Despite experiencing several shifts in political ideology including a major revolution in 1974, Ethiopia remained inhospitable for press freedom for much of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. All major political entities that ruled over the Ethiopian state in the past 100 years—Haile Selassie’s monarchy (1930–1974), Mengistu Hailemariam’s military dictatorship (1974–1991), and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) authoritarian elite (1991–2019)—deployed decrees, monitoring infrastructure, and censorship mechanisms that strangled independent media development. From this historical perspective, it can be argued that state entities had monopoly over media capture practices in Ethiopia. However, recent events in the aftermath of EPRDF’s collapse that are characterized by rise of ethnic tensions and extreme political narratives in digital spaces are disrupting the state monopoly paradigm of media capture. This chapter probes the emerging current of non-state actors, modalities, and networks of media capture in the context of political instability in contemporary Ethiopia. More importantly, the chapter engages with the viability of the polarized pluralist model in a transitional, hyper-partisan, non-Western context amidst the increasing relevance of non-state actors in the mechanics of media capture.