From Moscow to Silicon Valley: Mapping the New Architecture of Media Capture
MJRC Director Marius Dragomir has published a new research paper mapping the global landscape of media capture across six distinct typological models, with case studies covering Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and the United States.
The paper applies the Capture Typology Framework (CTF), Dragomir’s four-component analytical model developed through sustained empirical research across more than 30 countries, to a comparative survey of how political and economic interests displace editorial independence and instrumentalize media systems worldwide. Each of the six models examined operates through distinct mechanisms: Russia’s comprehensive state restructuring, Hungary’s methodical consolidation playbook, Turkey’s business-dependency model, Egypt’s intelligence-services ownership network, Israel’s billionaire-patron dynamic, and the tech-oligarchic model now crystallizing in the United States.
The findings are sobering. Assessed against the provisions of the European Media Freedom Act, no EU member state covered in the study fully complies across all four dimensions of the CTF. Hungary remains the most advanced and egregious case of systematic capture. Slovakia is moving quickly in the same direction. And the United States — long assumed to be protected by the strength of its commercial media and the First Amendment — is exhibiting the early architecture of a form of capture with no clear historical precedent, one driven not by politicians seeking to instrumentalize existing media systems, but by technology billionaires simultaneously controlling media ownership, platform distribution, AI infrastructure, and newsroom financing.
The report concludes that capture has become not merely a feature of weakened democracies at the European periphery, but a replicable strategic program that travels between political contexts — and that the tech-oligarchic model now emerging in the United States raises the prospect of media capture with genuinely global reach.
Read the full report.
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