As global press freedom dwindles, corrupt politicians rejoice

Journalists can be infuriating. They simplify. They exaggerate. They sometimes get things wrong. They are disproportionally university-educated, middle-class and a bit left-wing, so their attitudes often jar with the rest of the population. When they act unethically—for example, when the BBC’s Panorama programme aired clips of President Donald Trump that had been spliced together in a misleading manner—people are rightly outraged. Trust in the news media has declined across the rich world, especially since the advent of social media allowed errors in reporting to be more widely reviled. So some people may not care much when they hear that journalism is in trouble. Yet it is in their interest to care.

Press freedom is in retreat worldwide. Since 2014 the global score on an index devised by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a watchdog, has deteriorated from no worse than it is in America today to as grim as it is in Serbia, where journalists covering anti-corruption protests are routinely beaten by police.

This matters for several reasons. It is not just that free speech is the bedrock liberty on which other liberties depend. It is also because critical journalism is an essential check on state power. If the mighty know that abuses will be neither exposed nor publicised, they are likely to commit more of them.

The Economist analysed data from about 180 countries over the past 80 years collected by V-Dem, a Swedish research project. We found a feedback loop between muzzling the media and unleashing corruption. It seems to go something like this. Politicians who want to rob the public have an incentive to gag the press. The tighter they gag it, the easier it grows to steal. And the more guilty secrets politicians accumulate, the greater their incentive to stifle future critical reporting. Our calculations suggest that if press freedom decays from “as good as Canada” to “as bad as Indonesia”, that is a good predictor that graft will rise from “as clean as Ireland” to “as grubby as Latvia”. The process is gradual, metastasising over several years, so voters may not notice until after the next election. It is worse under populist governments, which typically demonise their critics and seek to crush institutions that limit their authority.

One of the most alarming trends is that governments which claim to be democratic are increasingly using tools pioneered by more authoritarian regimes. Typically, they do not try to silence truth-tellers entirely. Rather, they seek to create a media ecosystem in which voters hear amplified praise of the ruling party and only faint whispers of dissent.

They use taxpayers’ cash to promote fawning coverage: deploying yes-men to run the public broadcaster, directing state advertising budgets towards pliant newspapers and nudging friendly tycoons who rely on public-works contracts to take over independent media firms and neuter them.

At the same time, they make it harder for critical outlets to thrive—or even survive. Those that insist on doing investigative reporting may find that the government not only refuses to advertise with them but leans on private firms to shun them, too. They may face constant tax audits and vexatious lawsuits. Many struggle to stay afloat: in 160 out of 180 countries surveyed by RSF, the news media are financially precarious.

Supposedly democratic governments are going after individual journalists, too. Those who irritate the powerful are often doxxed and harassed, especially if they are women. A UN survey found that 75% of female reporters had endured online abuse and 42% had been harassed or threatened in person. Some reporters are snared by national-security laws banning almost any disclosure of which the government disapproves, or rules against digital “fake news”, meaning almost anything it disputes. The most persistent may be prosecuted for crimes that have nothing to do with journalism. In the Philippines in January, for example, Frenchie-Mae Cumpio, a frequent critic of abuses by the security forces, was sentenced to 12 to 18 years in prison for “financing terrorism”. Ms Cumpio says the security forces burst into her flat, forced her to the floor, and planted guns and contraband on her bed.

Technology has changed what it means to be a journalist and opened new avenues for free expression. Anyone with a phone can film a cop punching a protester and post it on social media, which is a useful check on brutal policing. But overall, the digital revolution has not been as liberating as many people once hoped. Dictatorships can shut off the internet when their subjects are angry (as Iran and Uganda did last month). Flawed democracies use more subtle methods. Laws to protect digital privacy are used to shield politicians from scrutiny. Meanwhile, government snoops hack journalists’ phones to identify their sources, scaring off future whistleblowers. And if the reporters happen to have embarrassing photos on their devices, these may mysteriously find their way into the public domain.

A final shift is America’s government, which used to stand up for press freedom around the world and no longer does. The Trump administration has scrapped subsidies to independent foreign media and shut public outlets such as Radio Free Asia, which used to broadcast to news-starved Tibetans and North Koreans. Worse, Mr Trump has made clear that he won’t press foreign governments over free speech—unless they are woke Europeans, that is. From Azerbaijan to El Salvador, strongmen have jumped at the chance to lock up or intimidate more pesky reporters without diplomatic blowback.

Apologists for crackdowns often argue that news outlets, too, should be accountable. But they understate the degree to which they already are. Readers can stop subscribing; subjects who are libelled can sue; the head of the BBC resigned over the Panorama scandal. Journalists have plenty of faults, but preventing them from doing their jobs will have dire consequences. A vigorous newsgathering ecosystem, once destroyed, is hard to rebuild. And a world with less press freedom will be dirtier and worse-governed. ■