Journalism’s Impact On Authoritarian Regimes

Authoritarian regimes and totalitarian states create a very intense and difficult set of obstacles for journalists within their borders. Authoritarian states most often seize control of the media in their country and either provide a very controlled, biased version of the news to their people, or else they provide no news at all. Autocratic leaders will go to lengths to suppress information they don’t want coming to light including detainment, assault, or execution of offending journalists.

Despite the crusade against the free flow of information, journalism works on the public in a few ways regardless. One must consider the public perception of journalists in a healthy democracy versus a totalitarian regime: Various studies show that in traditional (Western) democracies, the public views the media as a detached observer with no vested interest in either the public or the government, but an entity in and of themselves. These publications also tend to run with one specific bias or political party in mind—this is called parallelism. While parallelism provides a mental challenge for some readers who differ politically, the number of outlets available in a healthy democracy usually offsets the products of parallelism. 

In a non-functioning democracy or authoritarian regime, when the goal of the ruling party is to bring all aspects of rule in the country under party control, journalists find themselves in a dangerous position. As the regime attempts to suppress the past of the country and make opposing political parties and even opposing political views illegal, the journalist is forced to consider how they might continue making their living. This could result in imprisonment or detainment and also results in all news sources exhibiting heavy parallelism for their authoritarian regime. News becomes untruthful or difficult to trust when put forward by these sources. 

So then what does the journalist do if they are in danger of being jailed or detained? Continue to do the work. Not at risk to their life or liberty, but instead, by getting creative: they begin dropping leads and become assets to reporters outside of their community where they can be helpful. This matters because authoritarian regimes suppress the important information that would reveal the truth about them to the rest of the world. Human rights abuses abound in these regimes, and while reporters may be forbidden from publishing these stories, they can continue to document them and pass that information off safely. 

Independent media who rise up to fill the gaps in local media can really help the rest of the world understand what is happening in the compromised space. Having quantifiable evidence and supplying it to a curious world reminds both the regime and the people struggling against it that there are forces working against the corruption central to an authoritarian state. This evidence doesn’t just matter today—it will matter in the future.

Journalism is the history of the future. In continuing to report and inform on the issues present within an authoritarian regime, journalists also create the legacy of a nation and its people: history for a later time to judge, but history nonetheless. Complete pictures of how a nation operates in a microcosm of a chaotic time will help future journalists and historians to draw patterns and create narratives out of the story a nation’s people are currently living through. There are so many moments from the 20th century that remain iconic in the collective unconscious due to the impact of journalism. 

So even if the impact may not be apparent, it’s there. Even though your job may be illegal in an authoritarian regime, and it may feel impossible to do, it’s still important to find ways to do it both for the benefit of the world and for posterity. Journalism always has an effect, but especially when it’s forbidden.