Media capture, academia capture? Rising authoritarianism and public knowledge capture

Recent political and media trends challenge various disciplinary axioms and popular scholarly intuitions. For instance, is media good or bad for democracy? Is democracy—ideally based on the popular will—necessarily popular? And what might the news look like when politicians and audiences become increasingly illiberal, authoritarian, and, in some cases, simply racist?Several books, written by media scholars and practitioners, have tackled different aspects of this reality in recent years. As is often the case, the US received greater scholarly attention (e.g., Boczkowski & Papacharissi, 2018; Carlson et al., 2022), both due to the incomparable impact each shift in the US carries over other countries’ media systems—as Trump’s cuts to the USAID funds demonstrate—as well as the US-centric political economy of certain academic institutions, funding structures, and publishing industries.