3 Sep 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
In late April, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt decided to do things differently by holding a new type of press briefing. Instead of fielding questions from credentialled journalists, she held separate briefings specifically for social media news influencers.
“Tens of millions of Americans are now turning to social media and independent media outlets to consume their news, and we are embracing that change, not ignoring it,” Leavitt said at the beginning of the first such briefing on 28 April.
Jackson Gosnell – a college student who runs a popular TikTok news account and sometimes appears on the pro-Donald Trump broadcaster One America News – attended that briefing. He asked about Russia’s war in Ukraine given Trump’s promise to end it quickly.
“I thought it was important to ask questions that people at home wanted to know,” Gosnell told Index. “Not the fluff that others might have given.”
Unsurprisingly, nearly all the 25 people identified by NBC as having attended that week’s briefings at the White House have a history of clear support for Trump. The “fluff” from the other news influencers – dubbed “newsfluencers” or “news brokers” by various academics – included a combination of softball questions, overt praise for Trump, false information and conspiracy theories.
But how did these people make their way into the heart of the federal government? In January, Leavitt announced that “new media” – such as podcasters and social media influencers – would be permitted to apply for credentials to cover the White House. She began reserving a rotating “new media” seat at regular press briefings and giving its occupant the first question. Analysis by The New York Times found that the seat often went to either right-wing media or newer outlets such as digital start-ups Semafor and Axios.
The White House then took over the press pool in February, giving it control for the first time in a century over which reporters were permitted close access to cover the president. It announced it would start inviting “new media” to join the press pool, with most of the invited outlets being conservative or right-wing, according to analysis by the non-profit Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Historically organised by the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, the press pool is a group of rotating journalists, who cover the president up close every day for a wider group of media, who are known as the press corps.
The rise of citizen journalism in the USA has been a long time coming. But in the months since Trump returned to the Oval Office, the phenomenon has quickly reached a crescendo as the White House embraces pro-Trump newsfluencers in a way that has never been done before.
Former president Joe Biden invited social media influencers to the White House, too. But the current administration openly welcomes, champions and legitimises pro-Trump newsfluencers and other members of the “new media” cohort – many of whom tend to disseminate falsehoods and conspiracies.
The White House has simultaneously used other mechanisms – such as co-opting the press pool – to box out traditional media and make it more difficult for mainstream journalists to cover the current administration.
Multiple academics said that, taken together, these phenomena are concerning for US democracy because they make holding the president accountable a taller order. They also send the message to the rest of the world that the USA doesn’t care as much about championing global press freedom as it once did.
“This is about trying to eliminate criticism and dissent,” Kathy Kiely, chair of free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, said. “[It’s] lapdogs versus watchdogs.”
The White House’s spokesperson Anna Kelly told Index over email that the media has enjoyed “an unprecedented level of access to President Trump, who is the most transparent and accessible president in history.”
“Under the president’s leadership, the press office has been more inclusive of new media, whose audiences often dwarf those of legacy media outlets, and local syndicates – ensuring that the president’s message reaches as many Americans as possible,” she added.
The concept of a newsfluencer is relatively new. In the USA, they were once on the fringes of the media ecosystem. But the 2020 election and the subsequent “big lie” narrative – that the election was stolen from Trump – was a major inflection point that accelerated the rise of far-right newsfluencers. False narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 6 January insurrection in 2021 also helped facilitate their ascent.
Many rose to prominence by deliberately differentiating themselves from the mainstream media. But now some of them are on the verge of entering the mainstream themselves, if they haven’t already.
“These Maga [Make America Great Again] influencers see their role not as sceptical journalists but as boosters of the president and his administration,” said Aidan McLaughlin, editor-in-chief of the media news site Mediaite.
The months leading up to the 2024 presidential election crystallised the vast reach that newsfluencers now wield. Trump appeared on an array of podcasts and online shows popular with male audiences, including the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Former vice-president Kamala Harris also turned to “new media” in her campaign.
