The last two decades or so have seen a shift in the way in which many media scholars talk about ‘bread and butter’ topics of media research and analysis in transitional democracies of the Global South. Age-old phenomena, including media ownership, media manipulation, bias, censorship, clientelism, and patronage are now increasingly discussed as a subset of a broader phenomenon of media capture, a concept whose definition remains slippery and elusive. In its everyday usage, it has lacked analytical clarity and nuance, particularly in terms of what distinguishes it from traditional practices and cultures of news media manipulation that lead to media’s failure to fulfil its normative role of watching over abuses of power in society. The concept has thus been bandied about as an indicator of a range of normative ‘breaches’ associated with the news media. In some contexts, it has come to resemble a near onomatopoeic term that phonetically corresponds to the sound that it describes—capture—an expression “invested with connotations of force” (Dassah 2018, 2).