Understanding Media Environment Capture

The next speakers in this IAMCR 2023 session are Mandy Tröger and Hendrik Theine, who continue to address those concerns about media environment capture. They begin by noting that most of the debates here are limited to national or regional contexts, and influenced by the specific and idiosyncratic settings found there, without taking a more general, overall perspective informed by theory. Such a perspective can build on the concept of media capture by developing it into the idea of media environment capture, in particular.

Media capture itself has been used by political economists to describe capture by either governments exercising undue influence over the media; or by private interests controlling media organisations directly or through dependence on advertising. But there is now a need for a broader and more inclusive concept of capture: traditional business models have declined; digital conglomerates have grown and become increasingly close to news media; news media themselves depend increasingly on the tools and applications provided by Big Tech. Media environment capture thus highlights the reliance of news media and journalism on information, data, knowledge, and infrastructures.

In media environment capture, individual player such as Big Tech companies make indispensable contributions to the information and media environments without which journalism can no longer function. This happens within news media companies (at all stages of the news production process) as well as from the outside (the media environments where news circulates). Aspects of this are the intellectual monopolisation in the media industries (as certain infrastructures, technologies, information, and knowledge become indispensable to the operation of news media); critical state theory (through media policy and regulation initiatives that predominantly serve the interests of Big Tech, as a result of lobbying and other forms of influence); and expropriation of the life-world foundations of journalism (as the social resources, i.e. the background conditions for developing individual and social conditions, the economy, and politics, are captured and colonised by Big Tech, and as this is inherent in the reproduction of capitalism as a social order).

In combination, this has a direct, indirect, and mediated influence on the news media: directly, via the acquisition or financing of journalism organisations; indirectly by altering the framework conditions for journalism (law, policy, audience interests, and information flows); and at the intermediate level by changing the processes by which news media create journalism (e.g. the technologies used by journalists).