No publication on media and corruption fails to cite Brunetti and Weder’s well-known claim that “free press is bad news for corruption” (Brunetti & Weder, 2003). Corruption can be tackled and prevented if the press fulfils its normative role as “custodians of conscience” (Ettema & Glasser, 1998). For this to occur, however, journalism must be sufficiently autonomous from political and economic pressures that constrain or redirect its action.
For this reason, the concept of “media capture” has become central in research addressing corruption, including large-scale initiatives such as the BRIDGEGAP project, and has thus been adopted, albeit being a dubious and slippery concept. Within the liberal tradition, journalism is expected to function as a watchdog of power. Yet scholars have long warned about the risk of capture by political actors and “vested interests” (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2008), a process that undermines the media’s core democratic function of informing citizens in a balanced and independent manner. The European Media Freedom Act (EMFA, 2024) echoes these concerns, highlighting the vulnerability of public service media. At the same time, commercial interests (e.g., media owners, advertisers, and increasingly digital platforms) may compromise editorial autonomy. Today, networks capable of exerting influence over the media often combine political, economic, and technological power; in some cases (e.g., Musk or Bezos), these dimensions converge in single actors. Since news organizations are also businesses that must generate profit to survive, tensions between commercial viability and democratic responsibility are structural rather than exceptional.
The social-democratic or habermasian tradition further reminds us that media systems operate as arenas in which competing actors seek to shape the public agenda. Media structures are embedded within broader political and economic configurations and are increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures and platform power. They do not function in isolation, but are continuously shaped by, and conversely shape, the institutional and societal environments in which they operate. Moreover, the contemporary informational environment extends beyond journalism. Citizens no longer consume news as a clearly bounded product; instead, they navigate heterogeneous flows of “information” within hybrid media diets. However, the same environment is marked by the spread of disinformation, misinformation, and broader forms of information disorder, which further threaten citizens’ ability to “make informed choices, including about the state of their democracies” (EMFA 2024, 2). Ensuring the integrity of information flows and preventing capture by diverse actors has therefore become increasingly urgent.
The evolution of the media capture concept
The concept of media capture emerged in the late 1980s, when scholars observed that formally liberalized media systems often remained deeply influenced by political elites, governments, or foreign actors (Besley & Prat 2006; Mungiu-Pippidi 2008; Dragomir 2019). Economists initially adapted the concept from the theory of regulatory capture (Stigler 1971; Besley & Prat 2006). In parallel, debates on “state capture” or politicization of the state (Grzymala-Busse 2003) revealed similar dynamics in post-authoritarian contexts. Mungiu-Pippidi (2008; 2012) showed how governments and vested networks could shape media systems to influence both public discourse and policy outcomes. Bajomi-Lázár (2014) described “party colonisation of the media”, while Mancini (2012) referred to “instrumentalization” to capture systematic subordination of journalism to political or economic goals.
Over time, scholars demonstrated that capture is not confined to transitional regimes but represents a structural risk across media systems embedded in capitalist economies and political power structures (Corneo 2006; Petrova 2008; Pi 2010; Márquez-Ramírez & Guerrero 2017; Powell 2017). Research highlighted indirect instruments of influence, such as ownership concentration, selective state advertising, and allocation of public funds, used to secure favorable coverage or silence dissent (Corneo 2006; Pi 2010; Dragomir 2019). Media capture thus came to denote a continuum of dependencies, from overt political domination to more subtle market-mediated forms of control. Implicitly, this literature assumed that media autonomy was achievable in principle, and that capture represented a deviation from a normative ideal.
More recently, the concept, originally developed for post-authoritarian systems and legacy media before the widespread diffusion of the Internet, has been reformulated to address platformized environments (Schiffrin 2021; Usher 2021; Nechustai 2018; Sevignani et al. 2025). Dragomir and Horowitz (2024) argue that in such contexts capture and disinformation are mutually reinforcing: captured structures facilitate the circulation of misleading or politically instrumental content.
Despite its analytical relevance, the concept of media capture remains strongly normative and often binary, suggesting that once captured, editorial independence is entirely lost. Such an understanding risks obscuring the negotiated and graduated nature of influence. As Benson (2025, 128) observes, “no governments, whether left or right, [are] immune from the temptation to control the media to preserve power”. Media institutions are always embedded within power structures, and the boundary between capture and partisan journalism has historically been fluid. In this sense, capture is less an exceptional pathology than a recurring structural tension.
From media capture to media capture risk
For these reasons, we adopt a broad and relational understanding of media capture. We define it as situations in which particularistic interests override the universal normative function of the media system, undermining its role in enabling citizens to form informed judgments in democratic contexts. Crucially, we shift the focus from individual outlets to the media ecosystem as a whole, and from institutional autonomy alone to the informational conditions experienced by citizens. The central issue is not only whether journalism operates freely, but whether citizens are effectively able to exercise their right to be informed under pluralistic and fair conditions.
In a hybrid media environment characterized by alternative news actors and the structural influence of platforms (Van Dijck et al. 2018), particularistic interests no longer reside exclusively with traditional power holders such as political elites, owners, or advertisers. They may also emerge from within digital infrastructures themselves. The media ecosystem must therefore be understood as embedded within broader political, economic, and social configurations that shape both its resilience and its vulnerability.
Our framework adopts a relational approach that analyzes interactions among media ecosystems, political systems, and societal structures. We conceptualize media ecosystems as embedded within national institutional contexts, which condition both autonomy and exposure to pressure. At the same time, we recognize that the risk of capture depends not only on structural and institutional factors, but also on citizens’ media literacy and informational awareness.
Finally, we conceptualize media capture as a risk rather than a fixed condition. Since pressures on the media are pervasive and historically persistent, it is difficult to determine when capture is complete or partial. Our mapping exercise therefore does not identify capture as a binary outcome but highlights the structural conditions under which the risk of media capture is more likely to emerge.
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