Reading this week’s passages provided a glimpse into a kind of censorship that looks nothing like the redacted and blackout sources I once imagined.
In the opening chapters of The New Censorship, Ayala Panievsky opens with Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan standing outside Netanyahu’s office in 2016, reading his attack on her, on national television where she had to broadcast the accusation that she was a traitor. For Panievsky, this moment previewed a global trend, from Trump’s “enemies of the people” to the AfD’s “lying press,” in which populist leaders attack journalists not by banning stories, but by drowning them out. She describes this new censorship as “authoritarianism masquerading as democracy.”
What struck me most was her argument that we have been defending the wrong side. Debates about the media tend to center on free speech, which protects the speaker, even one spreading lies. Panievsky instead centers the conversation on the public’s right to know the truth: our ability to vote, protest, and make decisions based on reliable, honest information we draw our own conclusions from. She is not dismissive of social media’s power to connect and mobilize, but she argues that no influencer or even chatbot can replace the years of collaborative reporting behind stories like Watergate.
Drawing on Cas Mudde and Jan-Werner Müller, Panievsky defines populism as a ideology that divides society into “the real people” and “the corrupt elites,” leaving no room for legitimate opposition. Under this logic, any criticism of the leader becomes betrayal of the people themselves. I found her example of Nigel Farage turning on the Daily Mail the moment it criticized him reveals how fragile loyalty has become, “In a single headline, the Mail went from being one of Farage’s staunchest allies to, in his view, conspiring with the Kremlin.”
Once journalists are framed as enemies, every critical story appears to confirm the accusation, so even a damning investigation becomes an asset for the populist. Social media rewards divisive content, amplifying a small, vocal minority while most users stay silent, and turns the occasional angry note on a reporter’s windscreen into constant, coordinated harassment. Having just watched the film “The Social Reckoning” this message of how hatred equates to more engagement was a tool platforms such as Meta embraced, meanwhile, the business model for news is collapsing. Lies are cheap and fast to produce, while truth is slow and expensive to verify.
Her own experience made this concrete. As an editor in Tel Aviv, she fought to put Sudanese asylum seekers being deported to third countries on her magazine’s cover, while advertisers pushed back. Given our class’s focus on migration, it struck me how easily refugees disappear from the news, not because anyone censors them, but because their stories do not sell. Panievsky also shows how populists and Silicon Valley tell a similar story about democracy: direct, majoritarian, and free of filters. In this version, journalists are no longer watchdogs but obstacles between leaders and the people, and professional expertise becomes distrust worthy rather than reliable.
These chapters left me wondering whether a public that increasingly avoids the news and has taken to social media to get their information is equipped enough to decipher reality from false agendas.