It’s difficult to measure the extent that newsfluencers impact how people vote or think about societal issues, said Roxana Muenster, a graduate in communications at Cornell University in New York who studies far-right lifestyle movements online. She said the outsized role they played around the 2024 election was undeniable.
Shortly after the election, a Pew Research Centre report confirmed the growing power that newsfluencers hold. Roughly one in five Americans regularly get news from influencers on social media, the report found, and about two-thirds of that group say this helps them better understand current events and civic issues.
No longer on the outskirts of the US media sphere, right-wing TikTokers and podcasters are now welcomed into the White House. Some, such as Laura Loomer, influence Trump himself (her sway has allegedly led to the sacking of several government officials, including former national security adviser Mike Waltz).
Others – including Robert F Kennedy Jr, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino – have even become members of the administration.
To a certain extent, these newsfluencers don’t really need the White House, says Muenster, because they already have significant followings of their own. But they do get something else out of it.
“It bestows them with a certain legitimacy,” she said. “It says that these are reliable sources to get your news from.”
This can pose problems when the newsfluencers aren’t actually reliable or accurate, as is often the case. “They are not as strict with the truth as people in the actual news industry,” Muenster said.
That means false information and conspiracy theories can run rampant, which doesn’t bode well for the health of US democracy.
Disinformation and misinformation can erode trust in institutions and make authoritarianism seem more appealing, according to Mert Bayar, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Centre For an Informed Public.
“In a normal democracy, you want credible sources of information,” he said.
For instance, while in the “new media” seat during an official briefing in late April, Tim Pool – the prominent host of several conservative podcasts, which last year were found to have links to Russian state media – lambasted “legacy media” for “hoaxes” about Trump and asked Leavitt to comment on their “unprofessional behaviour”. (“We want to welcome all viewpoints into this room,” Leavitt replied.)
And at one of the influencer briefings, Dominick McGee – a highly-followed conspiracy theorist on X who operates under the pseudonym Dom Lucre – asked Leavitt whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would ever be investigated for election integrity. Forbes reported that McGee was briefly suspended from X (then Twitter) in 2023 for posting a video of child sexual abuse.
Leavitt said McGee’s question was “refreshing” and that “the legacy media would never ask” it.
In a phone interview, McGee told Index he thought US media was “broken” and had “betrayed the American people”.
He said he considers himself a journalist; but he also said he was more concerned with being “freaking entertaining”.
Like McGee, Gosnell thinks mainstream media is dead and influencers are the future of the media industry.
But compared with other “new media” in the Trump orbit, Gosnell is relatively balanced in how he delivers the news. Even though he welcomes the rise of the newsfluencer, he knows it comes with risks. “It’s a little scary, too, because people on the internet can lie just as much as news hosts – if not [more],” Gosnell said.
Still, he is sometimes tempted to produce more opinionated content, adding: “It seems way more profitable.”
The White House gets something out of its new arrangement, too, according to Bayar. Speaking directly to Maga newsfluencers gives the White House a sympathetic ear to peddle its messages to. Meanwhile, prioritising these voices also limits the ability of journalists from mainstream outlets to ask hard questions that can hold the administration accountable.
To Bayar, the situation in the USA reminds him of his home country, Turkey, where the government picks and chooses which journalists are and aren’t allowed at press conferences with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
“It is part of this authoritarian playbook,” said Bayar. “If you don’t get asked tough questions, you can actually control public opinion better because you control your answers.”
While the White House’s embrace of Maga newsfluencers appears to be bad news for democracy in the “land of liberty” and the home of the First Amendment, it also has implications for the rest of the world.
The USA has historically championed press freedom globally. But the administration’s simultaneous embrace of pro-Trump influencers and attacks on critical media signal that Washington doesn’t really care about independent journalism anywhere in the world, according to Kiely. “It sends a very strong signal to dictators elsewhere,” she said.
