ALFP e-magazine issue 1: Democracy

Free Media and Democracy in the Age of Elected Demagogues
Kunda Dixit (Nepal)
Editor and Publisher, Nepali Times / ALFP 2006 Fellow

A lot of us are worried today about the challenges media and democracy face in South Asia andaround the world.
Truths that we thought were self-evident are being challenged. New technologies are making thepress irrelevant. The media business model has collapsed. The erosion of press freedom iseroding democracy.
In South Asia in the last five years, we have seen the rise of the alt-right. In the world’s largest
democracy with its long tradition of freedom of expression, trolls and vigilantes are on the loose– silencing journalists with threats and even death.
The Philippines elevated a self-confessed death squad gang leader to the office of president.
Turkey’s elected president has unleashed a draconian crackdown on dissidents. After Brexit there
has been a rise of the wrong right across Europe. Just when we thought America’s president
couldn’t tweet anything more shocking anymore, he surprises us every morning.
Western democracies come with a design defect: they permit the unrestricted freedom to express
the most extreme and despicable views. Populist politicians use this to stoke xenophobic fears
about migration, crime, and terrorism. The mass media can be manipulated to whip up voters atelection time.
Democracy has been used to elect demagogues. Despots have learnt to exploit the disarray within
the traditional democratic political establishment, and their lack of accountability and chronic
failure to deliver development and services. And once they are elected to power, they proceed todismantle the very institutions of democracy that got them there.
Germany saw all this happen in the 1930s. In a recent op-ed Jochen Bittner of the German
newspaper Die Zeit called the present worldwide anti-democratic wave “Orderism”—it is basedon fear of disorder and chaos. It offers stability over freedom. He compared Orderism to thepromises of utopia under Communism, and said “it is merely a fig leaf for tyranny.” The enemyof Orderism is liberal democracy, and in this Putin, Trump, Duterte, Erdogan and others have amutual admiration society.
In South Asia, there has been a yearning for strongman rule that stems from an unaccountableelite that has rigged the system to get elected over and over again. Dynastic politicians andreckless rulers have contributed to political instability and democratic decay, and South Asians
envy the order they see in East Asia.

© 2018 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation

ALFP e-magazine issue 1: Democracy

Many in South Asia are fed up with the squalor of our cities, crumbling infrastructure andendemic corruption. Yet, even though surveys have shown that we still strongly believe indemocracy, we look longingly at Malaysia, Singapore or China as role models. There is a belief
that East Asia’s limited democracy is a better formula for economic growth.
But we have all tried strongman rule before in South Asia, and our experience has not been very
encouraging. In fact, our strong men (and women) have tended to be as corrupt and despotic as
our elected leaders.
The only time South Asian countries have had the least corrupt and most accountable leadershipis when we’ve had interim electoral governments made up of unelected technocrats. You have tobe really, really lucky to have a Lee Kwan Yew—who showed that a visionary leader could be
accountable even with limited democracy.
Every day there is growing evidence that the election upsets in the US and other countries were
due to manipulation of media, especially the social media. Post-truth journalism was out of sync
with the masses, and the social web was hijacked by bots and fake news sites.
Facebook in particular has come under intense scrutiny for doing nothing about its toxic
ecosystem of falsification, even before the recent revelations about how Cambridge Analyticastole and sold personal data for targeted messaging at election time.
This has led some to question the media’s adherence to the doctrine of false equivalence—thejournalism rule under which reporters are required to give equal weight to both sides in anargument even when one side is deliberately lying, or saying something incendiary. The mantra ofobjectivity is now being challenged with the argument that it is more important to be truthful
than neutral.
This bit of soul-searching comes at a time when media everywhere is under siege. It has either
been forced by commercialisation to abandon its public service remit, or it is being seriously
challenged by hate content on the social web.
The word “demagogue” comes from the perfectly wholesome Greek word for “a leader of thepeople.” It took on a derogatory connotation only because the Athenian upper class despised theproletariat. Demagogues today are able to manipulate the media at election time to whip up
chauvinism and intolerance. Journalists who adhere to rules of objectivity lose their relevance inthis frightening Orwellian combination of 1984 and Animal Farm that we see unfolding aroundus.
The emperor doesn’t like it when we point out that he is naked. Power doesn’t like it when you
speak truth to it, and power tries to intimidate and harm the messenger. Government agencies
controlled by elected autocrats have also become smarter. They have learned that jailingjournalists attracts needless international attention. So they have refined their methods—© 2018 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation

ALFP e-magazine issue 1: Democracy

censorship today is achieved by behind-the-scenes threats which can be even more insidious andsinister.
It was easier to deal with old-fashioned censorship. At least you knew who the enemy was, andwe took it as our noble duty to defend democracy and the free press. But what do you do when
the threats to press freedom do not happen in a totalitarian state, but in elected democracies
where the legislature and judiciary have been compromised and co-opted?
When the central values of democracy and press freedom are threatened, journalists have to takeon an activist role—because they are not just defending their own freedom, but the citizens’ rightto know. We in the media are just the custodians of press freedom.
In my own country, Nepal, we have seen absolute monarchy, military coups, parliamentarydemocracy, a war and a shaky post-conflict transition.

Pro-democracy protests in Kathmandu in April 2006

Throughout it all, we have experienced first-hand that the threat to democracy and press freedom
come from both the extreme left and extreme right. We have seen that development is directly
related to democracy: it is when villages, municipalities and the national Parliament have electedleaders that the chances of accountability are highest.
The answer to the current crisis of democracy lies in strengthening its four pillars, fortifying thejudiciary, legislature, executive and the media to be more accountable so they can serve as checks
and balances. And one of the critical institutions for that has to be an independent andinvestigative public service media. As someone famous said: the only way to fix the problems
with democracy is by making it more democratic.
The contents of this article reflect solely the opinions of the author.

© 2018 International House of Japan and Japan Foundation