Theorising the Elements of Media Capture in Backsliding, Autocratising Democracies

The second speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Cherian George, whose focus is on the theory of media manipulation in autocratising electoral regimes. Autocracy or authoritarianism as a regime type is different from the process of autocratising and democratic backsliding, and the process is often related to media capture by political actors.

Existing autocracies are often born this way: this is the case for China or Iran, for instance; conversely, backsliding democracies like Turkey, Poland, or Israel experience a change in their democratic institutions. Singapore or Hong Kong, in turn, are something else and in between again. This means that there are significant differences between these countries.

Such differences include the existence of democratic institutions and culture; of major independent news organisations; of active civil society and an engaged citizenry; and a democratic constitution and independent judicial system. Would-be autocrats will need to dismantle these systems (and this is certainly possible, given enough time in power).

Media capture, then, is a necessary early stage in autocratisation, but this faces friction and resistance. Autocratisers might choose variously violent, visible, and/or extensive approaches to addressing this, and this choice of manipulative methods matters. For example, autocratisers today may not seek to explicitly ban independent media altogether, but enable their slow takeover by friendly business operators; they may not forcefully raid newsrooms, but frustrate their operation through financial chicanery; and they may use targetted oppression against journalists and media organisations rather than all-out attacks.

Such patterns have been observed in countries from Turkey through India to the Philippines, and have been successful in shaping a more friendly environment for their autocrat facilitators Erdogan, Modi, and Duterte. This also avoids making journalists into martyrs and thereby reduced public outrage about this slow capture of the media; it also benefits from limited public understandings of the concept of editorial independence, and a strong respect for the media proprietors’ rights to direct the operation of their outlets that is common in capitalist systems.

But it is dangerous to oversimplify and overgeneralise these patterns. Media freedom indices show declines across a large number of countries around the world, but the nature of such declines differs widely depending on local circumstances. There may be more similarities across backsliding democratic regimes than between them and born-autocratic regimes, though.