Some authoritarian countries appear to have already been emboldened by Trump’s actions. As part of the Azerbaijani government’s crackdown on independent media, authorities in May imprisoned Voice of America contributor Ulviyya Guliyeva. Press freedom experts and her colleagues believe the Trump administration’s campaign to gut VOA emboldened Baku to target the reporter.
As McLaughlin says, “this has a bad ripple effect on the rest of the world”.
26 Aug 2025 | Africa, News and features, Somalia, Volume 54.02 Summer 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 2 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Land of the Free?: Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad, published on 21 July 2025. Read more about the issue here.
Speaking out about societal issues such as poverty, hunger and police abuse in Somalia is perilous. Both journalists and ordinary citizens practise self-censorship to avoid trouble. The country remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. More than 80 media workers have been killed since 1992, and dozens have been forced to leave the country due to threats on their lives.
A new directive issued by the government has worsened the situation by further restricting the media and the public from posting or broadcasting any information related to “insecurity” in the capital, Mogadishu. According to the minister of information, culture and tourism, Daud Aweis, those who violate this directive could face “legal consequences, including prosecution in court and severe punishment”.
Questioning government officials about security failures or attacks by the al-Shabaab militant group can land journalists or citizens in jail – as can highlighting issues such as poverty.
On Thursday 20 February at midday, Sayid Ali, a tuk-tuk driver, was waiting to pick up a client for a short ride into Mogadishu city centre when a group of armed police officers confronted him. They had his photo on their phones. Days earlier, Ali had spoken to local journalists about the corruption that has left many Mogadishu residents, including tuk-tuk drivers, struggling with hunger.
Ali, who is 46 years old and a father of five, had gained media attention under the nickname “Saan Miyaa”, which literally means “Is this how it is?” – a phrase expressing frustration over the widespread corruption that seems endless.
In an interview earlier that week with Shabelle TV, he had said: “People in Mogadishu are surviving on only a cup of tea every 24 hours because they have nothing to eat.” He blamed widespread corruption among government officials for driving up inflation, making it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to afford even a single meal each day. He also complained about police extortion and the bribes they demanded from the city’s struggling tuk-tuk drivers.
External factors have made the problem worse. Somalia is one of the countries hardest hit by US president Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze, with the termination of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) programme. The aid cuts have worsened food insecurity, reducing critical relief efforts at a time when drought, conflict and displacement were already pushing millions towards famine.
Following his arrest, Ali was taken to a police station and locked in a cell.
“They asked me why I was criticising the government. I said I was only describing the reality of our situation,” he told Index.
One officer allegedly turned the interrogation into a warning, telling Ali that he could be charged with “insulting the president” because his remarks directly implicated Somalia’s leadership. If found guilty of that, he could be imprisoned for between six months and three years.
“I was scared and did not know what to do,” he said. He was released after a day in detention but was given a final warning.
“We know you talk too much,” an officer allegedly told him. “But we warn you, stop talking about the president, or you will rot in jail.”
A police spokesperson, Abdifatah Adan Hassan, did not comment on Ali’s arrest. Ali was re-arrested and re-released in May, after speaking out publicly again.
Police brutality
This case is just one among dozens of arrests, harassment incidents and even killings targeting those who publicly criticise the government or the armed groups responsible for plunging Somalia into turmoil.
A few days before Ali’s arrest, a young man was reportedly killed in Afgooye, about 30km from Mogadishu, simply for sharing a Facebook post about police brutality. According to a family member who requested anonymity, Ismail Moalim, who was 27, was active on Facebook and had previously worked with the police.
“The police demand bribes from the families of detainees, and when they receive nothing, they beat them mercilessly,” the family member told Index.
The specific video that led to Moalim’s death, which has since been deleted, showed a police officer in Afgooye beating a young detainee. The footage was allegedly leaked online by a whistleblower, then shared more widely on Facebook.
