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Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, "Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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A
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A
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me both of the authors of a new book published by Columbia University Press in 2025 titled Dictating Reality the Global Battle to Control the News. Obviously, this is an incredibly timely topic that takes us through a number of different countries. Some countries that are democratic, some countries that are not, some countries that are kind of in the middle and doing all sorts of things to understand this really important intersection of media, news, information and politics. Domestic politics, international politics. These are things that impact kind of high level diplomacy every day. They also impact kind of all of us all the time in our everyday interactions with what's going on. So clearly this is a really timely topic and something that we have a lot to discuss. So I'm very pleased to welcome both of the authors of the book, Dr. Thomas Colley and Dr. Martin Moore, to the podcast to tell me all about their work. Tom? Martin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast and thank you.
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C
For inviting us on.
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A
Could we please start with each of you introducing yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book and write it together. Martin, maybe you want to start us off.
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D
Thank you, Miranda. Yes, I'll have a go. So, yes, I'm Martin Moore. I specialize in political communication. I run a center for the study of Media Communication and Power at King's College London, and I'm a lecturer there. Why did we decide to write the book? Well, I mean, both Tom and I share it's a long, long interest in propaganda communications, government communications. About five or six years ago, we were looking at what Russia was doing in terms of, you know, using its kind of news outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik to try and interfere in elections and disrupt politics in other countries. And then you started expanding that and looking at what China was doing and how, how distinctive and in many ways different what China was doing to what Russia was doing. But as we were doing this, we were realizing that actually these techniques were being adopted by leaders and governments around the world. And that wasn't just autocratic and authoritarian governments, it was also democratic governments. And we saw an acceleration of that during COVID and we've seen even more acceleration of that post the invasion of Ukraine. And so it struck us we needed to better understand what, why they were doing this, how they were doing this, and the effects that it was having.
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C
Thanks, Martin. So I'm Dr. Thomas Colley. I'm a visiting fellow at King's College London, and I also am a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where we train UK army officers. And exactly as Martin described, we've had a long standing interest, mutual interest in propaganda news media. Mine focused a bit more on sort of war, national security, perhaps information warfare, a lot of research on disinformation. And so as we saw actors like Russia and China using disinformation and trying to manipulate the news in order to put out their versions of reality. You know, we were particularly interested in that. And as Martin said, during COVID we were awash with news of how different countries and different leaders were trying to put out their versions of reality, trying to justify their responses or inaction towards the virus. And we realized we had a global phenomenon to look at, and so we started studying lots of different countries. India, Hungary, Mexico, the US The UK and so that sort of project escalated from there. And that's the project that the book tries to bring about. But I think we are also concerned, bluntly, that some of these behaviors by governments were undemocratic and undermine, you know, democracies across the world. And so that's part of a concern of ours, too, and something we try to address in the book.
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A
Okay, so we clearly have a lot of things to discuss. Thank you both for that introduction. Before we get to some of the specific countries, though, Thomas, that you just listed there, I want to make sure we understand the stakes of this kind of investigation and its relevance for where we're at now, because we could start with the question of kind of, well, it seems normal for governments to want to influence the news. I mean, we should make it clear why that's something kind of worth investigating. So is it bad for governments to control or influence the news? Like, what are the stakes of this?
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C
So I think one of the big things bluntly, is, of course, it may be that on national security grounds, maybe in war, in certain situations, it might seem okay for governments to want to exert influence over the news. I mean, a lot of people today would say that the information environment is very polluted, full of disinformation, and might think actually government intervention or involvement could potentially be justifiable. Or maybe a government is being misrepresented by mainstream media and feels that they want to get their message out there, which seems high. However, the problem is fundamentally governments, their perspectives, they are driven by the imperative to try to stay in power. And what that means is they are often unreliable truth tellers. They have an incentive towards only focusing on information that presents them well and downplaying or silencing or putting spin on narratives that might reflect poorly on them. And so the stronger government control over the news gets, the less the news can serve its function of fully informing citizens about what is happening in their societies and enabling them to hold governments to account.
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A
Okay, that makes the stakes very clear. Martin, what would you like to add?
