Abstract
The US presidential election that influenced media around the world (Rizvi et al., 2022) has reflected how powerful corporations monopolized the news in the digital realm. This phenomenon prompted Anya Schiffrin (2017) to encourage public discussion and action in a book on “media capture.” She connects the roles of money, digital platforms, and governments in the issues of controlling digital journalism in the digital age. She also collects 16 authors to peruse the topics from various perspectives and classifies them into three parts of the book: overview, examples of problems, and solutions.
Along the side of the ability to control public opinion and even determine various government policies, the position of digital media can no longer be underestimated (Zhuravskaya et al., 2020). With the increasing power of digital media in popular culture, politics, and economics, a new trend in political regimes and economics has arisen in many countries to overturn digital media ownership (Gil de Zúñiga and Chen, 2019). Schiffrin emphasizes government and vested interest in explaining the trend called “media capture” (p. 5).
Schriffrin begins the book by describing the background idea of media capture which was born before the Internet. It became a threat afterward the downfall of the old-fashioned business model for media. The traditional business model has developed media for making a financial profit, while the new model captures media done for holding political and ideological power (pp. 6–10). In the new model, digital media gave power to advertisers. The advertisers’ supremacy has created the media’s ability to execute some societal roles (p. 9).
Nikki Usher explains the transformation from media capture to platform capture by focusing on the power of the elite and bad actors (p. 43). The platform industry is influenced by various factors, both old and new, such as profit strategies that prioritize expansion as the primary measure of a firm’s worth. To meet investor expectations and achieve growth, platform corporations may take hasty actions that can lead to significant repercussions.
Andrea Gabor describes some examples of the former actor appearing in corporate education-reform philanthropies (pp. 118–136), while Mary Fitzgerald, James Cusick, and Peter Geoghegan show them in the story of Britain’s “feral beast” (pp. 188–207) and call our attention to digital disruption as one of the influential variables in the media landscape (p. 201). They also offer philanthropy (p. 206) as a solution for when stakeholder media and the alternative funding models do not work as a practical solution to overcome “the crisis of paying for journalism” (p. 203).
Noam Cohen warns that Big Tech’s version of yellow journalism might denote a greater imperilment to democracy than yellow journalism of the past (p. 70). Twitter and Facebook seized the bulk of the attention once devoted to the blogosphere (p. 99). This moment also coincides with the rise of the podcast (p. 100), which can be a more intimate medium. Blogging is gradually vanishing, and the true blogs are gone (pp. 102–103).
In analyzing print journalism, Andrew Finkel observes that it made a diverse set of loyalties became more palpable if it helped forge the nation-state (p. 151). This theme can be linked to the case of India, where Raju Narisetti exposes the intimidation of journalists when the government supported by the mainstream media accused them as traitors (pp. 177–181). In Britain, the UK government announced a report on how to fortify high-standard journalism (p. 206). Natalie Fenton (in House of Lords, 2020) has warned that a healthy news media can be claimed as the life-blood of democracy for the reason that it delivers, or should provide “the vital resources for the process of information gathering, deliberation and analysis that enable citizens to participate in political life and democracy to function better” (p. 6). The journalists in Britain tend to avoid “the money trap” offered by big companies. Therefore, Fitzgerald, Kusick, and Geoghegan insist that there are some reasons not to fear for the worst in Britain’s journalism (p. 204).
Finkel underlines the Turkish government’s control of media, where more than 150 journalists and students were detained for insulting the president. From December 2017 to December 2018, the cyber patrol investigated 42,406 social media accounts where 18,376 individuals were accused of hate speech and currency manipulation (p. 154). Narisetti reports that the control media in India has been running for a long time. The prime minister used the pretext of a national emergency to limit the Indian media’s freedom. The government restricted the press by imprisoning journalists, limiting news outlets, and allowing pro-government conglomerates to take over the news media (pp. 161–165).
This book is an excellent volume on the hegemony of economic power over media owners and users. The editor offered solutions in part three of the book where she invited some authors to discuss a global strategy for combating media capture (pp. 213–231), find new models for journalism (pp. 232–258), build trust (pp. 259–276), defend vanguard journalist (pp. 277–290), and the role of technology companies (pp. 291–296). However, with all these solutions, will journalists breathe a sigh of relief and get rid of the media capture?