“Ismail had only shared the video because he had many followers. Unfortunately, the officer involved in the beating knew him personally and came to our house. He shot Ismail twice in the head. Ismail died on the spot,” the family member said.
Impunity is high in Somalia – cases of murder are rarely investigated and perpetrators rarely arrested, especially when victims belong to a less influential group. Ismail’s case is a clear example of this, as he belonged to the Bagadi minority group, which has little influence among authorities or politicians.
The plight of female journalists
Women journalists are at particular risk. On the morning of Saturday 15 March, the National Intelligence and Security Agency (Nisa) raided the home of journalist Bahjo Abdullahi Salad in Mogadishu. Salad, who works for local news station RTN TV, had posted a video clip on her TikTok account showing rubbish left in a residential area after a Ramadan iftar feast attended by prime minister Hamza Abdi Barre and his entourage.
“Cleanliness is half of faith. The rubbish left here could pose a health risk to the general public, particularly young children who play in the area. I ask government officials to please clean up your waste,” Salad said in her viral video.
Soon after the video was published, armed Nisa officers entered Salad’s family home and took her away. Her frightened relatives raised the alarm, and fellow journalists quickly reported the incident online.
Nisa has a notorious reputation, with many of its officers being former militants. Three months earlier, another female journalist, Shukri Aabi Abdi, was dragged and beaten in Mogadishu by Nisa officers while covering protests against forced evictions. Her camera operator, Ali Hassan Guure of Risaala Media Corporation, was arrested, and their footage was deleted.
Unlike Abdi, Salad was not physically harmed. Later that day, her sister found her in a police station cell in the Wardhiigley district. She was released without charge but was forced to delete the video of the rubbish as a condition of her freedom.
“My family told me to accept their demands because they would not release me otherwise,” Salad told Index.
Freedom of expression at risk
At the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS), we track deleted content from journalists and, when possible, republish it as evidence in our ongoing documentation of media freedom violations in the country, so we have now reposted Salad’s clip.
These incidents highlight the deteriorating state of freedom of expression in the country. In Somaliland, a northern Somali region that declared independence in 1991, authorities shut down the privately-owned Universal TV on 12 February, accusing the station of “violating an agreement” with the government and breaching “Somaliland’s nationhood”. The Ministry of Information, Culture and National Guidance ordered all cable networks to remove Universal TV, banned the use of its logo, and instructed local advertisers to cancel their contracts with the station. Universal TV remains closed.
Later in February, the governor of Somaliland’s Togdheer region ordered the arrest of three journalists in Burao – Said Ali Osman of Sky Cable TV, Ayanle Ige Duale of Sahan TV and Abdiasis Saleban Sulub of KF Media – after they reported on his ties to local clan militias and the destruction of a water reservoir belonging to herders near Burao.
Freedom of expression in Somalia remains highly restricted and dangerous to navigate due to government repression, threats from armed groups and impunity for crimes against journalists. Killings and attacks on journalists rarely lead to justice, as perpetrators – whether government officials, security forces or militants – are almost never held to account.
The situation for journalists is getting worse. In March, police in Mogadishu arrested 19 journalists from both local and international media – the largest number yet in a single day in Somalia. They were rounded up onto a truck and taken to a police station, where their camera equipment was confiscated and their footage was deleted before they were released.
They had been covering the aftermath of an al-Shabaab bomb attack on President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s convoy just outside the presidential palace on 18 March. Following the arrests, police also raided the local radio station, Risaala, due to its coverage of the bomb attack. Armed officers stormed in and shut down the radio transmitters, arresting five journalists.
CCTV footage from the radio station’s offices showed the police forcing their way into the building before taking the journalists into custody. They were released the same day after being warned that they “should not say anything about insecurity”.
What is even more troubling than the raid itself is that the police commander who led it is a former al-Shabaab terrorist commander who defected to the government and was later promoted to a position of authority in Mogadishu.
