YouSaid · the spoken record

Martin Moore

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-11-28
most recent: 2025-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's about scientists and scientific organizations, it's about the legal system and the justice system and academics more broadly, etc. So there are ways in which we have built processes to build and check and verify and disseminate knowledge. And those have been really challenged and have been really undermined at the moment. And I hope that these new truth seekers signal a way in which we can start to recreate, reinvent and rebuild these institutions of knowledge, which are going to be crucial if we have any sort of foundational ground truth going forward.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, it is absolutely. And I think that we have to recognize that we do live in an extremely different information environment than we did two decades ago. And necessarily in a new information environment, institutions need to evolve and process democratic processes need to evolve. And one of the things that I think has been fascinating has been the enormous growth of what we talk of as truth seekers, and that's open source intelligence and fact-checkers and others and this whole international growth and network of those who are willing to challenge governments. And I hope Jonathan Rauch in his, I think a really valuable book called The Constitution of Knowledge talks about how we talk about political constitutions an awful lot. We don't talk about the constitution of knowledge, by which he means these institutions and processes that we've relied on for the last few hundred years to sort of create a basis of knowledge. And that's partly it's about news organizations in general.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saying do not believe them, believe me, and that can have again really damaging effects. And actually, we may look towards reform and say, you know, reform has been very critical and there's been stories recently about how reform have been kind of preventing journalists from covering them. But actually, we shouldn't forget that for years, the Conservative Party was extremely critical of the BBC. A number of Conservative politicians talked about defunding the BBC, challenging the future of its license fee. And so there is already, I think, a degree to which we've seen certain, yes, at a much more minor scale, but we've seen some of the practices that we see in Hungary that we see in India, even though we see in Mexico happening here in the UK.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that's been highly effective, and obviously we've seen it in the US, we've seen it in many other countries like Mexico, governments can constantly and very viciously attack the legitimacy of media outlets in the sense of attacking their credibility, in the sense of attacking individual journalists, in the sense of, you know,”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of these governments have realized that media, in the sense of sort of institutional media, is in a particularly vulnerable position. I mean, the business model has been declining for years now. Many news media organizations are constantly anxious about whether they'll be sustainable, whether they'll last until next year, let alone 10 years' time. And so are necessarily very, very aware that they need money, they need advertising income, they need, in some cases, indirect or direct support, bearing in mind obviously in this country government funnel support. not just through advertising but through tax breaks etc and they need access they need access in order to produce news and all those are levers that the government can pull in addition to which we shouldn't forget that actually”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most Indians get a lot of their news either through the channels themselves or on social media. And those levers are absolutely available in other democracies. And we saw in Hungary, actually, in Hungary, the Orban government massively increased, massively increased the amount that it was spending on advertising, in part so that it could then use that as a lever to direct it to media outlets that were in its favor and take it away.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And I think that's where we do sort of need to understand and learn that actually whilst we've always known that autocratic governments have lots of tools to control speech, to introduce new laws, et cetera, that are not available to democracies or at least not openly available to democracy. Democracies actually have a lot more levers than they think democratic governments. And as you say, we saw that absolutely in India. the BJP and Narendra Modi's governments have used money and access and friends, by which I mean sort of friends of Modi, to gain much, much greater influence over Indians' musicology such that broadcast news is now effectively sort of almost entirely pro-GJP and broadcast news, particularly cable news channels, Republic TV times now and others the main way in which”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“15, 20 days plan. But because Meta has this deal with the telecoms companies, you still have access to Meta's services. So what that means in practice is people have become more and more dependent on WhatsApp, not just for communications with friends and families, but for their news, for their information, for understanding politics essentially. And that was what really kind of Bothnaro really successfully took advantage of both in 2018 and 2022.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the Bolsonaro government. And that was what I suppose really astonished me, the fact that you can kind of create what one New York Times journalists call a mass delusion without even needing the big media houses anymore. I mean, admittedly, one has to take into account that Brazil quite unusual in some senses because Brazilians kind of flocked to social media very quickly. They are huge consumers of social media. They are highly reliant on messaging services and particularly WhatsApp. And because, and it's important as a structural point, but it's just important because the way Meta works, meta did partnerships with various different telecoms providers in Brazil. And most Brazilians buy kind of monthly plans. And you have a particular data limit on that plan. That data limit for many Brazilians will run out after kind of.