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Episode 1518Jan 22, 2026

What is media capture?

We’ll talk Trump, his allies, and the media biz.

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What is media capture?
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President Trump has routinely sought to influence the business dealings of U.S. media companies, including Netflix and Paramount’s fight over the future of Warner Bros. Rodney Benson, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and author of the book “How Media Ownership Matters,” has argued there’s a word for this trend: media capture. On today’s show, Benson joins Kimberly to explain how the phenomenon works and why he believes it’s playing out in the U.S. Plus, we’ll smile about the wonders of the cosmos.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

Join us tomorrow for “Economics on Tap.” The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

The Team