Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Lohinger.

As once formidable media behemoths, like the Washington Post and CBS News, continue to take more and more damaging blows,

it would be easy to point fingers at entirely modern causes. But press scholars have been crying for

decades that this industry's foundations

contained significant cracks. There's actually a phrase for what's happening, not just in the

United States, but around the world. Media capture, or the idea that when the government

fails to codify protections around the press's obligation towards public

interests, political and commercial interests can take over. No coup required, just a slow, steady

transfer of power. Victor Picard is a professor of media policy and political economy at the

University of Pennsylvania. He recently

wrote about how American media have actually seen three cascading layers of capture,

capitalistic, oligarchical, and authoritarian. And to start with capitalistic, we have to go

a little ways back in time. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, in the newspaper industry, there was a structure

transformation where they shifted to a more advertising-dependent business model.

So they went from relying on advertising revenue roughly 40 percent, their overall revenues

in the mid-1800s into the 1860s.

By the early 1900s, they were relying on advertising for well over 70% of their revenues.

And what that did was it changed the relationship between publishers and readers.

Publishers saw their readers not as engaged citizens in a democratic society,

but primarily as consumers whom they would deliver to advertisers. It also led them to rely on more

sensationalized media coverage. It also incentivized further media consolidation. You saw the

rise of newspaper chains and press

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