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a joke. He's a kind of, he's a nostalgic, embarrassing uncle who always says offensive and disreputable things and is not taken seriously by anyone. And yet he manages, particularly with the help of his sons and others within his kind of immediate circle, he manages to not only get re-election in 2018, but effectively to create this sort of parallel information ecosystem online, an ecosystem which by the next election by late 2022, an awful lot of Brazilians, that's their main sources of information, and they are no longer reading, or at least they're no longer taken seriously the mainstream media outlets. They are only really existing and listening to these kind of information bubbles that have been very consciously and very deliberately created by Bolster.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really is. Yeah, no, I think that's a really what it is. Although I think that the Kind of the most astonishing and fascinating example of that is really in Brazil rather than Hungary because it's in Brazil where you see the election of Jayabol Sonara in 2018, a candidate who is dismissed entirely by mainstream media by the large media outlet as a class. He's a joke.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Approaches essentially sort of pushing the narratives and pushing these influences across social media prior to our election. So you see how kind of in a very, very step-by-step fashion. Orban has very carefully taken over almost all. He's left. I think it's important to note he has left enough to be able to still claim. No, no, no, look, there is an independent media. And there are. There are independent, but they are absolutely in a minority. They struggle for funding. Obviously, they're dismissed by all the kind of major broadcasters and the public service broadcaster. And so, you know, they only really serve a kind of minority relatively small minority audience. And they're always being kind of dismissed as that so-called dollar media, i.e. being funded by the US, being funded by US foundations and being funded particularly by the kind of the baddie in all of the Orban stories.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get the next election, every local newspaper is endorsing Orban. Every local newspaper is saying you must support Orban for re-election. And then finally, just quickly, from 2019-2020 onwards, they start turning, the government starts turning their attention to social media and they start working, or at least sorry, I should say they have plausible deniability because this is a sort of pseudo-independent company, but a pseudo-independent company that suddenly becomes awfully rich with very opaque funding, which starts to cultivate, nurture, coach and fund right-wing influences online. And that means identifying people with the potential to become influencers, bringing them in to get sort of sponsorship and coaching, funding them to inflate their audiences and their followers online and to promote their posts online. And then as the 2022 election...”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Infrastructure projects, etc. He becomes very, very wealthy very, very quickly. And then he suddenly starts buying up the first tens and then hundreds of these media organizations, previously independent media organizations. Hundreds. Yeah, exactly. Hundreds. And along with various other friends of Orband who have similarly been whose wealth has similarly increased. And this happens really relatively quickly over the kind of mid-2010s until in 2018 all these friends of Orban suddenly coincidentally, remarkably, give, literally give these to a government-run foundation called Kesma, because they say this is for the better, good, this is the public good, this is for the better nation. So suddenly...”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broadcaster, it literally strips out. I mean, I think one summer they fired about 800 people at the public broadcaster and install loyalists there. So you have a whole series of people who are, according to some transcripts, which are Janice Magic get hold of, literally taking transcription from the government when they're writing headlines and when they're doing stories. And then there's a really interesting period between sort of 2015 to 2018, when Orban, there's a... an old school friend of Orban, a man called Metzaros, who was literally a gas pipe fitter in Orban's hometown in Hungary and Felksfut. And suddenly his fortune's changed really considerably at 2010 when Orban comes back to power. He gains some political power, which he'd never previously sought. But then suddenly he starts to become very, very wealthy. The wealth is as a consequence of being given all these public contracts to water works for various”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he had been in government previously. But it's from 2010 to now really that the Fidesz government and Orban in particular takeover of the news media. And it starts with regulation itself. It starts with the sort of changing the law and changing the regulations. Essentially to make sure that the regulator is if not controlled by the government certainly unwilling to challenge the government unwilling to act independently and certainly willing to support the government when the government for example challenges mergers or acquisitions by independent organizations but not when it's by pro-government media organizations. And having sort of taken control of the law and the regulation it then moves onto the public service.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we find ourselves hungry. The kind of first nominal, like democracy, I suppose, on our list, also a country that's extremely concerned about trying to legitimize their capture of news, Martin. But one that kind of perhaps is much less profound than China, not really trying to build everything from the infrastructure up. Tell us about how they really went after the institutions of the Hungarian press. I think you're right. I think Hungary is really interesting because it is, well, it calls itself an illiberal democracy, but it is part of the EU. It is considered a democratic country. It's also increasingly considered, certainly in the US as a sort of model that they would like to consider as an alternative to their system. What we see in Hungary, and this is particularly from 2010 when Viktor Orban and the Fidesz Party take over for the second time.