- [08:08]
D
Just to add a couple of things to that, because what we have to, I think, realize is that the circumstances in which governments are communicating have changed fundamentally in the last couple of decades, such that we see that kind of the traditional media, particularly the news media, are in a much, much weaker position now than they were at the turn of the century. A weak position in the sense that clearly there's Much, much more competition for people's attention. There are many, many more other outlets and voices, including of course, the voices of those within government. They're also in a much weaker position economically. We've seen news organizations across the globe either close or significantly scale back so that they are much less able to perform the roles that we have at this, to this point at least, kind of taken for granted the kind of, the kind of, the roles of the fourth Estate and scrutinizing those in power. So they're in a much weaker position at the same time as states have many, many more opportunities to speak to the public, to, to create their own media, to amplify their own voices, and in doing so, to amplify their own narratives and versions of the truth.
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A
Okay, so that gives us a good foundation then to start to compare some of the different countries that you examine in the book. I think the first one I want to pick out is one. Tom, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that things changed with Russian news around the full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. So what exactly changed at that point and how much of it was building on things we had sort of seen with the invasion of Crimea, or was it sort of completely out of nowhere in that moment?
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C
Yeah, so one of the big changes we saw was that Russia shifted in many ways from having quite an edgy, subversive, subtle and sophisticated approach to 21st century news to becoming far more Soviet authoritarian. This. So in other words, if we go back to incidents like when Russia shot down the MH17 aircraft in Ukraine, their approach in the news was, and Martin did some fantastic research on this to put out as many different narratives, explanations as possible about why that was the case in order to essentially sow public confusion within Russia and internationally about what was true at all. Journalist Luke Harding of the Guardian described this as weaponized relativism. This idea that if you get people to the point where they can't work out what's true at all, then they don't know who to trust. And that might be useful to undermine social cohesion in liberal democracies, but also it makes it harder for people to agree on what to do on how to improve Russian society, for example, maybe change the government, etc. So Russia did that through the subtle use of RT and Sputnik by hosting anti establishment voices on their channels from Western societies that would always put out perspectives that Western societies are in chaos, that liberalism is dead. It's ridiculous, it's flawed, it's dying. However, after February 2022. And Russia, you know, embarked on this full scale invasion, the ninth year of its war in Ukraine, which people often forget. They suddenly had this imperative, they renewed this invasion of the country. Their methods became far more sort of old school authoritarian. People were being imprisoned for calling a war a war, not the special military operation. They were being imprisoned for spreading what the government called fake news about the war, which is essentially anything other than the government's official narrative about what was happening in this conflict. And so as a result, and they, you had Russian television talk shows for hours every night on which leading Russian propagandists were openly advocating Soviet Union style censorship, saying no society can, no big society can survive without tight control of information. So this is very much. And that's leaving alone how strongly Russia controlled information in occupied Ukraine, taking control of TV towers, switching out Ukrainian technology for Russian technology, distributing SIM cards to Ukrainians to control their Internet access. So basically, Russia has gone far more old school authoritarian since February 2022 in its desire to control information, which is partly a continuation of what Putin had tried to do in the previous 20 years in power, but it really accelerated from that point onwards.
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D
Can I just add, to add to that, because I think exactly as Tom says, they have accelerated this attempt to create this sovereign reality within Russia. But what's fascinating about Russia, and I suppose the most extreme example that we could find of where the government has sought to use news and current affairs as a means by which to, to put forward these, what seemed to us kind of absurd unrealities, distortions of the truth. Just to give some examples from, from Ukraine, I mean, so within Russia, when people talk about Bucha, Bucha for Russia is a shorthand for, for fake news. It's a shorthand for how you stage manage a massacre. Whereas for the rest of the world, Bucha is a terrible, awful massacre that the Russian forces conducted early in the conflict where hundreds of civilians were killed and put in mass graves. You know, and this is documented and this is recorded and this is by independent witnesses and others. So in that sense, within Russia, they have a completely different understanding of reality than we do outside. Take another example. Russia has forcibly displaced tens of thousands of children from Ukraine to Russia, which has been condemned by many international organizations. Within Russia. The way that is portrayed is that these children were evacuated for their own safety and are being very benevolently rehomed within Russia. So again, you see this sort of complete, if almost almost sort of, I think we refer to it in the book as sort of like Newton's third law of motion where every reaction has a equal and opposite reaction. Every piece of reality outside has an equal and opposite reality within Russia. And they're only able to do this because of this very, very concerted attempt to control the information environment, which seemed, you know, when we, when the Internet arrived and when we thought there'd be this sort of wonderful openness and it would be impossible for people to do what the Soviet Union and others did in the 20th century and before in terms of controlling information. Actually we're seeing a sort of reassertion of control within this new environment.
