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In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy

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In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy Edited by Anya Schiffrin In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy Copyright © 2017 by National Endowment for Democracy ABOUT CIMA The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), at the National Endowment for Democracy, works to strengthen the support, raise the visibility, and improve the effectiveness of independent media development throughout the world. The center provides information, builds networks, conducts research, and highlights the indispensable role independent media play in the creation and development of sustainable democracies. CIMA convenes working groups, discussions, and panels on a variety of topics in the field of media development and assistance. The center also issues reports and recommendations based on working group discussions and other investigations. CIMA’s publications aim to provide policymakers, as well as donors and practitioners, with ideas for bolstering the effectiveness of media assistance. The Center for International Media Assistance National Endowment for Democracy 1025 F Street, N.W., Suite 800 Washington, DC 20004 Phone: (202) 378-9700 Fax: (202) 378-9407 Email: [email protected] URL: http://cima.ned.org Design and layout: unkanny! Design Notice of Rights: Permission is granted to display, copy, and distribute this publication in whole or in part, provided that (1) the materials are used with the acknowledgement “The book In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy is a product of the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy;” (2) the report is used solely for personal, noncommercial, or informational use; and (3) no modifications of the report are made. ISBN 978-0-9818254-2-7 In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy Edited by Anya Schiffrin In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy Contents Introduction ...............................................................................................1 Anya Schiffrin Toward a taxonomy of media capture ...................................................9 Joseph E. Stiglitz Competing forms of media capture in developing democracies .....19 Maha Rafi Atal Media capture in the digital age ..........................................................33 Rasmus Kleis Nielsen Clientelism and media capture in Latin America .............................43 Mireya Márquez-Ramírez & Manuel Alejandro Guerrero The state, the military, and the market: Capture in the new Burmese media landscape .................................59 Jane Madlyn McElhone Unfinished business: Tanzania’s media capture challenge ..............83 Ryan Powell III The gradual takeover of the Czech media system ............................97 Martina VojtĚchovská Managed liberalization: Commercial media in the People’s Republic of China ................... 111 Yiling Pan Tunisia’s media barons wage war on independent media regulation ..................................................................................... 125 Kamel Labidi Exposing Eastern Europe’s shadowy media owners ...................... 137 Paul Radu What is to be done? Options for combating the menace of media capture ................................................................. 143 Mark M. Nelson iv About this Volume In April 2016, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs hosted a conference on the topic of “media capture” with the intention of bringing new theoretical and empirical perspectives to the topic. The papers presented at that conference provided the foundation for this volume, the first of its kind to explore how political figures and economic elites are colluding to undermine the independence of privately-owned news media. The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) is proud to present this collection and hopes it will inspire further research and thoughtful policy responses to this growing threat to democ- racies around the world. About the editor Anya Schiffrin is the director of Technology, Media and Advocacy specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Her most recent book is the edited collection Global Muckraking: 100 years of investigative reporting from around the world (New Press, 2014). She is a member of the advisory board of Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and the Natural Resource Governance Institute and in spring 2016 joined the Global Board of the Open Society Foundation. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the two donors who funded the media capture conference held at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2016 as well as the anonymous reviewers who spent vast amounts of time reading the papers submitted for volume. Susanna De Martino, Meixi Gan and Danfeng Wu assisted with the conference. De Martino also shepherded the papers through the submission process and did extensive research on the question of capture. A number of colleagues generously shared their ideas on capture including Rodney Benson, Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Nicholas Benequista, Heather Brooke, Julia Cagé, Alexander Dyck, Richard John, Kamel Labidi, Michael Massing, Mark Nelson, Nick Papandreou, Andrea Prat, and Joseph E. Stiglitz. A special thanks as well to Ava Seave and Heather Brooke who assisted with preparation of the conference agenda and to Dean Merit Janow and Micaela Ordahl for their support. V Introduction ANYA SCHIFFRIN Director of Technology, Media, and Communications specialization, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University In many countries around the world today, political transitions and the rise of digital technology have changed the way governments influence the media. With some exceptions, pre-publication censorship and pre-approval of news and information is mostly a thing of the past. Political transitions in many countries have changed mechanisms of control. Instead of a censor in Burma marking up advance copies of local newspapers, journalists receive more nuanced signals as to what should be covered. In countries like China and Vietnam, where governments still issue directives to journalists, there is now a vibrant social media space where forbidden topics are covered and dissent is expressed. 1 In the Service of Power: Media Capture and the Threat to Democracy In countries undergoing political transition, another change witnessed in the past two decades is that the threat to journalistic independence no longer comes from the government alone, but from the private sector, and from collusion between the two. In countries such as Burma, Venezuela, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, or even Italy under Silvio Berlusconi, the ties between government and media are close. Such links can be forged through advertising or some form of state subsidy to the media, or simply through the relationships between political elites and media owners, but the effect is frequently the same: media that does the bidding of elites and thus is not truly free. This collection looks at the state of media around the world with an emphasis on what we call “media capture.” It comes out of a conference held at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in April 2016, and aims to introduce the concept of capture to a broader audience, show how capture is man- ifested in different parts of the world, and highlight some possible solutions. This is the first collection on media capture around the world and the first to consider how digital technology is affecting the issue. Media capture defined Media and communications scholars have long looked at questions of commercial influence, ownership, the role of government, and other sources of political bias in shaping coverage. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) famously pro- posed their “five filters” and included ideology, corporate ownership, and pressure from sources as factors that influence coverage. Ben H. Bagdikian (1983) wrote about corporate control of the media and the effect it has on coverage, and sociol- ogist Herbert Gans (1979), and others, have written about the way that sources shape coverage through developing relationships with reporters. This question was explored in an African context by anthropologist Jennifer Hasty, who did fieldwork in a state-owned outlet as well as at a private newspaper in Ghana and wrote about the different ways journalists at the two outlets covered government (Hasty 2005). Since then, others have refined these ideas, under a variety of terms, to better understand the full range of forces that restrict or bias coverage. Perhaps the best working definition of the media capture phenomenon is that provided by political scientist Alina Mungiu-Pippidi: “By ‘media capture’ I mean a situation in which the media have not succeeded in becoming autonomous in manifesting a will of their own, nor able to exercise their main function, notably of informing people. Instead, they have persisted in an intermediate state, with vested interests, and not just the government, using them for other purposes” (Mungiu-Pippidi 2013, 41). In many parts of the world—including Australia, Italy (Stille 2006), Burma (McElhone, this volume), Thailand, Turkey (Finkel 2015), and Venezuela (Bennett and Naim 2015)—government control of the media is entwined with control by 2 Introduction business interests. In Venezuela, private entities linked to the government have taken ownership of media outlets
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