Connect the Dots 101

A.G. Sulzberger

Some foreign leaders have ruthlessly curtailed journalism. U.S. politicians could [ARE] draw[ING] from their playbook.

After several years out of power, the former leader is returned to office on a populist platform. He blames the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection. As he sees it, tolerating the independent press, with its focus on truth-telling and accountability, weakened his ability to steer public opinion. This time, he resolves not to make the same mistake.

His country is a democracy, so he can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organizations in subtler ways — using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting. Meanwhile, he rewards news outlets that toe the party line — shoring them up with state advertising revenue, tax exemptions and other government subsidies — and helps friendly businesspeople buy up other weakened news outlets at cut rates to turn them into government mouthpieces.

Within a few years, only pockets of independence remain in the country’s news media, freeing the leader from perhaps the most challenging obstacle to his increasingly authoritarian rule. Instead, the nightly news and broadsheet headlines unskeptically parrot his claims, often unmoored from the truth, flattering his accomplishments while demonizing and discrediting his critics. “Whoever controls a country’s media,” the leader’s political director openly asserts, “controls that country’s mindset and through that the country itself.”

The playbook:

• Manipulate legal and regulatory authority — such as taxation, immigration enforcement and privacy protections — to punish offending journalists and news organizations.

• 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.
• 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.
• Use the levers of power not just to punish independent journalists but also to reward those who demonstrate fealty to their leadership. This includes helping supporters of the ruling party gain control of news organizations financially weakened by all the aforementioned efforts.
As that list makes clear, these leaders have realized that crackdowns on the press are most effective when they’re at their least dramatic — not the stuff of thrillers but a movie so plodding and complicated that no one wants to watch it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/05/sulzberger-free-press-new-york-times/

September 24, 2024