Media Control in Contemporary Autocratization: A Mechanism-Based Mapping of Legal, Economic, and Digital Domination
JOURNALISM AND MEDIA, cilt.7, sa.4, ss.1-20, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 7 Sayı: 4
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Dergi Adı: JOURNALISM AND MEDIA
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: EBSCO Communication Source, Social Science Premium Collection (ProQuest), Communication Source (EBSCO), Scopus, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Directory of Open Access Journals
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1-20
- Anadolu Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Media control under contemporary autocratization extends beyond overt censorship, operating through legal regulation, economic dependence, and digital infrastructures. Yet, critical political economy, media-systems research, media-capture scholarship, and work on digital repression have largely theorized these forms within separate analytical domains. This article develops a structured conceptual synthesis rather than a primary-data comparative study, taking the mechanism, not the country, as its unit of analysis: twenty-three country-period illustrations across fourteen contexts show how mechanisms operate, not how often they occur. The mapping compares legal, economic, and digital mechanisms across three positions on the autocratization spectrum—democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism, and hegemonic electoral authoritarianism—in terms of instruments, targets, proximate effects, and institutional form. The ordering is ideal-typical and directional, not a historical sequence: legal control from deterrent uncertainty to institutionalized exclusion; economic control from discretionary dependence to closed resource architectures; and digital control from visibility manipulation to pre-emptive governance. Because the three families operate through shared dependencies linking the executive, state apparatus, capital fractions, and media ownership, they are relationally connected rather than independent. The mapping offers journalism and media scholarship a comparative framework for analyzing how media actors’ resources, autonomy, and visibility are reorganized within formally plural media markets.