Free press needs alliances against censorship

I recently reread my father’s diaries from the 1960s: pages of hurried scribbles of an ambitious twenty-something, furious about the hypocrisies and injustices around him. For years, I read his journals as the record of a frustrated man trying to practice a profession the system has stripped of its purpose. He was a journalist in a country where reality was pre-written: the Soviet Union. This time, I read them as a stark warning: good reporting can exist without a free press.

In an age of artificial intelligence (AI) and resurgent authoritarianism, we risk rebuilding the same trap in a different form: individual reporting can still matter while journalism as a whole becomes irrelevant to society’s ability to understand itself.

The comparison may sound absurd. The Soviet system censored what people could know while flooding them with one official story. Today’s information environment works almost in reverse: not one official story but endless ones, not scarcity but excess. Algorithms and the firms behind them rank, filter and increasingly synthesise more information than any of us can process. Facts can travel widely without ever forming a coherent picture. Fragment truth, personalise it, drown it in abundance, and suppression becomes less necessary. Noise does the censorship’s work.

That matters because we still understand press freedom mainly through censorship: can journalists publish what power wants hidden, and can they survive doing it? When they are jailed or murdered, the assault is obvious. Harder to recognise is a press that remains free in form while becoming hollow in function.

My father’s diaries show the caricatured version. He began his career inside the vast Soviet network of worker and peasant correspondents, created in part to expose local failures. Reporters like him could uncover corruption, document abuse, sometimes even get an official fired. What they could not do was follow the story upward, from the failing official to sustained scrutiny of the system itself.

Softer versions of that pattern appear today in India and Turkey: journalists still expose corruption and abuse, even as legal, political and economic pressure makes it harder to follow those stories upward into the systems that produce them.

In the United States, where extraordinary reporting remains abundant, institutions with the reach to connect the dots are under growing political and regulatory pressure. Disney is suing the FCC over early reviews of ABC station licences that it says are retaliatory; the FCC denies that claim. Paramount paid $16 million to settle the president’s lawsuit against CBS while its $8.4 billion merger with Skydance was awaiting FCC approval. The merger was approved weeks later. Nobody has banned a story. But the institutions capable of assembling the larger picture are becoming more vulnerable to power.

The geography of authoritarianism has changed too. For my father, however dangerous it was to cross, there was a world beyond the Berlin wall. He took an enormous personal risk when he started reporting secretly for Radio Liberty, a US-funded broadcaster that carried uncensored news into the Soviet Union.

Today, authoritarianism is no longer neatly contained within borders. The Iron Curtain has splintered into thousands of digital partitions running through neighbourhoods, even families. This fragmentation creates the conditions authoritarian movements know how to exploit: a weakened shared reality and uncertainty about what anything means.

Much of this fragmented information system is built by a handful of powerful men in Silicon Valley whose technologies shape what we see and how we understand it. That puts America at the centre of a striking reversal: once a defender of the free press, it is now helping weaken the shared reality a free press depends on. And this is arguably bigger than President Donald Trump. He simply exploits a fragmented information system that was built before him and will outlast him.

Some of the fragmentation is on us, the journalists. Conspiracy theories succeed because they offer what audiences are looking for: a coherent explanation of how the world works. Journalism can build that picture without inventing reality, but doing so takes time and money. The 24-hour news cycle pushes the other way, trapping newsrooms in beats, updates and fragments.

We do not lack good reporting; what we are missing is enough journalism that connects it. People do not live in beats, and yet most newsrooms cover school-board fights, elections, technology, food prices, wars and trade routes as separate stories. Rebuilding local news has rightly become a central democratic project in the US. But illuminating every dot is not the same as drawing the map. If the dots never connect, a press can remain busy, prolific and technically free, and still tell us nothing about how power really works.

In the US now, I sometimes feel the world of my father’s diaries coming back into view. He would have recognised the danger: plenty of truth, but a system that keeps it from adding up. Soviet dissidents understood that when truth is trapped, you have to build routes that carry it somewhere where it can connect and matter.

Long before the Berlin Wall fell, tunnels ran underneath it. Samizdat, foreign broadcasts, voices from the other side: together they created routes around the Soviet system, linking people inside it with people beyond.

Today we live among countless fragments of reality, each circulating behind its own invisible walls. Journalism cannot bring those walls down. But it can dig underneath them. The Panama Papers showed what happens when hundreds of reporters across borders work the same material together: fragments become a picture of how power works.

We need more tunnels—and they cannot stop at newsroom walls. They need to cross disciplines and borders, connect the local to the global, and bridge the widening distance between journalists and the people they are trying to reach. A free press now needs alliances not only against censorship, but against fragmentation. Without them, press freedom risks becoming little more than the freedom to publish into the void.

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The writer is a journalist, co-founder of ZEG Network and co-founder and publisher of Coda Story and The Atlas. This opinion piece was commissioned as part of the World News Day campaign, a worldwide campaign highlighting the essential role of journalism in providing facts and clarity