African countries have seen a steady transition from unfettered capture of media by the state to a more diffuse range of contesting voices and perspectives in the public sphere. Ghana’s media landscape reflects this trend, eliciting optimism that subaltern, alternative, or contrarian voices will find their place in this expanding media space and restructure the dynamics of power and influence on public discourse and the national agenda. We assess this optimism by critically examining the dialectical relationship between traditional drivers of media capture, on the one hand, and subaltern, alternative, and contrarian voices, on the other, to determine whether there is a fundamental shift in who sets the agenda and how that influences media coverage. We conclude that Ghana exhibits two contending forms of contemporaneous, albeit asymmetrical, parallel capture whereby each of the two main political forces uses its alliances and allegiances to discredit the views of the other or those of non-partisan media. This system of bifurcated or parallel media capture is possible partly because the country is too polarized to sustain a sufficiently formidable base of support for any one side. We contend that media capture in transitional democracies like Ghana’s is more nuanced in its triggers and manifestations, with interconnected driving forces instrumentalizing a variety of subtle and not so subtle forms of control. We propose an approach to media capture analysis that encapsulates a messy intersection of different interests, motivations, as well as political and market formations.