The Impact of Populist Regimes in Europe on Journalism

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Marko Ribać, whose interest is in the impact of authoritarian-populist politics on journalism. The project focusses on Hungary and Turkey as clearly populist and autocratic regimes, compared to Austria and Slovenia as countries with more intermittently populist governments. The focus is on the past ten years of journalistic experience in each country, and conducted through interviews with some 82 newsworkers across the four countries to identify the external forces impacting on their work.

There are three broad areas of findings here. First, the influence of owners was felt strongly in Hungary and Turkey, where national private media were handed over to pro-government owners; there is a party line to be followed, and a constant threat of losing one’s job if it is not. Owners and editors also monitor news outputs, and this results in direct control and censorship of content being published. In Austria and Slovenia, this was felt far less strongly, though some direct intervention by owners was also felt during past populist regimes in Slovenia; in Austria, there are mainly just concerns about an Orbanisation of the media, especially in the context of the Ibiza scandal.

In Hungary and Turkey, there was also a strong perception of media/politics affiliation, eroding journalistic doxa and resolving the field of journalism into two acceptable stances that are antagonistic and hostile towards one another. There is a sense of a total lack of objectivity or neutrality in journalism. In Austria, this is felt more as an opposition between tabloid and quality media, and tabloids are captured by the government line because of their strong dependence on government advertising; while in Slovenia there was an ‘enemy overtake’ and party colonisation of the public broadcaster under the cover of supposed pandemic communication needs. This has substantially damaged the public broadcaster, and there are attempts to establish a second, even more government-aligned broadcaster.

Digitalisation was another important theme: online media were seen as an opportunity to develop freer media, but this was quickly colonised by the government in Turkey, and the social media space especially has been overrun by government-aligned cyberwarriors here. In Austria, digital media are seen to have enabled a (covert, not explicitly aligned) revival of the party press, and there is strong message control by populists who capitalise on the lack of journalistic resources – so the government communicates more actively directly online, too. In Slovenia, again, the pandemic was exploited as a reason to institute greater message control; also, working from home and following press conferences via online stream meant that journalists felt considerably more isolated from one another.