Although the generic meaning of ‘media capture’ coalesces around the instrumentalization of the media by vested economic or political interests, its manifestations as seen across chapters in this volume are diverse and contested. In this chapter, we explore ‘cognitive capture’, one of the deeply contested but under-researched pillars of capture that both asserts and explains the way in which journalists subvert their professional norms to ‘external actors’ with the effect that they cease to report autonomously and impartially on critical issues directly connected to the ‘external actors’. Put in slightly different terms, cognitive capture describes ‘abstruse forms of influence’ that achieve the practical equivalent of the prevalent forms of media capture which foreground ‘material self-interest’ (Kwak 2014). It highlights the tendency of the news media to internalise and champion the perspective of the ‘external actors’ they are meant to report on (Schiffrin 2015; Stiglitz 2017).