The existential struggle between journalism and authoritarianism

Independent media may not survive autocracy

Independent journalism is bad for authoritarianism. 

Over the past year, we’ve seen countless examples proving why the Fourth Estate is such a critical pillar of free and democratic society. 

These pieces educated voters about the danger of openly authoritarian promises by a presidential candidate for president (see Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman), exposed abuses of power by those in government from both parties (see the excellent reporting on Eric Adams and Robert Menendez), and introduced us all to the people and processes that keep our elections running securely (see TIME Studio’s remarkable THE OFFICIALS). 

Examples of unbiased, accurate, explanatory, and even heroic journalism like this are legion:

• Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon, and Nick Corasantini: “Trump Allies Bombard the Courts, Setting Stage for Post-Election Fight.”

• Peter Eisler, Ned Parker and Joseph Tanfani: “Trump blasts his trial judges. Then his fans call for violence.”

• Brianna Keilar and Abby Phillip: “Trump's big lie turns into voter suppression.”

• Michael Schmidt: “What Omarosa, John Kerry and Michael Cohen Have in Common. And why it matters in 2024.”

• Amy Gardner, Colby Itkowitz, and Mariana Alfaro: “Trump pledges to jail opponents, baselessly suggests election will be stolen from him.”

• Anne Applebaum: “Autocracy in America.”

• Yamiche Alcindor: “Felons who are legal to vote may be intimidated by Florida election police arrests.”

• Riley Beggin and Angele Latham: “Trump 'dictator' comments raise questions about democracy. Here are 5 guardrails – if they hold.”

• David Folkenflik: “Off the air, Fox News stars blasted the election fraud claims they peddled.”

• Nicolle Wallace: “Preserving democracy is at stake in November.”

• Hansi Lo Wang: “14 pro-Trump electors linked to efforts to reverse his 2020 loss are back for 2024.”

• Greg Sargent: “Trump’s Slow-Burn Authoritarianism.” 

• Margaret Hoover: “Counting the Vote.”

• Emily Bazelon and Mattathias Schwartz: “Why Legal Experts Are Worried About a Second Trump Presidency.”

• Ethan Bauer: “Contingent Election: A detour from democracy.”

You’ll notice that a lot of those pieces focus on Donald Trump and his allies.

There’s a reason for that: While authoritarianism globally can come from the left or right — and, yes, there are strains of illiberalism on both sides in the U.S. — the dominant threat right now in America is coming from a faction on the right that has elevated Donald Trump as its leader.

This creates a genuine challenge for American media. 

On one hand, good journalism is — and always has been — nonpartisan. On the other hand, it also needs to be fair, objective, and focused on truth, regardless of where that truth leads. So how does the media handle a situation like the one we’re in where telling the truth about threats to democracy risks appearing partisan? 

For certain industry leaders — people like The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and executive editor Joe Kahn — this is clearly front of mind. What if that perception of bias undermines trust in journalism among certain segments of their audience? What happens if the end result of telling the truth is just an increasing politicization of truth? 

This dilemma has set off a massive debate in the world of media criticism, with accusations of “bothsidesism” being met with counter-recriminations that the media can’t “become a propaganda arm for a single candidate.”  

In our view, that rejoinder mischaracterizes the criticism. No one is responsibly arguing the media should be in the tank for a given candidate or party. If a Democrat commits a crime, the media must cover it! But they also don’t need to go out and find equivalent behaviors on both sides in order to call out misbehavior by one. We’re in a moment where telling the truth about threats to democracy is going to sometimes sound partisan to some readers. 

That truth still needs to be told. The only way out is through. 

Moreover, the best way for independent, fact-based media to win back the audiences they’re losing to polarization is to not chase them. To resist contorting coverage of the truth to fit the political landscape. But rather, to double-down on independence, objectivity, and honesty. To report reality as it is and to let the chips fall where they may. To draw a hard distinction between the normal political jockeying of healthy democracy and actions that threaten our system of government. 

Back in 2022, in response to questions from reporters about how to discern between those two things, we wrote a report on how experts understand threats to democracy: The Authoritarian Playbook: How reporters can contextualize and cover authoritarian threats as distinct from politics-as-usual. 