While the president survived the al-Shabaab bomb attack, several civilians were killed, including journalist Mohamed Abukar Dabaashe, whom I mentored when he was a trainee at Radio Risaala, where I was chief editor in 2011.
Aged only 31, Dabaashe was in his home when the massive bomb exploded, causing the entire building to collapse. His body was found hours later. He was laid to rest the following day, as family and colleagues, overcome with grief, gathered at Madina Hospital.
Threats growing
As always, hope for accountability for the young journalist’s murder has faded away. When al-Shabaab bombs kill civilians, including journalists, and the government also targets them, accountability becomes impossible. Those brave enough to continue reporting face threats from all sides.
These threats are only intensifying. Between 22 and 24 May, 15 journalists were arrested in 48 hours, with the SJS recording a disturbing spike in arbitrary detentions, equipment confiscation and the obstruction of media workers by security forces. On 25 May, a media worker for the privately-owned Mogadishu television network Astaan TV was also killed – Abdifatah Abdi Osman was riding his motorbike on his way to work when he was shot by a hotel security guard.
When physical violence or criminal prosecutions are not used, legal and financial threats can be. I have faced legal threats for writing critically about a Somalia-based bank linked to the president.
The threats against me, which began in January, are part of the long-term persecution I have endured as a journalist and secretary-general of the SJS. A London-based law firm working on behalf of the bank threatened to sue me if I did not delete my social media posts and issue the bank an apology. The same bank, which has ties to the Somali government, has previously targeted both me and SJS, at one point freezing the SJS’s bank accounts and blocking its funding.
Somalian journalists face assaults from the authorities, opposition and militant groups, and big businesses. Under this constant attack, it increasingly feels that we have little recourse.
23 Jul 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
When journalist Afraaz Hussain (not his real name) tried to revisit a series of investigative reports he had filed on human rights abuses in Indian-administered Kashmir, he was stunned to find the links broken and the pages wiped clean. Some of his most critical stories – on government surveillance, military misconduct and civil unrest – had vanished without explanation.
“A lot of my work from the region is totally missing,” said Hussain, who asked that his name be changed to protect his identity. “Entire archives of newspapers before 2019 are missing. Stories critical of the government have disappeared.”
Apart from losing most of his investigative work, which he first noticed had vanished around two years ago, Hussain says he is facing police intimidation and a ban on his travel outside the country.
Many reporters and editors based in India say media outlets are deliberately erasing or hiding their work amid what they describe as growing pressure from the Indian government to limit reporting critical of its policies. Stories that once documented surveillance, hate crimes and rights abuses are now vanishing from digital archives without explanation.
The government has also, in many cases, explicitly ordered the takedown of journalistic pieces that highlight alleged human rights abuses. For instance, last year, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directed a magazine to remove an article detailing accusations of torture and extrajudicial killing by the Indian Army in the Jammu region.
This is true not only for the conflict-torn Indian-administered Kashmir and Jammu regions, even if it may have started there. Across India, a quiet purge of digital content is underway. News stories critical of the government are being erased – scrubbed from websites, replaced with 404 errors or removed after veiled legal threats. Journalists and activists call it a “digital vanishing act” that’s increasingly common in the country’s shrinking press freedom landscape.
“404 journalism” is becoming the norm
Veteran journalist and author Ruben Banerjee calls it “404 journalism”.
“You click on a link and the story’s just not there anymore,” Banerjee told Index. “It’s becoming a new genre of journalism in India – stories that once were, but are now memory.”
Banerjee was ousted from Outlook Magazine in 2021, a move he believes is in part linked to the magazine publishing a series of stories critical of the Modi government which allegedly invited political pressure on the publication.
Banerjee cited daily Hindustan Times’ now-defunct Hate Tracker as one of many casualties of “404 journalism”. The tracker, which meticulously documented hate crimes across India, disappeared from the outlet’s website with no public notice or editorial clarification.
“Nobody disputed its facts,” he said. “But the political sensitivity was enough to have it pulled.”