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A
Okay, that's very helpful and interesting to understand the ways in which obviously the technology is kind of new and evolving, but some of the tactics being used actually take us back further in time. Thinking then about control of the news media and these really kind of quite non subtle methods. I suppose the obvious question that comes to my mind is with similarities and differences between what you've described there with Russia and with China that obviously also very consistently for a long time has used quite specific methods of controlling and using the news. Are there some key similarities and differences that you found when comparing these two countries?
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C
Yeah, I think one of the significant differences. China has been more focused on control than Russia. China tends to prefer a single narrative relayed almost bombarding people on all possible media channels, which is far less subtle than Russia's approach that we described in the previous question. Russia's far happier in a situation of creating uncertainty about what the truth is and using that uncertainty to disorientate and demobilize its citizens. Whereas China is very much. This is the official narrative. You'll get this if you look at Xinhua, the news agency, if you go on CGTN or Global Times, or if you listen to a press conference by a Chinese Communist Party spokesperson, the official narrative is there, it's clear, it's repeated. And then China will be trying also in a global campaign, to buy up and take ownership stakes in news outlets around the world and then use those to put those fairly singular narratives out there and essentially try to dominate the information environment that way. But China combines that with fairly Orwellian systems of censorship. The classic example when you read books on Chinese media is the removal, the censorship of not just things like the Tiananmen Square massacre in the late 80s, but also things like removing references to Winnie the Pooh from the Chinese Internet because of an unfavorable resemblance to Xi Jinping. Russia doesn't have the resources to censor that way in the way that China does. Even If Putin's regime may want to. Russia, for example, has kept access to Telegram open, it's kept access to YouTube open, despite accusing YouTube repeatedly of sort of supporting terrorism. It's done that because it knows that it can't actually stop Russian people fully from using it, even though Russia has started going further down the line of blocking people from downloading VPNs and things like that. There is, as we've said, as Russia gets more authoritarian and pursues tighter information control, are sort of blurring the lines between them. So they are similar in intent to control the information of Bonan. China just has the resources and will to do that more effectively than Russia.
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D
And I think it's important in this instance to distinguish between the domestic and the international in the sense that, as Tom says, I mean, the two have been quite distinct in both in the past. So historically, at least from, you know, the 1990s onwards, Russia was domestically at least more open than China. It's becoming. It's become less and less open as the years have gone on. China, right from the start, right from when the Internet arrived in China, the CCP took measures to try to control it domestically and to put obligations on tech platforms and others to. To censor and to have manual and automated systems. But then if you looked internationally, Russia historically was really trying take a very, very kind of disruptive, destructive approach where it was trying to pretty much do anything that causes chaos. Whereas China, internationally at least, was projecting this sort of counter hegemonic perspective, in other words, sort of trying to present itself as an alternative, you know, kind of a leader of the world. And so it was adopting some of the sort of staid approaches internationally on its international news stations and its international communications to give the impression that it was, you know, a little bit, I suppose, I suppose, similar to the BBC World Service or something, obviously with some really fundamental, important differences in terms of independence. But that was the kind of impression it was trying to give internationally. What we've seen, as Tom mentioned really just within the last few years, is both on the domestic front, China and Russia becoming more similar, with Russia trying to adopt and integrate some of the methods that the Chinese government has used historically. And interestingly, China becoming a little bit more like Russia internationally and very covertly, but using some of this sort of disruptive and destructive methods to interfere in other people's elections and to try and sort of promote a kind of perspective about the dysfunctionalism of liberal society.
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A
Yeah, in fact, it's exactly that sort of domestic and international aspect that I'd love to discuss a little bit more in the case of China, because in many ways it seems like China has been somewhat more successful than Russia in not necessarily interfering beyond its borders, but in extending its parallel reality, its different narratives beyond its borders. So not just for domestic audiences. Why might that be?
