Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, "Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Nov 1, 2025

Martin Moore, a political communication specialist and director at King's College London, and Thomas Colley, a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, delve into how authoritarian regimes manipulate news to solidify power. They discuss the alarming spread of biased media control from China to Hungary, examining strategies like censorship, propaganda, and the role of social media. The conversation highlights the global risks of losing objective information and the emergence of truth-seekers trying to combat these challenges.

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INSIGHT

States Are Reclaiming News To Entrench Power

Governments increasingly use news to entrench power and evade scrutiny rather than inform citizens.
This trend accelerated during COVID and again after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

INSIGHT

Russia Moved From Relativism To State-Enforced Reality

Russia shifted from sowing confusion internationally to tightly controlling domestic truth after February 2022.
The Kremlin now enforces a parallel reality where events like Bucha are framed as "fake news."

INSIGHT

China's Information Strategy: Repeat And Censor

China prefers a single, repeated official narrative backed by heavy censorship and platform obligations.
Russia favors disorientation; China favors domination of the information environment.

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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.

In Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News (Columbia UP, 2025), Dr. Martin Moore and Dr. 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.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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