Rising above the noise

Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on a cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of a civil war. We don’t use the term, but fake news is all that we get at home through common channels. That makes the real news — coming from the West — a lifeline. I am in awe of the crackling radio that has my mother’s full attention; I want to become that voice.

That was my very first insight into a lesson I’d learn again and again in my life: Good journalism is vital for people who need it.

The world has changed a lot since I sat in that kitchen. The Iron Curtain no longer divides geographies, but its digital successor cuts straight through our communities, polarizing us from within. From Manila to Minneapolis, societies are divided on many of the same issues: changing identities, economic inequity, climate change and lack of reckoning over past injustices, to name just a few. Modern-day authoritarians no longer need to jam shortwave radio signals or shut down journalism organizations (although plenty of them still do). Instead, they flood our digital information systems.

From Budapest to Washington D.C., rising authoritarian populists now share a playbook of digital, legal and narrative tools that they use to manipulate and abuse people’s legitimate grievances. At the heart of their strategy is the same age-old quest for money and power, but their tactics are new, often innovative and designed to confuse, distract and sow doubt. Noise, not just fake news, is the greatest weapon in their arsenal.