Exploring the Connections between Journalism and Authoritarianism

The next speaker in this P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is Ruth Moon, whose focus is on the role of journalists as authoritarian actors. Journalists have an important democratic role to play, but this is complicated when they work within authoritarian regimes, and democracy can decline even in countries where there is relatively high media freedom. Further, of course, ‘media’ is not a monolithic entity: media are themselves diverse and have various understandings of and approaches to democracy.

This means that we need to unpack the idea of ‘free media’ and examine the ways in which journalistic practices in various system contexts can encourage democracy and authoritarianism. This might be approached though an authoritarian practice perspective (where practices include disabling the voice of popular debate, and disabling access to information): how do journalists actively enable authoritarianism in their daily regimes?

Ruth’s project approaches this through a mixed-method literature analysis of articles on journalism and authoritarianism over the past 20 years; so far, this has reviewed the metadata of some 2,300 articles and found some strong coverage in some of the leading journals in media and communication, but less so in political communication and political science.

Social media emerges as a particularly strong focus of such work, with civil society, human rights, and public opinion less so. ‘Journalism’ itself does not appear as a particularly prominent term; forms of journalism that appear are especially data journalism and citizen journalism, and a crisis in journalism is also mentioned repeatedly. The next step is now a more detailed qualitative analysis of a selection of these articles.