The takedown coincided with the exit of editor Bobby Ghosh. The Wire reported that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a personal meeting with the publication’s proprietor, Shobhana Bhartia, in the months before Ghosh’s departure, and government officials raised objections about Ghosh’s editorial decisions.
In some cases, journalists themselves are requesting takedowns, driven by fear rather than falsehoods.
“Some are scared because their old work is now being used against them,” Banerjee said. “But that is not journalism. That is capitulation.”
The erasure of digital archives is not new, but its scale and coordination appear unprecedented. In Kashmir, where Hussain worked as a correspondent for multiple outlets, entire archives were purged following the Indian government’s 2019 abrogation of Article 370, which revoked the region’s special status.
“Most English, Urdu and vernacular newspapers had their archives wiped clean,” Hussain said. “It is not like a few pieces were removed, it is an institutional erasure.”
These deletions, he said, targeted some of the most impactful journalism on record. “We spent weeks on those investigations. These were exclusive stories on grave issues. When that disappears, you are erasing the rough draft of history.”
The implications are serious.
“For students, researchers, even citizens trying to trace how events unfolded, that material is gone,” said Maariyah Siddique, a research scholar at Aliah University, in the state of West Bengal. “The government’s intention is clear: to intimidate journalists, activists and whistleblowers, reminding them of the government’s omnipresence.”
She added: “Even the government knows that in the digital age, information once posted online cannot really disappear, but such tactics are directed at creating long-term impacts [rather] than short term. It is more mental and psychological than physical intimidation of journalists.”
This subtle form of pressure, explained Siddique, is not only about erasing content but also about instilling a sense of vulnerability among journalists.
“Sometimes government action is simply meant to warn the concerned that their work is being heard and they will be chased next,” she said.
The chilling effect
The government’s legal toolkit also plays a role. A notable example is the 2022 arrest of Kashmiri PhD scholar Abdul Aala Fazili for an article he wrote in 2011. Since then, media houses and their contributors have grown more wary. Several editors told Index that authors and scholars now request takedowns of old pieces, fearing their writing could be used against them.
“What’s worrying,” said Banerjee, “is that many media organisations don’t wait for official orders. They self-censor, just to avoid displeasing the powers that be.”
The consequences go beyond deletion. The constant fear of retaliation has created a culture of self-censorship and editorial paranoia.
“No one even pitches stories critical of the government anymore,” said Qazi Zaid, an editor with Free Press Kashmir, one of the few independent media houses in the region. “We are walking on eggshells with every story. Many authors and journalists ask us to take their articles down because they think it is affecting their passport applications or fellowships.”
Experts say erasure of archives is not just about control but “erasing the past” to influence the future.
“When journalism disappears, so does accountability,” said Siddique. “Every post, every report, every fact contributes to an informed electorate. Erasing it is an act of political manipulation.”
Journalistic freedom in India has steadily declined in recent years, slipping to 151 out of 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom index. Journalists say the vanishing archives are just one more indicator of this decline.
“Press freedom is being eroded like never before,” said Hussain. “And now, it is not just what you can’t say, it is also what you did say, that gets you in trouble.”
For journalists and media experts, it is a moment of reckoning.
“You start reporting, knowing the risks,” said Siddique. “But this erasure… it is the last blow. If your work isn’t going to survive, what’s the point of doing it at all?”
16 Jul 2025 | News and features
For years, the United Kingdom has looked to the United States for moral clarity and strategic leadership in confronting the challenge posed by China’s authoritarian state. Whether it was the decision to ban Huawei from Britain’s 5G networks or to speak out against abuses in Xinjiang and the erosion of freedoms in Hong Kong, British policymakers often found strength in US resolve. Washington’s warnings were heeded, and alignment on values was assumed. That is why it is all the more jarring that a possible threat to Britain’s free press is now emerging, not from Beijing, but from a private equity office in New York.