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had Xinjiang and a re education camps in Xinjiang. We had Hong Kong and the anti-democracy actions in Hong Kong. We had various other critical stories of China. Where are those critical stories now? Where are those investigations about what the Chinese government is doing, either domestically or internationally? Indeed, stories about COVID-19. I mean, there are many, many stories which have effectively disappeared. And I think that's in part because the Chinese government has been very successful, if not necessarily convincing people that it is benign and it is an alternative to the kind of US hegemon at the very least limiting and restricting the negative news that's coming out about it.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too you know, if you turn on the TV in Nairobi, probably the first default news channel you'll get is CGTN. They made sure that Xinhua, which is the sort of the Chinese state news agency, they increased the number of staff to, I think it's about 10,000 now. International Bureau is around the world and then provided an awful lot of the agency copy for free for news organizations. So you start sort of seeing how the Chinese perspective and Chinese produce news starts to become a foundation and starts to be infiltrated into news around the world. And of course what that means in practice is that you get a very Chinese perspective. I was just thinking actually last week when we were hearing these stories about the spy, the CLAP spy trial in the UK. It was just occurring to me how long it's been since we've heard any news that's really critical of the Chinese government, the CCP. I mean, there was a few years ago we had...”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not thousands of internal sensors who are working within these companies and building software to sensor. But it was at that point when the end of the first decade of the 21st century, China having sort of, if you like, gained a high degree of control internally, started to look externally, started to say actually, you know what, we're going to go beyond China and start investing heavily, not just in content that tells our story well, but in infrastructure, communications infrastructure around the world. In some cases, literally the hardware. So, you know, buying satellites, paying for cables, it is making sure that they have agreements with lots of media organizations around the world. They start investing in media organizations around the world. They start making sure that their channel, CGTN particularly, are prominent when it comes to...”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around China through which they can control what comes in and out from outside China. And then from the early 2000s, starting to putting the responsibility on the technology companies themselves to essentially censor initially manually and increasingly in a very automated way what was happening on their platforms. And at that point, we still had some US platforms in China, Google's in China. Google tried to accede to some of the demands of the Chinese government eventually in 2010 decided it just couldn't do that. And so we saw Western companies either banned or were removing themselves from China and Chinese equivalents start to grow within China. And those Chinese equivalents very much worked closely or at least responded closely to the demands of the CCP and had in some cases hundreds of”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I think the first time the internet ever arrived in China was 87, 1987. And it was literally from the very early stages that China was very skeptical and nervous about the role that the internet would play within the Chinese political system. And it was partly because they were looking at what was happening in Russia or the Soviet Union at the time. So their belief was that actually glasnosts in Perestroika were disastrous for the Soviet Union and actually Glasnost openness. That openness, particularly of communications, had accelerated the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union. And so from very, very early on, they were determined not to kind of replicate what happened to the Communist Party in Russia. And so from the 1990s onwards, they started this program, the Golden Shield program, part of which was the so-called Great Firewall, which is this virtual wall.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talk of the book about Newton's third law of motion, which is, you know, for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction. And it's almost like that is the way the Russian media deals with events in Ukraine. In other words, where something happens in Ukraine, it's reported in the equal and opposite way in Russia. So if there is a, you know, the most glaring example is Butcher, where there's a massacre, a documented massacre, a massacre documented by many, many, many independent observers of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians. That is a stage managed action by the West against Ukrainians in order to alienate people from Russia and in order to allege Russia is guilty of war crimes. In fact, to the extent that, and Jade McLean wrote the rights about this very well, the extent that Butcher now in Russia is a shorthand for fake news. So they literally use that.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stories fit. So whenever, and the way this works in news is, you know, whenever there's a event, the event is not, I mean, it is obviously reported, but it's reported through a particular prism. And that prism has to be the overall strategic narrative. So if Russia is retreating, Russia is actually making a tactical withdrawal in order to attack somewhere else. There is never a moment at which the facts can't kind of contravene the much larger story. They have to fit somewhere within it. And that goes not just for Russia now, it goes increasingly for governments across the world.