Over the summer Vladimir Putin’s government introduced yet more laws to control news and information in Russia. It is now illegal to search for or consume ‘extremist’ content online. Extremist content can be anything that questions the government’s version of the war in Ukraine, sympathises with Putin’s domestic opponents, or promotes LGBT+.
While Russians can still circumvent restrictions using a VPN, this too is becoming harder as the Kremlin pushes towards absolute control of the country’s information sphere. It uses this control to create a narrative reality within Russia that bears little resemblance to the objective reality reported outside its borders.
The government claims, for example, that the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, was a fake crime scene staged by the British. It professes that the bombs it dropped on the Mariupol theatre were actually the fault of the Ukrainians themselves. It asserts that tens of thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly displaced to Russia were evacuated for safety reasons. It could not do this without the willing cooperation of Russia’s news outlets and its current affairs programmes. News is the vanguard of Putin’s propaganda machine.
While Putin has taken his determination to impose a sovereign reality in Russia to an extreme, leaders around the globe – in both autocracies and democracies – are trying to use the news to increase their narrative dominance at home and abroad.
Xi Jinping, President of China, has invested billions since 2009 in trying to ‘tell China’s story well’ internationally. The Communist Part of China (CCP)’s communications infrastructure funnels output from news agency Xinhua and China’s state news channel CGTN via satellites and cables from Hanoi to Harare.
The Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orbán, has strategically and systematically commandeered every level of the country’s news media. He started by compromising the independence of media regulation. He then gutted the public service broadcaster, before taking over the majority of Hungary’s commercial news outlets (including, crucially, the local press). Since 2020 he has turned his attention to social media. So successful has Orbán been at appropriating all the main channels of news that he has effectively created a state-controlled – counterfeit – public sphere.
In India, all the main broadcast news outlets now support Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) agenda and accuse Modi’s critics of being ‘anti-national’ or part of a ‘Lutyens Club’ of Delhi elites that wants to divide the country. Their tub-thumping Hindutva nationalism aligns with the government and leads them to dismiss or ignore Modi’s faults and failures. Their coverage is so fawning many Indians now refer to them as the Godi (lapdog) media. They do this because Modi’s government makes it worth their while. Supportive outlets gain access to government, access to information, and access to government funding (through advertising). Unsupportive outlets face tax investigations, raids and lawsuits. Modi can do this because he relies so much less on the news media than he did in the past. He can bypass news outlets by posting to his 108 million followers on X or his 29 million subscribers on YouTube, by disseminating news through the five million plus BJP WhatsApp groups, or via his regular radio programme, Mann Ki Baat.
Other leaders have also taken advantage of the opportunities of digital media to control the news. In Mexico, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum live stream daily to millions of citizens. These mañaneras, as they are called, can last for hours and – while framed as press conferences – are more like sermons delivered from a pulpit. They allow the president to tell people the truth, AMLO told his audience, without it being distorted by the ‘prensa fifi’ or ‘snot-nosed media’. There is even a section of the mañaneras – ‘Who is who in the lies of the week’ – in which news organisations are accused of spreading falsehoods and a journalist is named as ‘Pinocchio of the Week’. Named journalists can then find themselves the targets of online vitriol and offline violence. Mexico is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists, with over 140 killed there since the turn of the century.
These methods are becoming more common around the democratic world. US President Donald Trump is suing American news outlets which have criticised him. He is denying political access to news outlets he dislikes, and is fielding softball questions from friendly outlets in a manner that is beginning to look more like a Chinese Communist Party briefing rather than a press conference in a world-leading democracy.
Across the globe leaders and governments are battling to gain control of the news. Though they use different justifications and methods their objective is the same – to ensure their version of reality dominates. Even when this version of reality has little correlation to what happened and even when it leads to hostility and violence.
A consequence – as we show in our new book 'Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News' – is that millions of people now live in parallel realities, realities that are leading to a more fragmented, conflicted, and authoritarian global public sphere.