The deal in question is RedBird Capital Partners’ proposed acquisition of The Daily Telegraph, one of the UK’s oldest, most important and influential newspapers. At face value, this might seem like a typical media buyout. But behind the gloss lies something more serious: a growing fear that this deal could open the door to Chinese influence in Britain’s media ecosystem.
At the heart of these concerns is John Thornton, RedBird’s chairman. Thornton’s connections to the Chinese state are not historical or incidental, but ongoing. He sits on the International Advisory Council of the China Investment Corporation (CIC), the country’s sovereign wealth fund. He has held senior roles at Chinese state-linked institutions. He has chaired the Silk Road Finance Corporation, a Belt and Road Initiative vehicle backed by state-aligned Chinese entities. Most tellingly, he has consistently echoed CCP narratives in public, once praising Xi Jinping as “the right man, at the right place, at the right time,” according to the Wire.
In 2023, Thornton himself related that he had told senior Chinese officials that they were losing the global narrative war because their story was being told by Westerners. He advised them to “get into” English-language media channels to shape international perceptions. He said: “The Chinese story is told by people who are not Chinese… until you start to get into those channels, you’re going to be at a big, big disadvantage.”
Now, under his chairmanship, RedBird is attempting to purchase The Telegraph.
This is where the line between ownership and influence becomes critical. The UK government is proposing to change the law to facilitate the RedBird deal, lifting the ban on foreign government ownership of UK media, and allowing up to 15% instead (coincidentally precisely the percentage needed to facilitate the Telegraph deal). This, argues the UK, will be sufficient to prevent foreign influence. But ownership, especially in an era of sophisticated financial engineering and opaque sovereign investment, tells only part of the story.
Thornton leads a firm with documented co-investments alongside Tencent, a Chinese tech giant designated by the US Department of Defense as a Chinese military company. RedBird has established a regional headquarters in Hong Kong, now subject to China’s national security laws. And Thornton himself maintains overlapping personal, commercial and political links to the CCP ecosystem that make it more than valid to question whether genuine independence would be possible. It’s not for nothing that Thornton received the CCP’s highest honour for foreigners in 2008, or was invited to tour Xinjiang when even the United Nations wasn’t allowed in to investigate atrocity crimes against Uyghurs and other minorities.
Influence can be subtle: a boardroom conversation, a commercial pressure, a well-timed phone call. But in the case of a national newspaper like The Telegraph, even subtle influence can be profoundly distorting. It sets the editorial tone, shapes hiring decisions, filters coverage, inculcates self-censorship and ultimately shifts public debate. The risk is not just theoretical, it is structural.
And yet, instead of confronting the risk, the UK government is falling over itself to facilitate the acquisition. Happily, not everyone is fooled. A major rebellion is brewing in the House of Lords, where, on 22 July, lawmakers in the UK’s appointed House will vote on a fatal motion to block these changes, in what could be one of the most consequential media votes in a generation. I hope they succeed.
Curiously, meanwhile, the British press has largely remained silent. A kind of omertá seems to be prevailing, perhaps for fear of offending potential future owners, or attracted by the possibility of selling 15% of their own business to foreign governments. But silence only compounds the danger. If influence is allowed to masquerade as passive ownership, the integrity of democratic debate really is at risk. Nobody in their right mind believes that news proprietors have no influence over editorial direction.
This isn’t just a British problem. It’s a case study in how soft power and sovereign wealth are used to circumvent democratic safeguards. RedBird has also been at the heart of the effort to acquire Paramount, drawing criticism from the House Committee on the CCP over the involvement of Chinese company TenCent. The fact that these media deals are occurring under the umbrella of a US firm – one led by a man who has publicly supported a more assertive Chinese media presence in the West – should raise serious questions.
Democracies must learn to distinguish ownership from influence, and legislation from reality. The Telegraph may soon become a test of whether we still can.
RedBird and Thornton were approached for comment
Luke de Pulford is creator and executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China