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C
Well, it's a fascinating question. Just to illustrate with an example. From 2021 onwards, one of the campaigns we observed and studied on China was a global campaign to promote itself as the world's leading democracy. Which of all examples of the parallel realities we talk about when we talk about the book and what we've studied, people look up in the room and say, what? China, the world's leading democracy? How ridiculous is that? But China has reached a point of confidence that it was willing to try to persuade audiences of that. How? Partly it's an economic thing. China has the funding behind it channeling billions into international news, its propaganda apparatus, and it has bought stakes, signed content sharing agreements, distributed news from its leading channels for free to countries throughout the world. And what that economic strength gives them is a degree of ability to influence people. There's narratives put out in other news chats. Some journalists have complained, for example, of being fired from their news channels because a Chinese state media company has taken partial ownership and they're not happy with the editorial line of that news outlet. But China has also genuinely invested in infrastructure, media infrastructure throughout the world, particularly in Africa, for example, and through initiatives like the Belt and Road initiative. And that grants China a degree of goodwill internationally and is backed by funding that Russia just cannot match. Both of them are making big efforts to get more positive narratives about their countries spread internationally. And Russia has had some success in certain parts of Africa and South America, particularly among political elites there. But China has had had far more success, and it's partly due to that economic clout and the genuine successes that China has had. And to be honest, to a degree in comparison, a degree of dysfunction seen in a lot of liberal democracies in the world, which we've not yet discussed, but we may well discuss later, it's.
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D
Worth saying as well that.
- [24:16]
C
Whilst it.
- [24:17]
D
May seem slightly sort of just unbelievable to think that, you know, China is the world's leading democracy and many of us might be skeptical about that, if you look at it from the other perspective, in a sense, that how much bad news do we hear about the CCP at the moment? So in the last few years, if you try and think back and you think about how much has come out of China in terms of reporting on Xinjiang, reporting on democracy in Hong Kong, reporting on some of the questions around corruption within China. Very, very little. So it's not necessarily that China has been very successful at promoting a particular perspective on its government abroad, but it has been, I think, very successful at dampening down criticism of its government and the exposure of its government for. For whatever it is, you know, the, the camps in Xinjiang or sort of threats to democracy within Hong Kong.
- [25:21]
A
Yeah, that's definitely an interesting aspect as well. Not just what narratives are out there, but also what narratives are not out there, too. So moving then to some other countries that you examine in the book, we obviously do have countries like China and Russia where the governments have pretty direct control over a lot of the way that news gets out there, but most countries don't. And yet we are seeing examples where leaders are getting a lot of control over the news, even without some of those measures we've just been discussing. So, for example, in Hungary, how does that work for leaders to have such control without being able to have something like the Great Firewall?
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D
I mean, Hungary is a fascinating example, I think, not least because Hungary is clearly an outlier politically within the eu, calls itself an illiberal democracy. But Hungary has also been often held up as a model, particularly by the U.S. right, and figures like Tucker Carlson and J.D. vance and indeed Trump himself, have pointed to Hungary as a model. And so I think it's worth looking at Hungary and trying to understand particularly how Viktor Orban, the leader and his party fidgets, has very strategically and very structurally taken control of Hungary's news environment. And they did it from the second time that Orban came to office from in 2010. He's been in office since 2010. He was in office briefly before that, but he's been continuously in office since 2010 until now. And right from when he arrived in office, he and his party began this process, a process which started by compromising the media regulation, compromising the independence of the media regulator, such that the media regulator from that point onwards would essentially sort of rubber stamp decisions made by the government, but would block any attempts, for example, at mergers by independent companies or consolidation by independent media outlets. Having compromised the media regulator and then moved on to the public service broadcaster. And it gutted the public service broadcaster. I think in One summer, about 800 people and employees, the public service broadcaster, were fired and installed, loyalists and installed, particularly those who were in some cases. And we know this because we've had leaks, journalists who have managed to get leaks from the public service broadcaster. We know that there are co channels which mean that the government can in many cases literally dictate the news. I mean, in the sense of, you know, writing headlines, writing, you know, head first, writing, you know, broadcasts before they go on air. It then moved on from the public broadcaster to the commercial media system, which of course was much harder because the commercial media system was outside the government's direct control. But what it did here was a little bit similar to what the Kremlin has done in the past. And there's a, there's a term called the Kremlin systema where those in, in the positions of government reach out to their close networks, their friends and they encourage their friends and in some case subsidized their friends to buy up media outlets. And this is exactly what Orban did. He got friends of his, particularly a sort of a, someone he'd grown up with in Fel, to buy up dozens and dozens of media outlets with money. It should be said that it was essentially funneled to this person via state entities until, you know, by 2018, he and other friends of Orban had hundreds of independent media outlets which they then donated to a government run foundation. So at that point the government essentially had perhaps a direct but indirect control of much of the commercial media within Hungary. So much so that, you know, when Orban ran the next election, every local newspaper strongly endorsed Orban and pushed, pushed down his opponents. And then since 2019, 2020, what we've seen is a shift towards trying to figure out how to, if not control, then at least dominate, dominate social media within Hungary in particular, by identifying, encouraging and then amplifying right wing influences on social media, in some cases literally sort of paying for their amplification through likes and shares on social media. So you now have a kind of network of very large followings of right wing influencers on social media. And that's what helped Orban get reelected last election. So you can see how, you know, each different, if you like, sort of piece of the media puzzle the Orban government has sought to, to control and is now at the point where it has, it's never, it doesn't want 100% control, it only wants sort of, you know, 80 plus percent, because then it can say, look, look, we're not, we're not a dictatorship, we're not authoritarian, there is still free media out there and yet it has, you know, by far the majority of the media essentially under its thumb.
