Dictating Reality

Reviews / Votes

While the news industry collapses in democracies, authoritarian regimes are reinventing "news" as a weapon to oppress opposition at home and enemies abroad. This book is the ultimate guide to this brave news world. -- Peter Pomerantsev, author of <i>How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler</i> Compelling and persuasive. Moore and Colley describe how authoritarian and democratic governments around the world seek to control news-and to create a parallel or sovereign reality. A valuable primer for our dark times. -- Luke Harding, author of <i>Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival</i> 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 Dictating Reality isn't just a story about authoritarian regimes-it's an investigation of how to reset and overcome the media infrastructures that keep them in place. In each of the countries studied by Moore and Colley, there are also important stories of resistance, political expression, and democracy advocacy in which digital media is also embedded. This book should inspire both fear and hope. -- Philip Howard, author of <i>Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives</i> This is an innovative, well-written analysis of news subversion. Its great strength is its comparative reach, contrasting, for example, state-sponsored media duplicity in Russia and Hungary with internet-based, populist news distortions in South America. It concludes with a compelling solution that cries out to be read. -- James Curran, professor of communications, Goldsmiths University of London This book serves as a sobering reminder that the marketplace of ideas cannot flourish if truth does not flow freely. * Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly * A significant contribution to contemporary critical media scholarship. It offers an empirically grounded account of how news ecosystems become sites of power consolidation and machines for the production of ideologically curated realities. * Critical Studies in Media Communication *