Media Capture and Resilience Strategies in Central and South-Eastern Europe

Abstract

This editorial introduction to the special section “Media Capture in the Western Balkans and Be-yond: Tools, Actors, and Effects” provides the conceptual discussion about media capture. As a flexible and overarching concept, media capture is used to describe the specific contemporary position of the media in the nexuses between politics and economy. The papers in this special section view media capture from a comparative perspective, detailing capturing mechanisms in Central and Eastern Europe. In this editorial we argue that, unlike some similar concepts, such as clientelism or instrumentalisation, media capture points to the more extreme and more broadly practiced forms of interference, systematically implemented in such a way to become one of the defining structural features of the media landscape.