Threatening broadcasters, Trump takes a page from the world’s autocrats

A comedian steps onto the stage and makes a joke or barbed comment that offends a powerful leader. Or maybe it is a cartoon or television programme that pushes buttons.

Regardless, the targets and their ilk accuse the creators and their bosses of violating moral standards and national virtues. Then the state cracks down. The authorities issue threats, exert financial pressure and hint at shutdowns as the humorists hire lawyers, executives cower and everyone learns the obvious: Nothing negative or embarrassing will be allowed about the government or its friends.

Those who live in China, India, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela are familiar with this scenario. Each is governed with various levels of authoritarianism; all have seen comedians, broadcasters, journalists and cartoonists squeezed towards silence.

Now US President Donald Trump, with his threat on Sept 18 to

revoke broadcasting licences from networks with late-night hosts

who make jokes or comments at his expense, has pushed the United States closer to that club.

With lawsuits against media companies, cuts to public broadcasting and threats to rescind licences or deny mergers while rewarding friendlier outlets, Mr Trump’s tactics fit a disturbing global pattern.

“Controlling information and media is the one of the early and necessary steps of the authoritarian,” said Dr Jennifer McCoy, a professor of political science at Georgia State University, who studies the deterioration of democracy. “Then, repressing dissent and criticism, not just among the media, but among political opponents and citizens, follows.”

No expert or organisation that tracks free expression is comparing Mr Trump to the world’s greatest violators. The worst authoritarian regimes have murdered critics and imprisoned anyone deemed questionable. Many dictators shut down newspapers and seized television networks when they came to power.

But the US has historically been a defender of free speech, and the tactics Mr Trump has embraced – suggesting that only presidentially approved opinions are valid and protected – place the United States in awkward company.

Freedom of expression is deteriorating in America and 43 other countries, a quarter of the world’s nations, according to the 2025 Democracy Report issued by the Swedish-based V-Dem Institute. That is up from 35 in 2024 and the institute says the problem has been getting worse for at least a decade.

In democracies and dictatorships, those who bundle their critiques with humour have become frequent targets.

In Iran in August, prosecutors filed morality charges against Ms Zeinab Mousavi, one of the first women to do stand-up comedy in the country, over a video that added explicit language to an epic poem about pre-Islamic Iran.

It was at least the third time she had been summoned by police since she created her character Empress of Kuzcoo, a parody of an old villager who wears a hijab that reveals only her nose.

In Turkey in July,

four cartoonists were arrested over an image

, in a satirical magazine called LeMan, that seemed to be a caricature of Moses and the Prophet Muhammad fraternising in heaven as bullets flew between Jews and Muslims below. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the image as “a vile provocation” and one of the cartoonists was charged with “insulting the president”.

In India, another country where free expression has eroded, even obscure jokes about local politicians have proved to be off-limits. At a comedy club in Mumbai in March, Mr Kunal Kamra, one of India’s last comedians still engaging in political humour, sang a playful song that used the word gaddar, or traitor, apparently in reference to a local politician.

That was all it took for the state’s chief minister to call for legal action and for government employees to vandalise and ransack the comedy club.

Dr Helmut Anheier, a sociology professor at the Hertie School in Berlin, said the dynamic of attacking free expression and seeking to punish elites for populist political gain was first identified by sociologist Antonio Gramsci when the Italian fascists imprisoned him in the 1920s.

For many demagogues then and now, Dr Anheier said, the goal is “to achieve cultural and political dominance” – or, as other scholars have put it, to reshape what the public sees as “common sense”.

Forcing independent institutions to submit is simply part of the effort to enforce a new narrative, to mythologise a rising strongman at the expense of public freedoms.

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Gramsci wrote around 1930, while still behind bars. “In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

China is perhaps today’s most successful master of expression management. While controls have ebbed and flowed over the decades, under President Xi Jinping, Beijing has tightened command, turning news outlets, films, comedy and social media into carefully monitored fonts of government-approved messaging.

As part of a 2016 tour of Chinese media outlets, Mr Xi explicitly declared that “media sponsored by the party and government” – which includes nearly all major media outlets in China – “should serve as propaganda platforms for the party and government”.

Since then, investigative journalists, who once held the government to account for abuses of power or corruption, even as they were employed by state-controlled outlets, have all but vanished. In a pattern found elsewhere, including Hungary and Russia, loyalists have been installed at once-independent publications.

The authorities have also tightened controls over movies and books, putting them under the direct supervision of the Communist Party’s propaganda department. Censors keep watch not only for political content, but also for anything deemed out of line with the party’s priorities.

The risk of overstepping can be immense. In 2020, Hong Kong’s public broadcaster ran an episode in Headliner, its signature satire programme, suggesting that the police were hoarding masks at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The show had been doing this sort of thing since 1989. Months after that one episode, it was axed.

In 2023, a stand-up performer in Beijing was accused of insulting the Chinese military with a joke involving stray dogs. The authorities imposed a roughly US$2 million (S$2.5 million) fine on the comedy studio where the performer worked. Police in northern China, far from the club, also detained a woman who had defended the comedian online.

In the United States, satire and criticism, often including sharp insults and investigations into potential corruption by the Trump family, continue to flow through the media to large audiences.

But experts see flashes of a familiar authoritarianism as Mr Trump threatens broadcasters’ licences or files lawsuits against universities and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Mr Trump’s licensing threats followed ABC’s decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely”

under pressure from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr

.

He had criticised Kimmel for comments about

Mr Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin

– insisting that Trump supporters were “desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” – and Mr Trump said that maybe cancellation of the show was not enough.

In those threats of regulatory aggression, Italians see shadows of Mr Silvio Berlusconi, who combined political power and media ownership, blacklisting critics and pressuring executives to silence dissent.

Venezuelans recall Mr Hugo Chavez revoking radio licences and forcing television networks to broadcast his populist speeches. Mr Viktor Orban of Hungry, a hero to the Trumpist right, used tax policy to harass and weaken major media outlets.

Russia scholars, however, see a parallel to Mr Trump’s threats against late-night comedians in Mr Vladimir Putin’s early years of rule in Moscow.

At the time, a satirical TV show called Kukly used oversized, somewhat grotesque puppets to parody political figures and current events, from the war in Chechnya to then President Boris Yeltsin’s heavy drinking. In the post-Soviet 1990s, as Russia sought to portray itself as a democracy, the show was mostly tolerated, even by the Kremlin.

But that changed when Mr Putin rose to power. First through harassment and then an outright takeover by the state oil monopoly, he refashioned the once-independent network that ran the programme into a friendly outlet – without Kukly.

“In general, few authoritarian leaders have a sense of humour, and even fewer can laugh at themselves,” said Dr Daniel Treisman, a political science professor at UCLA and an expert in dictatorship. “Putin was said to be enraged by his portrayal as an evil dwarf.”

Mr Trump may also be taking jokes personally – or channelling the outrage of his political base.

“They give me only bad publicity,” Mr Trump said of the major networks.

To which many Russians have already responded: Watch out, America, for what comes next. Mr Viktor Shenderovich, the main writer for Kukly, was later forced to flee Russia because of government harassment and death threats.

Many others who worked on the comedy show also fled their homeland in fear. NYTIMES