Palgrave just published an edited volume on media capture – i.e., government attempts to control the mass media – in Latin America and Africa. Calle Höglund and I co-wrote a chapter on how the Museveni government seeks to control the media in Uganda and how the so-called media fraternity – a network of journalist groups and media organisations – are mobilising to prevent media capture.
The chapter complements an article we published in Journalism Studies in 2021 (which in turn was was based on Calle’s master’s thesis in global studies).
Here’s the abstract:
How can journalist groups and media organisations resist government media capture? Governments in hybrid regimes seek to control the media sector, by, for instance, introducing laws and regulations that limit free speech, arresting journalists, corrupting licensing systems, and directing government advertisement to loyal media outlets. However, journalist groups, media houses, and media freedom organisations have sometimes been able to challenge the government’s attempts to subvert independent media. Theorising media capture as a dynamic form of contentious politics, we investigate Ugandan government’s strategies to restrict media freedom, and the strategies journalists and media freedom groups have employed to resist media capture. Drawing on original fieldwork data, including 40 semi-structured interviews with journalists and media freedom activists in Uganda, we analyse four strategies to curtail media freedom in the 2010s: regulatory interference, ownership, criminal prosecution, and direct repression. Our findings suggest that when the agents in the media sector have coordinated their efforts, combining legal action, protest, public advocacy, and/or media blackouts, they have been able to mitigate or halt government attempts to capture the media. Our case study of media capture in Uganda has some broader implications. Whereas previous literature sometimes seems to suggest media capture entails that a transitional state gets caught up in a stage where the mass media are unwilling to secure their independence from powerful vested interests, we suggested a dynamic account that allowed us to highlight that the targets of capture—journalists, media houses, and media freedom groups—have some agency to counteract media capture strategies. What limits their capacity to mobilise is not lack of will, but their weak organisations and precarious conditions.
Höglund, CM., Schaffer, J.K. (2025). Resisting Media Capture: Mobilising for Media Freedom in Uganda. In: Mabweazara, H.M., Pearson, B. (eds) Media Capture in Africa and Latin America. Palgrave Studies in Journalism and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68962-8_11
You can find the full-text pre-print on my SSRN page: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912443#