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Within weeks, if not days, the second Trump administration has demonstrated in January 2025 how fragile contemporary concepts of media freedom are. This chapter revisits the concept of media capture, ‘which refers to a situation in which governments or vested interests networked with politics control the media’ (Schiffrin, Journalism 19(8):1033–1042, 2018, p. 1033), and applies it to digital communication platforms. It appears that, despite the long policy tradition in Europe, no effective set of instruments exists to effectively moderate or control media and platform ownership power. While there have been numerous attempts to release European policy rules to limit media ownership power, the European Union’s ‘digital communication policy package’ of the 2020s contains elements for a focused and appropriate regulatory toolbox addressing communication platforms. How this regulatory framework fares in the face of fierce attempts by the second Trump administration to reject any such rules, at least for US companies, is likely to be one of the key media policy contestations of the decade.

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The Vigorous Return of Capture: How Ownership of Media and Communication Platforms Interacts with Political Power and Shapes Opinions

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Tales Tomaz,
  • Josef Trappel

摘要

Within weeks, if not days, the second Trump administration has demonstrated in January 2025 how fragile contemporary concepts of media freedom are. This chapter revisits the concept of media capture, ‘which refers to a situation in which governments or vested interests networked with politics control the media’ (Schiffrin, Journalism 19(8):1033–1042, 2018, p. 1033), and applies it to digital communication platforms. It appears that, despite the long policy tradition in Europe, no effective set of instruments exists to effectively moderate or control media and platform ownership power. While there have been numerous attempts to release European policy rules to limit media ownership power, the European Union’s ‘digital communication policy package’ of the 2020s contains elements for a focused and appropriate regulatory toolbox addressing communication platforms. How this regulatory framework fares in the face of fierce attempts by the second Trump administration to reject any such rules, at least for US companies, is likely to be one of the key media policy contestations of the decade.