November 2024
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How can journalist groups and media organisations resist government media capture?Governments in hybrid regimes seek to control the media sector, by, for instance, introducing laws and regulations that limit free speech, arresting journalists, corrupting licensing systems, and directing government advertisement to loyal media outlets. However, journalist groups, media houses, and media freedom organisations have sometimes been able to challenge the government’s attempts to subvert independent media. Theorising media capture as a dynamic form of contentious politics, we investigate Ugandan government’s strategies to restrict media freedom, and the strategies journalists and media freedom groups have employed to resist media capture. Drawing on original fieldwork data, including 40 semi-structured interviews with journalists and media freedom activists in Uganda, we analyse four strategies to curtail media freedom in the 2010s: regulatory interference, ownership, criminal prosecution, and direct repression. Our findings suggest that when the agents in the media sector have coordinated their efforts, combining legal action, protest, public advocacy, and/or media blackouts, they have been able to mitigate or halt government attempts to capture the media. Our case study of media capture in Uganda has some broader implications. Whereas previous literature sometimes seems to suggest media capture entails that a transitional state gets caught up in a stage where the mass media are unwilling to secure their independence from powerful vested interests, we suggested a dynamic account that allowed us to highlight that the targets of capture—journalists, media houses, and media freedom groups—have some agency to counteract media capture strategies. What limits their capacity to mobilise is not lack of will, but their weak organisations and precarious conditions.