Everything in that report has only grown more important as we enter a critical election and post-election period. Our country is in an existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. That’s the most important news story of the year.

Independent journalism’s strength doesn’t guarantee it will survive

There’s another dimension of this story, too. All of this is precisely why authoritarians threaten the media. Just like journalism is bad for authoritarianism, authoritarianism is also bad for journalism. 

No citation needed there. We all know that.

But the how — especially in a 21st Century context — is often misunderstood. These days, many autocrats don’t just smash printing presses, throw reporters in jail, and be done with it. Often they pursue a more nuanced, and more insidious, strategy. 

With a combination of intimidation, coercion, and financial manipulation, they slowly corrode the independence and autonomy of the press until it ceases to be a meaningful check on power. The media still exists; it’s just an empty shell, a useful facade. 

Put differently, modern autocrats don’t crush journalism — they corrupt it. 

Viktor Orbán perfected this model in Hungary. We’ve been writing about the ways Orban used the powers of the state to coerce media and other private interests to become his political bootlickers for some time. Sulzberger recognized in a recent Washington Post op-ed the danger such a strategy could pose here in the future, and Kahn also recently acknowledged that the press could be vulnerable to such a threat. But both men were talking in the future tense. They may not recognize how much erosion has already happened.

In an article this week in the Columbia Journalism Review, my colleagues Ian Bassin (Protect Democracy’s co-founder and executive director) and Maximillian Potter (a writer-editor with Protect Democracy who was a 2023 finalist for the National Magazine Award while at Vanity Fair) dive into several case studies. They connect troubling dots suggesting that Donald Trump deployed the Orbán strategy in his first term to greater effect than many realize.

Read the whole piece here: On anticipatory obedience and the media.

Experts have seen the threat for years

As Ian and Max write, we’ve known for a long time about the danger that authoritarianism poses for the press in the United States: 

In early 2017, Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, an adviser to our organization, Protect Democracy, who’d spent roughly a decade living in Hungary during the rise of Viktor Orbán, offered us a warning: beware that the newly elected American president might copy Orbán’s autocratic technique of using the regulatory state to punish media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Prime Minister Orbán did this to great effect. The barrage of audits, investigations, and regulatory harassment he directed at his media critics, coupled with orders that his government agencies direct public advertising dollars only to media sufficiently loyal to him, drove independent media from the field. Orbán didn’t neutralize the media overnight. It happened gradually and in plain sight.   

Trump makes no secret of his desire to threaten and retaliate against the media. He has repeatedly called for the Federal Communications Commission to revoke broadcast licenses — including of ABC after its moderating of the September 10 presidential debate. Just yesterday, he threatened CBS after 60 Minutes interviewed his opponent (in an election special he pulled out of).

According to Rolling Stone, Trump has privately brainstormed about how to get around the First Amendment and imprison journalists en masse. 

Trump has privately strategized about what a second term, potentially starting in 2025, could look like, he’s begun occasionally soliciting ideas from conservative allies for how the U.S. government and Justice Department could go about turning his desires — for brutally imprisoning significant numbers of reporters — into reality.

-Ryan Bort & Asawin Suebsaeng, Rolling Stone, November 8, 2022

Just last week, he expanded his threats — which had previously also targeted social media companies — now promising to prosecute Google for “revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J Trump.” 

Read more: Explaining Trump’s DOJ weaponization scandals.

Cowing the media through anticipatory obedience

In their piece, Ian and Max explore the two major instances in Trump’s first term when he attempted to wield the powers of the presidency against journalists for coverage he didn’t like. First, by threatening to block a proposed merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Second, by looking to raise shipping rates on Amazon, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post. 

In both cases, Trump mostly failed to carry out his threats. But… it’s also true that both CNN and the Post subsequently went through high-profile leadership shakeups at least partly in response to Trump. For CNN, this was Chris Licht’s short-lived tenure and disastrous efforts to make the network “more neutral.” For the Post, it was Bezos installing a new publisher: “Will Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch executive who has spent most of his career in right-wing media.”

