The Global Battle to Control the News

Martin Moore

Dir. Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power
King’s College London

Thomas Colley

Senior Visiting Research Fellow
King’s College London

In conversation with:

Jonathan Lemire CC'01

Journalist, MSNOW Morning Joe co-host 

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley discuss how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments’ efforts to take control of the media. Dictating Reality details how Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, AMLO’s Mexico, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Orban’s Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities—and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies. Combining keen analysis of contemporary world events with years of original research, this presentation is essential for anyone who wants to understand how authoritarian leaders use the media, why more and more people are living in different realities, and the ways democracy is under threat.

Time will be allocated for Q&A.

"This is an elegant, expert, disciplined, and important book about the most urgent contemporary problem: the decay and disorder of information. Different autocracies and governments, as this brilliant analysis shows, do it differently, but they are all manipulating news for their own ends—representing a threat not just to ‘the media’ but to our entire sense of reality."Jean Seaton, University of Westminster, official historian of the BBC

Martin Moore is senior lecturer in political communication education and director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King’s College London. His books include Democracy Hacked: How Technology Is Destabilizing Global Politics (2018).

With her new book, Massively Better Healthcare, she distills 15+ years of lessons into an essential guide for leaders who want to leave the system better than they found it.

Thomas Colley is senior visiting research fellow in war studies at King’s College London and senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. His books include Always at War: British Public Narratives of War (2019).

Jonathan Lemire is a co-host of MSNOW’s flagship program “Morning Joe” and is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His first book, “THE BIG LIE: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics after 2020” was released in July 2022 and was an instant New York Times bestseller.

Prior to his Morning Joe hosting role, Lemire helmed the network’s “Way Too Early” news show for three years while also working as White House Bureau Chief for Politico. Before that, he was a White House reporter for The Associated Press where he broke scores of news stories and wrote authoritative analysis pieces while covering the day-to-day workings of both the Trump and Biden presidencies. Lemire previously covered national and local politics at both the AP and the New York Daily News. He grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Columbia College in 2001.