Several states still deploy old-fashioned brute force against journalists. But overall, authoritarian leaders are finding they can control the news in less grisly ways
Against that backdrop, governments can cripple critical outlets by withholding advertising, and leaning on private firms to do likewise. Meanwhile, they subsidise more servile competitors. In Mexico, for example, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has squeezed local media by steadily slashing the government advertising budget.
Hungary shows how press freedom can be curtailed in a country that is still, more or less, a democracy—critical voices such as Telex reach far fewer people than state-backed propaganda outlets. In truly authoritarian regimes such as China the muzzle is far tighter. Technology has allowed the Communist Party to snoop and censor on a scale and with a precision that would have been extremely hard to achieve without more brute force even a few years ago.
Another threat to press freedom is common even in places where journalists are generally respected, such as western Europe. Rich and powerful folk with things to hide have found that over-strict libel laws and vaguely drafted privacy rules can be used to deter nosy journalists. “Strategic lawsuits against public participation”, ors, are claims that aim not to win justice but to exhaust publications’ time and resources.
As journalism has moved online, repressive governments have found new ways to censor it. China’s “great firewall” is both all-encompassing and sophisticated: it lets the Communist Party block nearly any content it dislikes. Other regimes sometimes use cruder methods. A report published in mid-2021 by Freedom House, a watchdog, found that 20 out of 70 countries had shut down the internet in the previous year to keep their citizens in the dark, typically during periods of unrest.
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