Using Nigeria as an example, Martha Bayles explains the playbook of 21st c. authoritarianism and the specific nature of the threat it poses to press freedom: the-american-interest.com/2018/08/06/no-…
"The memory of 20th-century totalitarianism causes many Western observers to be especially wary of state-run media using heavy-handed propaganda to indoctrinate the masses in a particular ideology. ... But [this] is no longer the main threat."
"the main threat is of powerful officials and wealthy oligarchs using media to entertain, distract, and confuse the public, while at the same time suppressing any news and information that might impinge on their power.
"In a struggling democracy like Nigeria, the process is more haphazard, as corrupt elites—typically politicians and their private-sector cronies—acquire commercial media outlets and through bribery and intimidation strive to turn them into personal mouthpieces."
today’s [authoritarians] provide the masses with movies, TV series, reality shows, and “infotainment” about sports, weather, fashion, and celebrity gossip. The masses are also regaled with an entertaining simulacrum of TV news that copies the worst practices of US cable channels"
And here's an important part: "Unfortunately, the American people’s access to quality journalism is subject to the same growing inequality that exists in income, education, family life, and all the other indicators of the good life in America."
"For the everyday citizen who used to rely on mass-market magazines and network news, access to quality journalism is harder than it once was...the lower you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more in thrall you are likely to be to the worst practices noted above."
I would say that many who think themselves higher on the socioeconomic scale still don't realize that to get decent foreign news coverage, you have to pay a *lot* more than you do for a NYT subscription. As I keep saying, good foreign news coverage *does* exist ...
... but you have to pay a lot for it. Very few people are motivated to pay that much; most people haven't noticed that they no longer get much foreign news coverage at all, or that what they're hearing is manifest nonsense, or why.
It's a big problem that we've got to figure out a way to solve, because an electorate that has almost no contact at all with the news from abroad will naturally assume that's because nothing important is happening abroad;
it will have little sense of the significance and ramifications of our foreign policy, nor will it know how the rest of the world is doing--leaving them with little sense of where the US is doing comparatively well & where it isn't.
And this is a much bigger problem for a continental country like the US than it is for smaller countries because a) smaller countries don't have so much power, and can't so easily destroy or immiserate another country in a Tweet;
b) if you live in a small country (unless it's an island-state like Palau), you'll naturally have a sense that the rest of the world is large and significant and one misstep could get you killed, whereas if you like in the US, it's easy to forget that;
c) you won't benefit from new or good ideas from abroad, or learn from others' mistakes. The ascendency of the Asharites is said to be the reason Baghdad is no longer the center of the scientific world; the destruction of our sense of "abroad" has a similar mind-closing effect.
d) This can only be aggravated if we pursue a policy of strictly limiting immigration. So ... it's an obvious, serious problem that needs a solution; I haven't thought of one yet, but I hope someone does.
