What is media capture?
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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.
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? So you might be captured in one way, politically, let's say, in the political line or in terms of the economic interest you're promoting, but you're still doing some good reporting on other topics.
So So with those caveats, I think, you know, yes, we're absolutely seeing this kind of process happening in the U.S. right now.
Let's look at some concrete examples. The first time I really heard this kicking up on my social medias was with CBS. Can you walk through why some people talked about the changes at CBS in terms of media capture?
Well, you had CBS in the process through being sold to Paramount Skydance. It was a standard merger, but then you had a lot of things going on in the background that said, is this going to get approved or not? by the regulators. So you've got a situation with the Trump administration where the regulatory process has been highly politicized. A lot of this was reported in the background that various kinds of promises were being made that they're going to turn CBS around, make it more sympathetic to the Trump administration.
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