- [30:54]
C
I think it's also worth adding on this one. I mean, it is in some ways quite shocking. In Hungary, the election Martin described, when you had 350 newspapers, all with the same image of Orban on election day, all with the same worded article on why everyone should vote for him, that's quite astonishing in a democracy. But another point worth mentioning is perhaps how Orban's administration has justified this because they've not just taken control and co opted the media, they've actually successfully persuaded many Hungarian citizens, if you look at opinion polls, that actually some shadowy elite opponent is the one that really controls Russian media, sorry, Hungarian media, and led by George Soros, the classic sort of anti semitic conspiracy theory, something like 40% of Hungarians, according to some polls, believe these conspiracy theories put out in the Orban press, that actually they control the media. And that Orban administration is essentially saving Hungary from this shadowy elite group conspiring against the Hungarian people. And so as well as the sort of backhanded giving news outlets or ensuring that news outlets go to friendly business people and other elites that are sort of aligned with the Prime Minister. There's also that narrative level where there's a parallel reality that Orban's putting out that actually his country is under threat and the media is under threat from this shadowy conspiracy cabal and that actually Orban's administration is saving Hungary from that. And that's partly how they've managed to justify or put a smokescreen over these attempts to take control of the media.
- [32:55]
A
This is a really interesting example in and of itself, but also in comparison to another one of the cases in the book, which is India, where there's a some way, sort of a similar co option of the media going on, but it seems to be sort of more willing from within the media. I mean, what you've just described in Hungary is a lot of media actors not wanting this to happen. What is similar or different? If we look at India in comparison.
- [33:21]
D
You'Re right to distinguish the two because I think they are, there are similarities, but they're also really important differences with India. I mean India has become, I mean it is, it is fallen and fallen on the World Press Freedom Index, but it's it. The reasons for that are different than Hungary in particular because. And they show how democratic governments do have actually a lot more tools at their disposal, especially now for controlling and directing the media than, than we often think. So and this is, I mean particularly since, since Narendra Modi has come to power in, in 2014 and similar to Orban and Fadettes, Modi and the BJP have very consciously sought to distinguish in the media between essentially friends and enemies and for friends within the media. And by friends, I mean media outlets that present them, present their agenda as they want it presented, that are not overly critical, that give access to BJP politicians and, and not to congress and others and enemies, obviously the, those. Those. Those who. Who do otherwise. And they very strategically use money and access. So if you are a friend, you get access to Modi and you get access to other BJP politicians, you get access to political institutions, you get access to information and you get access to information early. And you get money. You get money in the sense of money, advertising money directed to you. You get money more indirectly, for example, by BJP politicians coming to your conferences. And this is bearing in mind a lot of news organizations, as I say, are economically challenged at the moment. And one of the ways that they earn additional money is by doing things like holding events and that sort of thing. And so, and so Modi has used these tools to encourage and incentivize his friends, while at the same time for those who he considers his enemies. If you are a media organization who is doing investigations, who is criticizing, then you should expect to have raids, you should expect to have investigations as to your tax affairs. You should expect in some cases to have legal action against you and possibly even go to jail. What has happened really as a consequence and sort of the use of these levers is that we've seen the emergence, particularly in terms of broadcast media, broadcast news media in India of. Of these channels which are slavishly supportive of Modi and the BJP who, who, you know, extol the virtues of Modi and his leadership. So much so that there's this. There's this genus independent journalist in India called Ravish Kumar. Ravish Kumar referred to them as the Godi media. Godi meaning lap dog media. And that's a term which has now been picked up such that generally many, many news outlets, the most popular broadcast news outlets, news news outlets in India are known as the Godi media because of this. Because of this ongoing support.
