How Authoritarians Control the News

Every government, even the most authoritarian, depends to some degree on the consent of the governed. For leaders to remain in office, citizens must accept their rule rather than rally to political or revolutionary alternatives.

Whether citizens find their leaders acceptable depends on the reality those citizens inhabit. Populist and dictatorial governments have learned to harness theatricality, emotion, nationalism, and tribalism to shape that reality—and to create worlds where leaders are seen by their people not only as political actors but as stewards of truth. The leaders do not have to tell the literal truth—just an “emotional truth” that plays to their people’s experiences, prejudices, and fantasies.

In “Dictating Reality,” Martin Moore and Thomas Colley of King’s College London investigate the dynamics of such artificial realities in six nations: Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Narendra Modi’s India, and the former regimes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico. They also briefly digress to what they see as artificial realities created by Donald Trump.

Their canvas is extraordinarily broad. Many differences clearly exist among the six regimes. Some have enforced their manufactured realities by imprisoning and torturing anyone who refuses to believe. Others have focused on intimidating or co-opting news media and harassing opponents online. Some have allowed a few traditional democratic institutions to remain, at least as window dressing; others have eliminated them almost entirely, while still claiming their nations are democracies.

Whatever the specific tactics, the book’s main message is that political leaderships, including in democratic countries, are increasingly adopting more autocratic approaches to information and truth. Instead of promoting facts and rational debate, they encourage citizens to place their trust in charismatic figures “who they hope will save the nation, in the process granting them the power to dictate reality as they see fit.”

Strategies of Shaping Reality

The authors subtitle their work “The Global Battle to Control the News.” This phrasing tends to limit the book’s analytical scope. In some of the countries they study, government-controlled news media play only a supporting role in a much larger apparatus of oppression and propaganda. In others, controlling the news—and even dominating social networks—has been no guarantee that citizens will buy into a vision of reality they know is false.

Creating and maintaining artificial realities may in fact be much harder than the book overall suggests. Even the most skilled news manipulators find it difficult to convince citizens that they are more prosperous than they feel they are, or that obvious government corruption does not exist. Viktor Orbán built a highly advanced system of press and electoral controls that many believed had nearly closed the space for anti-regime thinking and organizing. However, he lost power in a landslide in April over economic frustrations and government corruption.

Moore and Colley detail in each of their case studies the truths and realities that leaders seek to create. Putin’s Russia, they say correctly, promotes the idea that there is no real truth; everything is relative. Therefore, the most patriotic (and safest) course for Russians is simply to hew to the flavor of reality endorsed by the Kremlin.

In China, the Communist Party tells citizens that they live in a “democracy that works.” Though the party violates every traditional measure of what a democracy is, it insists its rule is democratic—because the party serves the people, while “sham” democracies in the West serve only business and national elites.

Orbán’s Fidesz party manufactured a reality that claimed Hungary was under constant assault by Jews, the EU, and a host of shadowy actors seeking to dominate the world. Their goal was to flood Hungary with migrants, enforce liberal social policies that undermined traditional values, and drag the country into the Ukraine war to profit Western arms makers.

In India, the authors write, Narendra Modi promotes a version of reality in which the nation’s Muslims are oppressing a Hindu majority that is nearly six times as large. Modi backers decry citizens opposed to government policies, even farmers protesting reduced payments for their goods, as separatists, terrorists, and “Pak-sympathizers.”

Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing president of Brazil from 2019 to 2023, needed an artificial reality to deploy against leftist mainstream media, a liberal Congress, and a progressive Supreme Court. He found it, the authors say, by forging a “mass delusion” in which government institutions were biased, the electoral system corrupt, and those who criticized mining and deforestation in the Amazon servants of foreign interests.

In Mexico, López Obrador, president from 2018 to 2024, mixed facts and fiction in hours-long news conferences, seven days a week, to dominate his people’s view of reality. He presented himself as a messianic figure, struggling to save the working class from predatory elites and journalists who “lie to confuse readers.” Although a think tank calculated in 2021 that López Obrador averaged 88 untruths per news conference, 50 percent of young Mexicans said they felt better informed because of them.

