Of Autocrats and the Media
January 14, 2025 8:12 PM   Subscribe

For many, Hungary’s Victor Orban is the contemporary patron saint of autocratic rule. Certainly, he leaves “little doubt over what his model calls for,” A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times noted in a Washington Post op-ed this fall citing, “loud applause from attendees of a Republican political conference held in Budapest in 2022,” when Orban said, “Dear friends: We must have our own media.”

For those trying to undercut independent journalism in democracies, the attacks typically exploit banal — and often nominally legal — weaknesses in a nation’s systems of governance, Sulzberger writes. The typical five-step process goes something like this:

  1. Create a climate hospitable to crackdowns on the media by sowing public distrust in independent journalism and normalizing the harassment of the people who produce it.
  2. Manipulate legal and regulatory authority — such as taxation, immigration enforcement and privacy protections — to punish offending journalists and news organizations.
  3. Exploit the courts, most often through civil litigation, to effectively impose additional logistical and financial penalties on disfavored journalism, even in cases without legal merit.
  4. Increase the scale of attacks on journalists and their employers by encouraging powerful supporters in other parts of the public and private sector to adopt versions of these tactics.
  5. Use the levers of power not just to punish independent journalists, but also to reward those who demonstrate fealty. This includes helping supporters of the ruling party gain control of news organizations financially weakened by all the aforementioned efforts.
The autocratic playbook Sulzberger describes is currently at work in many parts of the world:

Brazil
  • Frequent abuses of the court system by former president Jair Bolsonaro and his allies were dubbed “judicial harassment.” Practitioners filed lawsuits before judges they knew to be skeptical of the press. They overwhelmed journalists with superfluous court filings to drive up their legal bills.

Hungary
  • Orban’s government has sought to manipulate the European Union’s digital privacy rules to block standard investigative reporting practices, such as drawing on public-records databases.

India
  • Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has a history of carrying out … “tax surveys,” as authorities called them, against independent Indian news organizations whose reporting has incurred his regime’s wrath.” Recently, he did the same thing with the BBC.
  • Modi’s government has recently begun to impose stricter visa rules on journalists and has stripped foreign-born reporters of their right to remain in the country. One result is growing journalistic tentativeness.

Italy
  • Giorgia Meloni, who took office in October 2022, has a history of suing journalists. In the most high-profile case, she successfully took investigative journalist Roberto Saviano to court for defamation. What was the infraction? He called her short. That wasn’t her first trip to court, however. Her approach has been described as “making strategic use of defamation suits to silence journalists and public intellectuals.” For those who follow American news, the emphasis on defamation may remind you of the ABC News (aka Disney) settlement.

Trump's America
  • In the waning days of Trump's first term, his Justice Department secretly seized the phone logs of reporters of three of his least favorite news organizations — The Times, The Washington Post and CNN.
  • For years, Trump has expressed interest in using federal funding and the tax code to punish institutions he doesn’t approve of, including public media such as PBS and NPR.
  • Trump's first Department of Homeland Security proposed strict caps on foreign-journalist visas, with extensions potentially depending on whether immigration officers approved of a reporter’s work.
  • His serial displeasure with The Post led him to threaten owner Jeff Bezos’s other business interests, attempting to upend Amazon’s shipping arrangement with the U.S. Postal Service and impede its defense contracting.
  • Likewise, furious with CNN’s coverage, Trump sought to influence the Justice Department’s review of a merger involving the news outlet’s parent company.
  • More recently, Trump suggested that NBC and MSNBC ought to lose their broadcast licenses over their coverage of his presidency.
  • Trump has also repeatedly sued The Times, The Post, CNN, and a host of other independent outlets.

How the American Media Is Fighting Back
Today, the New York Times reported on the steps lawyers and editors are taking to prepare for possible legal interference from the Trump administration at The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, The New Yorker, ProPublica and other publications, all of whom are encouraging reporters to reduce the risks that sources or confidential information could be exposed by subpoenas by relying more on encrypted messaging programs, like Signal, and not storing highly sensitive documents or notes in the digital cloud because companies like Apple, Google and Amazon could be subpoenaed by federal authorities. It also involves counsel on how quickly to dispose of notes and other documents after articles are published, or even when to use a pay-per-minute SIM card that can easily be discarded.