- [37:00]
C
Yeah. And I think the. Similar to the. Another similarity with Hungary is again, you have a parallel reality put out by these news outlets. So, you know, Modi's government is Hindu nationalist. In essence. The ideology driving it is this significant idea that, that Hindu India should be dominant and other ethnic minorities in India, particularly Muslims, you know, should. Should perhaps be subjugated. You get that in a lot of rhetoric from BGP politicians. You can find that over the years. And so, for example, during COVID these news outlets were reporting accusing Muslims during COVID of spitting on food, what they called spit jihad, they've accused Muslims of love jihad, saying that Muslims are trying to take Hindu women and marry them. And this is somehow unjust and illegitimate when at the same time, a lot of these same politicians and supportive news outlets have, you know, put out articles and reported on events in a way that suggests a degree of discrimination against Muslims, but also claim that actually what's happening in India is this Muslim minority is dominating Indian society. So again, they're the enemy at the gates against which Modi needs to protect the Hindu majority from. So again, you have this inversion of reality where you have the government and supportive media outlets claiming the country is under threat from a minority group. It is in many ways in the process of oppressing. And so there's another similarity in how these outlets are used in that way.
- [39:05]
A
That's really interesting to see the sort of similarities and differences there, especially as I think those are maybe not comparisons that would immediately come to mind without this sort of analysis. But I want to turn to a different section now of the book to again, see sort of what might be more similar, perhaps than we expect, because so far we've been talking mainly about sort of traditional media, so newspapers or TV shows, things like that. And obviously, as you've demonstrated in our discussion, those aspects of the way the news comes out still have a huge impact. But there is also, these days, social media, which is a big source of where people get their news too. And so we don't want to leave that out of the conversation, especially because it might seem like it would have to be left out that, wow, it's so different from these mainstream things. It's so much more decentralized, maybe even democratizing, that surely a leader kind of couldn't use these sorts of techniques to control it. That, however, from reading the book, seems like maybe more of a myth than we might think. Because you have a whole section, for example, on Brazil that shows state actors very much using social media to get their narrative across in some similar ways to what we've been talking about. So maybe you can tell us more about this aspect of your analysis.
- [40:21]
D
Yes, Brazil. Brazil. Brazil is. Is so important, I think, because in some ways it's an indication as to where we might be going. Because as you say, it illustrates what you can do in almost entirely in new media, particularly social media, and not in traditional media. And the reason for that is because in Brazil, Brazilians embraced social media a lot more quickly and to a greater extent than many people elsewhere in the world and spend hours and hours on it each day and rely, for example, on WhatsApp, essentially like a social utility. And in Brazil, Bolsonaro, Bolsonaro who became president in 2018 and was voted out in 2022. Bolsonaro could realistically never have become president in the traditional media world. The traditional media wrote off Bolsonaro as a clown, as a marginal figure, as one of these slightly absurd figures who talks about military coups. But yet Bolsonaro, really, working very closely with his sons and a few others, was able to take advantage of the fact that Brazilians were increasingly getting their news, as you say, from social media, who were finding out about politics from social media, and essentially to bypass the mainstream media outlets and to build his support almost entirely through a networked public sphere online. And he did this both before he gained the presidency, but more importantly, from our perspective, he then enhanced and extended this during the presidency. And he did this by creating this kind of a network, this network of combination of influences, very powerful influences in Brazil, by creating a whole series of essentially pop up news organizations and by actually essentially subsidizing some of his associates to create content on his behalf, such that what you get by the end of his presidency is you get literally this sort of alternative public sphere, by which I mean there is a whole public sphere of YouTube channels, of social media channels of very, very large influences who are talking about, describing and framing news entirely differently from the mainstream media. And yet close to the majority of Brazilians are getting their news from this alternative public sphere rather than from mainstream media. And it meant that one New York Times journalist actually, I think, talked about this after the attempted coup in 2023, where he said that many Brazilians appeared to have a sort of mass delusion. They seemed to have a kind of view of the world that was entirely at odds with the view of the world from outside Brazil, and indeed the view of the world from many other Brazilians who were not within this networked digital public sphere. And so I think that for that reason, I think we need to much better understand exactly what Bolsonaro and his associates did, because I think it's a model that we will increasingly see used elsewhere.
