Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Today, we're going to take a look at the media business and particularly how it's changing under President Trump's second administration.

The ongoing fight between Netflix and

Paramount over the future of Warner Brothers is highlighting some of the issues that come up when

politics or political players and media start to clash, because the president and his allies

have stakes in the game when it comes to a potential deal in this story.

One term that's been popping up around this conversation is media capture. So today, we're going to

get smart about that and talk about how it can help us understand what's going on in the U.S.

media industry right now. And so here to make us smart about this is Rodney Benson, who's a professor of

media, culture, and communication at New York University and author of the book How Media Ownership

Matters. Welcome to the show, Rod. Thank you, Kimberly. Happy to be here. Let's start with some

basic definitions. How would you define media capture?

Where does that term come from?

Media capture is a term that comes from economics.

The original term was regulatory capture, right?

So this is when you have government agencies that are captured by the industries that they're supposed to regulate.

So in other words, instead of providing independent oversight and enforcing regulations,

these agencies look the other way, or they interpret the regulations only in a way that the industry wants.

So the classic example would be the EPA going easy on industry pollution. So media capture is an extension of that. It's by analogy,

you can say that the news media also exercise oversight. That's why, of course, they're protected

by the First Amendment because they have that responsibility to serve as a watchdog on government

abuse of power.

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