Several of these rulers illustrate what Moore and Colley call a growing trend in which authoritarian leaders claiming a populist mantle oppose media scrutiny of their actions as a matter of principle. Journalistic investigations are pointless, these leaders claim, since they and the population are one. But the authors also describe how the leaders, just to be on the safe side, have sought to dominate the media as well.

This has been a simple task for Putin and Xi. In the tradition of Soviet and Maoist days, they have simply made it illegal for journalists—or anyone else—to criticize government policy. Journalists who resist have been forced into exile, arrested, or killed. Those who remain, running government-controlled media, say openly that they feel no shame promoting the Kremlin’s views.

Controlling the media was more complicated for Orbán, who had to pay at least lip service to the EU’s free press principles. The solution was for businessmen close to the prime minister, enriched by huge state contracts, to create what the authors call a “counterfeit public sphere”—buying up hundreds of newspapers and broadcasters and turning them into mouthpieces for Fidesz. The businessmen then, in an amazing coincidence, decided in 2018 to donate some 500 outlets to a government foundation, forsaking their investments and making it even easier for the government to control the outlets’ content.

Hungary could argue to the EU that the maneuvers of Orbán’s allies were simply decisions by individual businessmen, even if they seemed suspiciously coordinated and devoid of business sense. Hungary also let a few opposition media outlets cling to life, often financed by foreign grants. This “patina of democratic legitimacy,” the authors say, let Hungarian authorities continue to rake in EU subsidies while constantly attacking independent outlets as agents of “left-wing hysteria” and Trojan horses for foreign enemies.

López Obrador viciously attacked critical journalists by name, a frightening tactic in a country where murders of journalists are common. His supporters followed up the attacks with online campaigns, sometimes threatening the journalists’ lives. They benefited from existing public resentment of Mexico’s media, which had a long history of capture by previous government and business interests. In Brazil, too, many saw the mainstream media Bolsonaro railed against as part of an elite establishment that had abandoned common people.

In India, the picture was totally different. Major TV networks willingly entered what the authors call a Faustian bargain with Modi’s government, vying to offer the most flattering, noncritical coverage. One journalist called them Godi Media—godi meaning “lapdog.” In return for their fealty, the networks received easy access to state officials and revenue from state advertising.

In every case study, the regime sought to dominate social media. Yevgeny Prigozhin got his start in information warfare by drowning out Putin’s opponents on Russian social networks. China bans foreign social platforms and closely polices its own. An Orbán ally cultivated online influencers by offering technical training and building them a studio. Posts by López Obrador supporters were amplified by bots; automated accounts tweeted as often as 8,500 times a week. Top-level influencers posted a steady stream of pro-Bolsonaro content, lower-level actors promoted them in thousands of closed online groups, and millions of fans spread them further.

Moore and Colley list a string of other tactics that authoritarian rulers have used to control news production and distribution. Among them are “flooding the zone” with so many social media posts that opposition messages are barely visible, building digital platforms and apps they fully control, and establishing faux fact-checking bodies to endorse their statements and accuse their opponents of lying.

The authors note that Russia and China propagate their supposed truths on an international scale. They provide free text and video news feeds to cash-strapped news outlets in the Global South, thereby enhancing their own narratives with the credibility of local media. Russia has also been displacing Western countries as a major source of journalism training, bringing the Kremlin’s view of journalism to thousands of neophyte reporters and editors in developing countries.

Not all of this has worked out as Moscow and Beijing might have hoped. Russia’s international image has plunged during the Ukraine war. The authors say it is too early to judge if China’s media charm offensive has gained substantial international traction. They note that Beijing has had to embark on “aggressive campaigns to deflect and discredit” reports of its brutal treatment of Uyghurs.

Even at home, the ability of authoritarians to build new realities is not unlimited. They need something to work with. Even master manipulators must anchor their narratives in something, either in real-world events or in grievances felt by large parts of the population.

Under Putin and Xi, many citizens have seen their economic circumstances improve dramatically. This predisposes them to believe realities their leaders have manufactured in other areas. Similarly, according to Moore and Colley, López Obrador’s administration improved life for many poor and working-class Mexicans, helping to win him consistently high voter trust.

