're going to take a look at the media business and particularly how it's changing under President Trump's second administration.
The ongoing fight between Netflix and Paramount over the future of Warner Brothers is highlighting some of the issues that come up when politics or political players and media start to clash. Because the president and his allies have stakes in the game when it comes to a potential deal in this story. One term that's been popping up around this conversation is media capture.
So today we're going to get smart about that and talk about how it can help us understand what's going on in the U.S. media industry right now. And so here to make us smart about this is Rodney Benson, who's a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and author of the book, How Media Ownership Matters. Welcome to the show, Rod.
Thank you, Kimberly.
Chapter 2: What is media capture and how does it relate to U.S. media?
Happy to be here.
Let's start with some basic definitions. How would you define media capture? Where does that term come from?
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.
And that ties into what we're talking about now, because what's happening in the media industry right now, that sort of exemplifies what you're talking about here.
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.
So it depends on how it's structured. And secondly, capture can be presented as kind of a binary, like either you're captured or you're not, right? But instead, it's a process, and we're seeing that in the U.S. And finally, capture doesn't really make clear that there's different kinds of capture, right?
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Chapter 3: What is the definition and origin of the term 'media capture'?
You know, they're buying it. You know, it's clearly a kind of business move. And they're buying the entertainment properties from Warner Brothers that would really make sense for them to have. Whereas the Ellisons are buying not only the entertainment properties, but also CNN. Who are the Ellisons? The Ellisons are the, they're the largest shareholders of Paramount Skydance.
Larry Ellison is one of the richest people in the world. He owns Oracle, a kind of software storage tech, large tech company. And David is his son, right? And so they have become close to President Trump, particularly Larry Ellison. And they're trying to expand their media imprint. They, you know, they're the ones behind this and they're the ones with the relationship with President Trump.
And President Trump has basically said that he is actually, if anything, more favorable to their offer. And it seems clear that the reason he's favoring them is because they want to include CNN in the package. And they've also reportedly said that they're willing to make changes at CNN to make it more sympathetic to the Trump administration.
You know, you've got these big players, right? And I wonder if you can just lay out for me how media consolidation ties into this idea of media capture.
Well, it's really interesting. If you look at who is capitulating to the Trump administration, who is being captured in a sense, it's not random. The outlets that are vulnerable to this tend to be stock market traded companies, and they have a pressure to maximize profits in order to keep increasing their stock pressures or stock prices, and that encourages them
to seek economies of scale through these mergers and acquisitions and more and more consolidation. So they're stock market traded companies. They're also conglomerates. And so in other words, they're involved in multiple industries outside of the news business. And so that makes them uniquely vulnerable to the Trump administration pressure.
They have business with the government or they're regulated by the government. And so if you look at ABC owned by Disney, CBS, Washington Post, and the LA Times, where they've modified their editorial page line and the kind of politics of that. These are all owners that have business contracts with the government or that are regulated by the government.
And in the case of these legacy TV networks, they're also regulated by the FCC. So their ownership structure makes them vulnerable.
All right. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we're going to talk about what media capture does and doesn't look like in the rest of the world. We'll be right back. All right. We are back with Professor Rodney Benson. And I want to talk about sort of examples of more clear cut media capture. People often point to Hungary as a classic example of this.
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