Global Press Freedom in Peril

Over the past decade, freedom of the media and of the press has been deteriorating rapidly. This rapid increase in state and corporate suppression is an extremely dangerous trend. The main factors, at least for Western Europe and North America, is an increase in corporate funding into news networks such as CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and Sky.

However, the past 5 years has seen an increasing amount of state interference into journalism, and a prime example of this is the United States. In the US, the President constantly attacks and derides any negative press, which leads to his supporters slowly but surely disavowing those news networks in lieu of the President's preferred channel, in case, Fox News.

This method differs immensely from previous methods to sway general opinion against journalism, and is far less authoritarian. While previously, a leader would outright ban or suppress a news organisation they disagreed with, what modern leaders tend to do is to slowly but surely push their supporters towards a certain ideology, which leads to the general public caring less about the press, or in certain cases even becoming hostile.

Another factor is right-wing populism. Right wing populism, as seen in Orban's Hungary, or Johnson's Britain. These regimes first used right-wing media to propel themselves into general discourse, then when elected, threaten more mainstream news sources to toe the line. This of course causes a vicious cycle in which the media is further and further weakened through direct state repression.

Yet some nations have started to become more brazen in their attempts to snuff out press they think is too critical. The murder of the journalists Jamal Khashoggi and Daphne Caruana Galizia show that certain nations have started taking an even more extreme approach. When looking at Saudi Arabia and its government, and this, the people who murdered Khashoggi, we can see that Saudi Arabia has no independent media. This is linked to the Saudi Royal Family, which is extremely repressive of any critical news.

Yet currently, the most dangerous trend is apathy. Not from the general public, but from state broadcasts. one need not look hard to notice a distinct lack of stories by the BBC about the yellow vests. How does this factor into repression? while not direction suppression, the omission of stories about this paints a clear message as to where the news organisations' loyalties lay.

However, hope still exists. Citizen journalism, as seen in Chile, Lebanon and Algeria led to mass action against their Government's repression, and in all 3 cases, this led to the Government either collapsing, such as is the case in Algeria and Lebanon, and in the case of Chile, a possible change to the entire Constitution. As the Washington Post's Motto reads, "Democracy dies in Darkness". We should not let it die a slow and painful death, as what follows is usually far worse.