The point is not to criticize the excellent reporting done by either outlet. Rather, it’s about noting how dangerous and pernicious the financial risks of being targeted by an autocrat can be for media outlets. And how at a leadership and business level they might respond.

As Ian and Max write:

Mainstream American media is a small dataset. A few examples do not demonstrate correlation, let alone causation. But history—be it decades old or as fresh as yesterday’s news—instructs us to pay very close attention to the fact that, of all major media outlets, the two that Trump targeted with the most force during his first term have been the two that changed their leadership. 

Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny that autocratic leaders often succeed simply because the media, business leaders, and civil society look ahead to possible repression and move preemptively towards self-preservation. What he calls “anticipatory obedience”: 

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

The point is, Trump can still destroy independent journalism even if he never follows through on trying to ship New York’s media establishment off to Rikers Island.

All he needs is for the media, as individual actors, to eventually each decide not to chance it. For every outlet, independently, to quietly decide that directly crossing the autocrat isn’t worth the financial — or even personal — risk.

And even since Max and Ian’s piece published, Oliver Darcy reported that NBC executives — another outlet Trump has repeatedly threatened with revocation of their broadcast licenses — have scheduled a documentary on Trump’s family separation policies for after the November election. (A curious choice given that the job of news organizations is to present this sort of information to voters in time for them to incorporate it into their electoral decision making.) 

So, don’t just fixate on the threats of direct oppression you can see. Because then you’ll miss the invisible decisions you can’t see. A decision to reschedule or punt on something hard-hitting. A decision that profitability requires a “balanced” editorial stance. A decision that tempering certain stories is necessary to keep journalists safe. A decision that fact-checking a debate isn’t worth the flak. 

As Ian and Max write:

[L]ike Orban, Trump’s campaign against the media has taken time to have its intended effect, but have an effect it has, and the trajectory discernable now in hindsight doesn’t bode well for the media should Trump return to power. 

Democracy and autocracy are locked in an existential struggle in this country. By extension, that means the same is true of independent journalism and authoritarianism. 

In the end, only one of the two will survive. 

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The coup attempt never ended

Jessica Marsden, who leads our work to protect free and fair elections, has spent a lot of time this week in Jack Smith’s brief detailing the evidence against Donald Trump in the January 6th case. Her conclusion? 

Yes, all of the election subversion tactics described are very likely to be used again if Donald Trump loses. But it’s worse than that: it’s the same effort. The whole subversion project has continued uninterrupted from 2020 to today. 

Line-by-line, from exploiting the “blue shift” to instigating violence, she compares what Smith describes to things happening today, and finds essentially a 1-to-1 match. In the end, she writes: 

It’s not a question of whether or not we’ll see a similar coup attempt this time around. Because that implies the last one stopped at some point, that the activities described in Smith’s briefing are all in the past. 

The coup never went anywhere. 

Read her whole article: The 2020 coup attempt never ended.

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What else we’re tracking: 

• “When populists rise, economies usually fall.” Roberto Stefan Foa and Rachel Kleinfeld look at what happens to the economy when populist authoritarians — like Viktor Orbán — take over. The results aren’t pretty. 

• On Monday, we and others sued Virginia over an illegal voter purge inspired by (and intended to bolster) lies about who is registered and voting. Orion Danjuma and Anna Dorman explain: An illegal voter purge based on conspiracy theories.

• As Rick Hasen explains in Slate, “the Supreme Court may not decide the 2024 election after all.” 

• Highly recommend this piece from Jonathan V. Last on how authoritarians hack our nervous systems to desensitize us to their assaults: “Biology Explains Why People Normalize Trump.”

• In Pennsylvania, a new lawsuit is challenging the legitimacy of overseas votes, including of military service members, report Colby Itkowitz and Amy Gardner. According to Kyle Miller, this is another zombie lawsuit: “the concern here is not necessarily that they’re going to win on their merits prior to the election, but then they are going to be used to provoke elective diversion efforts on the back end.” 

• On mass voter challenges (which are ongoing), All Voting is Local and other groups have a new report detailing why the methodology used in this subversion tactic is fundamentally flawed. 

• In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes about how the reelection of Donald Trump would be George Washington’s nightmare and mark an end to his vision for the presidency: “The Moment of Truth.”