- [44:11]
C
Yeah, I think it's important to understand what social media offers leaders like Bolsonaro. They can. So, for example, Bolsonaro at a rally event could live stream to his followers, or his sons could, or leading influences could, without that mediation and editorial filtering from a mainstream news outlet. So if you want to go direct to your people and you want them to come directly to you for their news, for you as their source of truth. Social media is actually very useful. The other thing, if you went on, for example, Bolsonaro or Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, now their campaign websites during the 2022 election, you scroll down the page and there were just hundreds of WhatsApp groups that people could join. So people said, come and join our campaign, join one of our WhatsApp groups. And in one of those WhatsApp groups, you had sort of party supporters, loyalists, feeding that tiny echo chamber of people, the sort of pro regime messages, memes to spread out smears against opponents. And so actually social media, the way it was structured, we don't use WhatsApp like that so much in the UK now yet. But in Brazil it was being used to create these groups where you saw these incubators of sort of pro Bolsonaro or anti lunar messaging. It's also worth just finally clarifying what was achieved here. I mean, it's very hard to prove the effect of communication in the real world, but what you had in Brazil was really quite unusual. You had tens of thousands of people on the street calling for military dictatorship to save them from democracy. That is not a normal state of affairs. It is not usually what calls people onto the streets. So whilst causation is hard to prove, that suggests that this use of social media, this alternative information ecosystem outside of mainstream media was very effective.
- [46:22]
A
Yeah, that's a very stop in your tracks sort of example there that really demonstrates this point. So thank you for adding that in. One thing I want to sort of draw explicit attention to is something that's come up now, I think in every question we've discussed so far, which is that we start off talking about a country and then very quickly end up talking about a space specific leader, which is really true in all of these examples we've talked about that there is kind of a central leader that's such a key part of this. Is that just a coincidence or is that a key part of what we're seeing?
- [46:57]
C
It's not a coincidence, it's. It reflects a particular style of politics. And the link between a lot of the authoritarian approaches to news we see today is closely tied up with populism as a political strategy. Populism, I'm sure everyone's heard a lot of the term used this idea that the main tension in society is between a corrupt elite who are conspiring against the ordinary people, against their interests, and what particular political figures are doing, often leaders of parties and countries is trying to say, I am your voice. As Trump said, I am your voice. I am your warrior. I am your retribution. These leaders are trying to position themselves as channeling the people's will. And so their style of communication is to try to encourage people to come to them. They are messianic figures. They are like televangelists. They're trying to put out the gospel towards their people, something that should not be questioned or challenged, edited by journalists. So how does the news fit into that? What happens is these leaders say, don't trust mainstream media. They're fake. It's fake news. Don't trust them. They're not acting in your interest. They're elites. They're not ordinary people. They don't represent the people's interests. Instead, come to me for your truth. I am the truth. I am your truth. I will dictate. This is one of the reasons we call the book Dictating Reality, because of this new strategy, a conscious strategy by political leaders to try and position themselves essentially as the dictators of reality. And you have examples where congressmen in America in 2016, I forget who, said something along the lines of, yeah, Trump's the president, here's your truth. You don't need to go anywhere else. Go to him for your reality. This is despite, however, many tens of thousands of sort of falsehoods or misleading statements Trump, you know, issued while in office during that term. So, yeah, these leaders are on a conscious effort to be seen as the authority on what is true and real in their society. And news is one of the key vectors, the key means through which they try and achieve that.
- [49:34]
D
And digital media lends itself structurally to individuals as well. I mean, I think we need to recognize that there are structural features of social media, for example, which mean that people are much more likely to follow an individual than they are to follow an institution. And to. To look to individuals on social media, hence influences, and equally, that this also represents something that is much more common historically. What I mean is that I think we forget that the period that we've been through in the last century is of one of being run mainly through institutions and through the processes by which institutions interrelate to each other. For much of history, you know, it's been monarchs, it's been monarchs, it's been individuals who have sort of sat at the pinnacle of society. And so in many ways, I suppose the emergence of the, the XI's and the MODIS and the Putins and the Orbans and the Amlos has been a sort of reversion to a more historical norm than what we have seen in our lifetimes today.
- [50:43]
A
Well, in fact, it's exactly that comparison with history that I'd like to turn to next, Martin, which is push back against this sort of thing. Obviously, as you said, this isn't necessarily new in some senses, and we have had earlier generations of truth seekers pushing back against these sorts of efforts. So what does that look like now? And what other sorts of pushback might be possible going forward?