In Hungary, Orbán’s populism leveraged fears among many citizens over mass immigration and liberal social values. Modi has exploited long-existing tensions between Hindus and Muslims.

Yet in the course of their administrations, Putin and Xi have spent enormous amounts of money on domestic security agencies and surveillance technology—a clear sign of nervousness about their people’s support. (Indeed, when Prigozhin launched his mutiny in 2023, few Russians rushed to Putin’s defense, preferring instead just to wait and see what happened.)

The authors note that as Russia keeps failing to win the Ukraine victory it promised, its “state rhetoric has become more vengeful and genocidal, and the regime has been forced to rely on methods of control and censorship from a bygone era.”

Orbán lost the recent parliamentary elections despite his media capture and claims of anti-Hungary conspiracies. Indian voters stripped Modi of his parliamentary majority in the 2024 election after his version of reality “did not manage to convince enough people of being something that went against their direct experience.”

Bolsonaro lost the presidency in 2022 (albeit by a tiny margin) to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who campaigned against him on the economy and the need to protect the Amazon. Of the democratic leaders Moore and Colley studied, only López Obrador ended his presidency on a high note and was able to pass it to a successor of his own party.

Still, Moore and Colley are probably right that, worldwide, politicians promoting false realities are becoming ever more numerous and proficient. This may well be a factor in the decline of political and civil rights in 54 countries in 2025, according to Freedom House.

Is There a Solution?

To help guide citizens to what is true, Moore and Colley point to the importance of the fact-checking community and public service media, while acknowledging their limitations. One problem is that false narratives are often built on true facts. The facts may be selectively chosen, tendentiously arranged, and bathed in innuendo, but could technically pass a fact check. Public service media such as the BBC offer their audiences a reliable stream of verified information. But when authoritarians come to power, such media can face budget cuts and political takeovers.

The authors offer several other possible approaches. They suggest not framing the false reality problem as “fighting disinformation.” All forms of information are expanding so quickly, they argue, that it is virtually impossible to remove any one strain from the overall environment. According to Moore and Colley, some governments have worked intensely to counter false narratives on particular subjects, but they often recur in new forms. Beyond that, not a few governments have themselves become sources of disinformation.

The authors call for politicians and media to pull back from the tactic of storytelling—appeals to emotions, wishful thinking, and historical memory, emphasizing instead facts and logic. This sort of emotive storytelling has become an ever more common political tactic, they say, and by its nature lends itself to exaggeration and suppression of inconvenient facts. The authors acknowledge that emotional narratives are highly effective but say that, at least sometimes, “we need truth to get in the way of a good story.”

They call as well for a revived dedication to the “constitution of knowledge,” the principle that society must preserve and respect rigorous, time-tested processes that determine what is true and what is not. The authors mention the procedures used by academics, journalists, scientists and lawyers to establish facts. By deliberately subverting such processes and the institutions behind them, political actors seek to replace verified truth with “authoritative truth”—truth based on their own authority.

However, hopes that politicians will turn away from storytelling and renew their respect for logic are aspirational at best.

To this reviewer, the most thought-provoking advice proposed by the authors is for democracies not to emulate dictatorships by engaging in their own weaponization of news and information. Such a process, Moore and Colley fear, would lead even well-meaning governments to eventually create their own false realities and further degrade the world information order.

This, indeed, is a danger. However, as the reversals authoritarians have suffered demonstrate, humanity is not yet at a point where lies automatically triumph over reality. There is still room for democratic actors to campaign forcefully for clean government and true facts while avoiding the slippery slope to disinformation. The book identifies many tactics authoritarian actors use to spread false realities. Could not some of these tactics—such as “flooding the zone,” leveraging emotions, and building strong online communities—be reverse-engineered to promote what is true?

“Dictating Reality” is a highly readable book, rich in anecdotes, thumbnail profiles of key figures, and original research. It makes a compelling case for the danger of artificial truths. The task remains to find effective ways to combat them.