Why the Press Is Less Free Today
The New Censorship” outlines four main reasons why this is so. The first is the rise of elected leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the leftist Presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, who use their power to intimidate independent journalists and make it nearly impossible for them to function. They exploit their democratic mandates to govern as dictators—“democratators,” as Simon calls them. They do this not only by manipulating, denouncing, and jailing critical reporters but by creating an atmosphere in which a free press is considered a kind of fifth column in the body politic, an import from the West that at best serves as a propaganda tool for outside interests—introducing alien values and stoking chaos—and at worst actively undermines national security and pride.
Demagogues like Putin and Erdoğan create tyrannies of the majority, so that the dissenting stance that’s the normal position of an independent press is easily isolated, tainted with foreign associations, and blamed for social ills. The idea that freedom of expression, along with other public liberties, is a specifically Western ideology, rather than a universal right, is increasingly common, from Caracas to Beijing.
.. The extreme violence of conflict today is actually amplified by technological progress. Armed groups no longer need to keep journalists alive, because they have their own means of—in the terrible cliché—“telling their story”: they can post their own videos, publish their own online reports, and tweet to their own followers, knowing that the international press will pick up the most sensational stories anyway. .. Simon writes. “Journalists have become less essential and therefore more vulnerable as a result.”
.. Simon’s book confirms an idea I’ve had about the fate of institutions in the information age. Despite its promise of liberation, democratization, and levelling, the digital revolution, in undermining traditional forms of media, has actually produced a greater concentration of power in fewer hands, with less organized counter-pressure.