Personality Cults and “Insult Suits”: Noise and Silence in Authoritarian Propaganda
How autocrats protect their claims to be the sole arbiters of truth
As more authoritarians come to power around the world, we see the myriad ways they seek to domesticate the press and shape public opinion. They and their proxies go to great lengths to be accepted as the arbiters of truth. Today, when one-party states are less common, billionaires or other allies of such leaders may buy into legacy or new media properties, assisting them to spread propaganda and speed the deterioration of democracy.
The readiness of many major American media properties to ally with President Donald Trump, and the parade of settlements, restructurings, and on-air personnel changes that have followed are the latest case. Yet it is Fox News, dubbed “The Network of Lies” by journalist Brian Stelter, that has been the biggest enabler of the authoritarianism now unfolding in the United States.
Where would Trump be now if Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch had followed his first impulse to act in Nov. 2020 to “stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen”? He floated the idea of having Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other top hosts appear together on television and state clearly that Joe Biden had won the election. We are living today with the consequences of Murdoch’s cowardly decision to instead spread Trump’s Big Lie.
Authoritarians are certainly aware of the power of the media to influence their fate. That’s why they work hard to substitute facts for a version of reality that suits their needs. That requires silence as well as noise. They jail and harm journalists and use defamation suits to intimidate and silence media outlets and public intellectuals, even as they offer us streams of distracting media content.
Look at the cute hashtag #Melodi! These smiling individuals, who pose together at the June 2024 G7 Summit, are experts at generating such content as they cultivate a media climate that benefits them. In her first year in office, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government initiated the most so-called SLAPP cases –lawsuits designed to reduce negative publicity– of any European country. As for Indian Prime minister Narendra Modi, his government has escalated attacks on freedom of the press sufficient to earn India a ranking of 159 out of 180 on the World Press Freedom scale.
As I write in Strongmen, authoritarians disappear people, and they also disappear knowledge that conflicts with their goals or threatens to expose their corruption and violence. Two episodes from the history of the relationship of media and authoritarians highlight the dynamic of noise and silence: Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s personality cult, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “insult suits.”
Personality Cults: Flooding the Zone with the Leader as the Sole Source of Truth
For one hundred years, charismatic demagogues have known how to use the latest media and information technologies to their benefit, communicating with people in ways that seem fresh and new. Some of them come into politics with years of experience in mass communication and persuasion. Mussolini and Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko had worked as journalists, while Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, like Trump, had years of experience with marketing and television. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, had a career in advertising.
Authoritarians put those skills to good use in building the personality cults that are key to people accepting them as arbiters of truth. Whether the head of state is on the left or the right, such cults revolve around the idea that the leader is a man of the people, but also a man above all other men – the only individual who can save the nation.
Religious elites of all faiths have played important roles in enabling such claims, not least by declaring that the leader is the vessel of a higher power as he carries out the will of the people. Il Duce had to contend with the Pope as a rival authority inside Italy, so he came up with the slogan “Mussolini is always right” to claim that he, too, was infallible. Leave it to Trump to update this by asserting, via an AI-generated image posted on Trump Social, that he is the Pope.
Personality cults are key to the leader’s ability to convince people that reality is what he says it is: his followers not only believe him, but also believe in him. Trained as a print journalist, Mussolini knew that only about 30% of the Italian population could read Italian (most people spoke dialects), so he pushed for the development of visual propaganda.
He used newsreels to market himself as Italy’s divo, and borrowed from Italian silent films and Hollywood star culture to style his personality cult. In this 1934 image, he shows off his body, sending out a signed “fan photo” that appeared in a popular magazine. He is the man of the people, enjoying a summer vacation in Rimini, but the man above all other men.
In the 21st century, authoritarian personality cults continue to channel an important quality of celebrity: the object of desire must seem accessible, but also be untouchable. Modi embodied this principle when he appeared as a hologram during his 2014 run for office. As in Mussolini’s time, the more the leader has mastered the latest visual and information technologies, the more his admirers see him as authentic and feel a personal connection with him.
Erdogan’s “Insult Suits”: Protecting the Leader’s Truth Monopoly in a New Media Environment
As media technology scholar Fred Turner has written, the new media environment of the 21st century has brought with it a transition from the “one to many” communications that one-party state dictators such as Mussolini managed. Today’s more fragmented media landscape has created a “many to many” communications environment.
The explosion of creator and influencer communities with transnational followings on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms has challenged the power of traditional state and autocrat-allied private media channels. Citizen journalist movements have denounced abuses of power in Belarus, Nigeria, China, and elsewhere. And newsletters on platforms such as Substack give individuals more power to reach large numbers of people. As an example, Lucid, a pro-democracy publication, reaches Russia, China, Iran, and other autocracies.
Erdogan’s “insult” lawsuits, applied on a vast scale, offer an example of how autocrats are adapting their silencing methods for an age of information warfare, when gaining control of the narrative is everything, and yet achieving such control is much more difficult. His government targets ordinary citizens with defamation and other lawsuits, insult being a broad enough category to be used against anyone he and his government wish to silence, from Olympic medalists to schoolteachers and shopkeepers.
Between 2014 and 2022, a staggering 160,000 Turks were investigated for alleged insults against the president, and almost 39,000 had to stand trial, an average of over 4,800 people per year. With each passing year, Erdogan targets more and more people: in 2023, over 6,000 were tried, and fewer than one-third of those were acquitted. Between 2014 and 2020, over 900 children, 264 of whom were between the ages of 12 and 14, also faced trials for insulting the leader.
The scale of Erdogan’s autocratic lawfare may be unusual, but "making an example" of some people to encourage others to self-censor has a long history. So does flooding the zone with the leader’s own images and words. Authoritarians may proclaim their uniqueness, but from Mussolini to Erdogan to Trump, they are driven by the same maniacal needs for noise and silence: dominating the news with self-serving content, and keeping their corruption and crimes hidden from view.
i find myself wondering how so many "leaders" have ended up so power hungry. Trump clearly doesn't have the energy to be president, let alone the pope. It's becoming clearer every day that trump ran for president to stay out of jail.
In all that’s happened, the lack of “truth” in the media and in society as a whole has crippled humankind more than anything else. “Alternate facts” along with “fake news”, combined with ‘deep fake’ technology makes it harder to determine what is indeed, “real”. I so miss the days of Walter Cronkite, - when “that’s the way it is” meant just that. The courts should have FORCED Fox News to announce the actual truth about the 2020 election INCESSANTLY on their networks, in ADDITION TO the 3/4 billion dollar settlement that FOX had to pay the Dominion ‘voting machine company’. (BTW, what’s happening with all of those other lawsuits against Fox and The “My Pillow Guy”?). Thank God for 60 Minutes, George Stephanopoulous, MSNBC, and the other media outlets and magazines who continue to seek truth and objectivity in ALL of their reporting. The media, law-firms, and the courts must continue to hold fast to “Truth”, morals, and the rule-of-law or else we’re finished. We’re IN the middle of a most crucial time, and TRUTH must prevail or so much more will be lost.