- [51:08]
D
We have, and we do have pushback. And to take a couple of examples, we've seen the emergence of new types of truth seeker, such as fact checking organizations and such as so called open source intelligence organizations. And these are often kind of civil society organizations, Sometimes they're attached to directly to traditional newsrooms, but that's more the case in America than elsewhere. And in the case of fact checking, we've seen a sort of really significant growth in the last 15 years from just a kind of handful before 2010. It rose to over 400 by over 2020 globally. And their whole purpose and the way they sort of justify themselves is about trying to verify information. Not necessarily to kind of make any judgments about it, but simply to verify information in a world where it's becoming more and more difficult to verify information, or in the case of open source intelligence, to use to take advantage of this massive abundance of recorded information that we have out there and make sense of it and use it to investigate, for example, the downing of planes over Ukraine and elsewhere. So we are seeing the sort of, you know, nascent emergence of new types of, of truth seeker in society who are trying to challenge some of the narratives that have been put out by these leaders and these, these governments. But they're very, they're very young and they're very fragile. And in many cases they rely very heavily on, for example, foundation funding for funding from, often from, from the tech platforms as well as donations from the public. And so they're very hand to mouth a lot of these organizations. And actually what we've seen certainly in the last few years as the tech platforms have drawn back and as some of these foundations have come under pressure, most notably for example from Donald Trump, these very nascent kind of attempts to try and reinvent truth seeking for the 21st century are under threat. And I think that's, that's a real problem, that's a real danger. Because what we have to recognize is that actually the media and communications environment has changed fundamentally and our political systems are changing and the institutions, including the kind of news institutions need to change as well. We shouldn't seek to just preserve what's been in the past. We should recognize the needs of the present and reinvent in order to serve those needs. But we can only do that if we help those who are trying to do the reinvention at the moment. I think those are in danger.
- [53:55]
C
I think this is a really important point. If you look at open source organizations like bellingcat, who did so much with combining satellite imagery, open source research to identify what Russia has been doing in Ukraine for much of the last decade, you know, I don't see bellingcat necessarily. You know, even the most prominent of these organizations aren't necessarily particularly profitable yet, but they also face attack not just from, from certain governments in democracies and authoritarian states, but they also face the threat of imitation. So for example, when Russia initiated its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it also set up a site called War on Fakes. And what this site was was essentially a fake fact checker. In other words, whenever Russia was accused of a massacre, like at Bucha, as Martin mentioned, War on Fakes would try and put out essentially a fact check investigation to debunk the claims against Russia. And it claimed to be this sort of objective, citizen led organization that was trying to provide objective information about the war on Ukraine. And actually it was Russian disinformation. It was basically saying that whenever Russia was accused of massacring civilians, actually it was British special forces flying into rural Ukraine and putting bodies in basements and then ensuring they're filmed, or that people who were injured when Russia bombed hospitals were crisis actors. So in other words, you'd have these open source organizations trying to seek and publish the truth, show what's fake, but then their methods would be imitated by Russia to spread disinformation. So it's not even just that such organizations are financially fragile. They're now being imitated by people wanting to spread lies. And so this contest between reality and alternative reality is advancing another step. And we need to really stick with and pursue that, because no technique will automatically remain the sort of valid and reliable and trustworthy source of truth forever necessarily. This is an ongoing issue.
- [56:28]
A
Yes, very clearly an ongoing and evolving issue. So something we'll have to continue to pay attention to in all of these different countries and of course, more broadly as well. So is this what each of you are going to be continuing to work on now that the book is done, or. I don't know, if either of you have upcoming projects you want to give a brief sneak preview of.
- [56:47]
C
So, well, we'll hopefully do lots more research together in future. Currently, I'm working on an introduction to Propaganda for the general Reader, partly driven by the desire to help people, help myself, and help people understand how governments and how large institutions are trying to persuade people to believe and buy into and act on the version of reality they want to put across. So that's, that's my next project that I'm currently working on.
- [57:20]
D
Yes. And I'm similarly working in the same field, although I'm sort of recognizing that the extent to which media and politics has changed so fundamentally and also recognizing the extent to which I need to understand more about it, as I think many of us do. So I'm writing a textbook. I'm writing a textbook, indeed, called Media and Politics, which is going to do exactly that. Just try and really kind of get to grips with where we are with what's happening and how we understand it and then how we respond to it.
- [57:53]
A
Well, all of those projects sound very helpful in continuing to make sense of how all of these things are intertwined. So for listeners that want to learn more, of course you can read the book that has just been published by Columbia University Press in 2025 that we've been discussing titled Dictating Reality, the Global Battle to Control the News. And I've had the pleasure of having both of the authors with me to talk about it. So, Tom and Martin, thank you so much for joining me.
- [58:17]
C
Thank you, Brandon.
- [58:18]
D
Thank you so much, Miranda.