Policy briefing: Journalistic Resilience against Communicative Authoritarian Populism

The rise and endurance of authoritarian populism across the world is a serious global challenge for journalism. Populist attacks on news media and journalists threaten a free, pluralistic, and autonomous press, which is a necessary condition for a well- functioning democracy.

Against this backdrop, the POPBACK project aimed to inform strategies to increase democratic resilience by studying the mechanisms authoritarian populists use to increase their power over the media. The project also sought to identify the “coping strategies” societal actors use when faced with authoritarian populism.

Policy briefing seeks to explain these challenges in greater detail by focussing on: personal political attacks, censorship and content manipulation, ownership and employment, where we provide insights from media professionals in our sample countries (Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia and Turkey) as to how to deal with these threats.