Dictating Reality - by Martin Moore & Thomas Colley

About the Book

Dictating Reality shows how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted.

Book Synopsis

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news in order to entrench their power, evade scrutiny, and ensure that their political narratives are accepted. Combining in-depth analyses of seven countries with a compelling range of stories and characters from around the world, they demonstrate the unprecedented scale and scope of governments' efforts to take control of the media. Dictating Reality details how Xi's China, Putin's Russia, Modi's India, AMLO's Mexico, Bolsonaro's Brazil, and Orban's Hungary have all sought, in their different ways, to exploit news to manufacture alternative realities--and how their methods have taken hold in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other democracies. Combining keen analysis of contemporary world events with years of original research, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how authoritarian leaders use the media, why more and more people are living in different realities, and the ways democracy is under threat.

Review Quotes

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 Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives

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

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

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 How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

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 Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival

About the Author

Martin Moore is senior lecturer in political communication education and director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King's College London. His books include Democracy Hacked: How Technology Is Destabilizing Global Politics (2018).

Thomas Colley is senior visiting research fellow in war studies at King's College London and senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. His books include Always at War: British Public Narratives of War (2019).