Lucid

05/08/2025

As more authoritarians come to power around the world, we see the myriad ways they seek to domesticate the press and shape public opinion. They and their proxies go to great lengths to be accepted as the arbiters of truth. Today, when one-party states are less common, billionaires or other allies of such leaders may buy into legacy or new media properties, assisting them to spread propaganda and speed the deterioration of democracy.

The readiness of many major American media properties to ally with President Donald Trump, and the parade of settlements, restructurings, and on-air personnel changes that have followed are the latest case. Yet it is Fox News, dubbed “The Network of Lies” by journalist Brian Stelter, that has been the biggest enabler of the authoritarianism now unfolding in the United States.

Where would Trump be now if Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch had followed his first impulse to act in Nov. 2020 to “stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen”? He floated the idea of having Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other top hosts appear together on television and state clearly that Joe Biden had won the election. We are living today with the consequences of Murdoch’s cowardly decision to instead spread Trump’s Big Lie.

Authoritarians are certainly aware of the power of the media to influence their fate. That’s why they work hard to substitute facts for a version of reality that suits their needs. That requires silence as well as noise. They jail and harm journalists and use defamation suits to intimidate and silence media outlets and public intellectuals, even as they offer us streams of distracting media content.

For one hundred years, charismatic demagogues have known how to use the latest media and information technologies to their benefit, communicating with people in ways that seem fresh and new. Some of them come into politics with years of experience in mass communication and persuasion. Mussolini and Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko had worked as journalists, while Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, like Trump, had years of experience with marketing and television. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, had a career in advertising.

Authoritarians put those skills to good use in building the personality cults that are key to people accepting them as arbiters of truth. Whether the head of state is on the left or the right, such cults revolve around the idea that the leader is a man of the people, but also a man above all other men – the only individual who can save the nation.

Religious elites of all faiths have played important roles in enabling such claims, not least by declaring that the leader is the vessel of a higher power as he carries out the will of the people. Il Duce had to contend with the Pope as a rival authority inside Italy, so he came up with the slogan “Mussolini is always right” to claim that he, too, was infallible. Leave it to Trump to update this by asserting, via an AI-generated image posted on Trump Social, that he is the Pope.