Other Perspectives on the Media Fight
posted by Violet Blue (13 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by torokunai2 at 11:22 PM on January 14 [2 favorites]


This is an excellent post, and timely - thanks. Though I fear that in the case of the Wash Post & NYT (and thus Sulzberger, Bezos and the lot) the call is coming from inside the house
posted by chavenet at 12:50 AM on January 15 [22 favorites]


If anyone is interested, defamation is defined at Art 595 of the Penal Code of 1930. If that date concerns you it should - the law doesn't acknowledge freedom of speech or the free press, and the crime or civil wrong is defined as intentionally uttering a statement to damage someone else's reputation. Truth is irrelevant. Critics (pdf) of the law are plentiful, but it's unlikely that any changes are coming soon.
posted by 1adam12 at 12:51 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]


I wish the NYT had a lot more real news, given its status as the paper of record. But I felt a lot more sympathetic once I understood their finances. They lost 80% of their advertising income with the demise of print, and their news readership is stagnant. All the games, the Athletic, the cookery push, the YouTube and starry article push all exist to provide alternative reasons to subscribe. They're also pretty much the only media outlet making money in the U.S. these days.

As for the Washington Post... The only good thing I can say about what's going on there is Kara Swisher seems to be making a serious bid to find backers to purchase the newspaper off of Bezos. If she manages it, she would be its ideal leader. She made a career in Silicon Valley tech, and the brotherhood that runs it — and she take no prisoners.

I'm not surprised the Italian defamation law dates back to Mussolini. Its current use is sadly fitting for a latter-day member of his Brothers of Italy party. Politico just named Meloni the most influential person in Europe; not coincidentally, she's also currently in talks to hand over all of Italy's government and defense information to Musk via Starlink.
posted by Violet Blue at 2:00 AM on January 15 [5 favorites]


Biden Administration Quietly Carves TikTok Ban Loophole for Itself, Leaked Document Shows

The cable, dated January 5 of this year and sent to the State Department’s Public Affairs Section (PAS), goes on to explain the legal maneuver the Biden administration used to carved out the loophole. While the 2022 No TikTok on Government Devices Act prohibits the use of the app on government devices, the cable points to a section of the law that permits agencies to make “exceptions for…national security interests and activities.” So the State Department conducted “an assessment of national security and legal considerations,” and — surprise! — public diplomacy officials qualify (as well as contractors). As is often the case, national security is a more elastic concept than the First Amendment.

The cable describes two categories of exception in particular. The first pertains to “monitoring and analysis on TikTok,” under which they’re allowed to lurk on the platform but not post. The second category applies to contracting with digital content creators. A section on this second category includes the following suggestive remark: “There is increasing PD interest in and need to contract with digital content creators who focus on foreign audiences to produce and disseminate content about the Department’s work.”

posted by cendawanita at 2:16 AM on January 15 [3 favorites]


Possibly relevant: Is there a thinner facade of journalistic objectivity possible in this universe than the Washington Post printing something written by the publisher of the New York Times?
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 6:25 AM on January 15 [6 favorites]


Kara Swisher seems to be making a serious bid to find backers to purchase the newspaper off of Bezos. If she manages it, she would be its ideal leader. She made a career in Silicon Valley tech, and the brotherhood that runs it — and she take no prisoners.
Counterpoint: Kara Swisher has been a deeply uncritical and fawning sycophant for tech leaders for decades, and while she would probably be a better owner/manager of the Post than Bezos is, the same would be true of almost anyone with a pulse.
posted by Four String Riot at 7:20 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]


I can think of no media institution that has done more to normalize these trends and shepherd them into the mainstream than The New York Times
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:39 AM on January 15 [11 favorites]


Another tactic of these governments: laws against “online falsehoods.” We have one of these in Singapore and surprise, surprise it’s mainly been deployed against opposition parties, independent media, and anti death penalty activists.
posted by JoeBlubaugh at 4:43 PM on January 15 [2 favorites]


Four String Riot, thanks for the Baffler article! To date, I've only seen Swisher interviewed several times or listened to her podcast, so I was intrigued by the larger context, and not especially impressed by her work with Uber, for one.

RandlePatrickMcMurphy, the Sulzberger article is not intended to be objective. It's a researched opinion piece, and an extremely long one at that. I have no idea why it was published on the Post. Maybe because it's at least partly aimed at a DC audience, or simply because the Post format accommodates long-form opinion in a way the NYT does not.
posted by Violet Blue at 4:46 PM on January 15 [1 favorite]


Is there a non-paywall link available?
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 5:37 AM on January 16


Sorry, I didn't realize any of them were paywalled. Which article do you want?
posted by Violet Blue at 8:49 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]


If you meant the Sulzberger article, the archive link is here: https://archive.ph/El9zT
posted by Violet Blue at 10:09 AM on January 16 [2 favorites]


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