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us, it presents itself as this kind of David versus Goliath. It is Russia against the West. In its story, Ukraine was becoming increasingly extreme right even fascist, even Nazi. And Ukrainian government was, along with Azov Brigade, was attacking and killing people in the Donbass, people in the Donbass who Russia claimed saw themselves as Russian. And therefore by taking military action, Russia was saving the people of the Donbass from extermination by these Ukrainian Nazis. And then the West, and it does call it the West, the West reacted, and the West started funneling arms and military resources and even personnel into Ukraine in order to fight back against Russia. And this is the sort of much broader story into which all the Malma”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to tell its story well, this belief is that if you can create what scholars call this strategic narrative and the strategic narrative goes beyond simply kind of a specific individual story, it goes to a much broader story which has kind of a narrative arc, it has a sort of an origin story, if you like, it has individual characters. Those characters a little bit like I suppose a Hollywood plot. Those characters are often binary. So you have baddies and goodies. And clearly it's deterministic in the sense that it's sort of leading towards an end point. So to take, I suppose, a really an example that many of us will be familiar with in terms of Russia, when Russia presents the war in the special military operation in Ukraine, it presents itself as a kind of, I know this might sound astonishing.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Point where you get to the last 10 15 years and you have almost any field you look at whether it's commercial kind of in marketing they're always saying the answer to selling more products is to tell better stories if you look towards you know most institutions they say if the institution is in decline or it's under threat they say we just got to tell our story better and then you see this kind of move more and more into politics and you see for example in China in China in 2009 the Communist Party decided that actually the problem was not with the way that China governed the Trump problem was not with China from a geopolitical perspective the problem was that China's story was not well understood by the rest of the world and actually what China needed to do was to as it literally said tell its story well and it started investing enormous amounts in infrastructure and in content”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I suppose I date it back a little bit to thinking done many decades ago by a cognitive psychologist, Jerome Brunner. Jerome Brunner, who looked at how people think and how people learn. And he put forward this kind of proposal that actually an awful lot of people, they're understanding the world comes not through what we might think of as sort of objective reality. In other words, they're not going to endlessly going out and finding out things for themselves. I mean, of course, they find out things from their direct experience, but there's an awful lot that's beyond their own direct experience. And most of us make sense to the world through what he calls these narrative realities. So we understand these kind of broader stories and broader pictures. And that idea, which started out in the he was working in the field of education, started out in the field of education, gradually sort of started to infiltrate all sorts of other fields to the”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are as a government able to not even control all the news, but control the majority of the news, then that takes you a long way down the road towards dominating the kind of national narrative.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This incredibly complex and chaotic atmosphere, but actually what we've seen is this progressive kind of, I don't want to say takeover, this progressive influence over not just legacy media publishers, but all the other kind of structures of news production and dissemination such that in a way, particularly if you live somewhere like Russia, you simply don't see information, you don't see news, you don't see stories that challenge your world view. And even if you are a skeptical citizen, even if you do kind of have a healthy degree of pushback against the government narratives, it's really hard. It's really hard to know what isn't there, to kind of know what isn't being told. I mean, you can certainly talk about it, but quite quickly sound like a conspiracy theorist. So in a way, if...”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The news is central to the story. What many of these governments have realised, and some of them have said so explicitly, is that in order to gain, as they see it, narrative supremacy or kind of narrative dominance in order for their story to be the primary story, they need to, if you like, control the agenda and indeed control some of the facts that fit the agenda. And to do that, they need to have a large degree of control of news. And that is news, and this is the thing that I suppose really struck us when we were looking at it. We thought that in this incredibly chaotic, incredibly sort of open digital public sphere, it's impossible for anyone to really control the news because, you know, not only you've got the old publishers, you've got the new publishers, you've got the new influences, you've got all of us, the kind of the general public, you've got this.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Regained an awful lot of power and are increasing that power. And I think increasing it in a dangerous way, in a way that is very undemocratic and is leading us to this much more authoritarian public sphere and leading us towards, as Russia calls in these kind of sovereign realities.”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was when I was doing some work with Tom from War Studies on Collie. He and I were looking at what Russia and China were doing in particular in terms of their international news services, so Russia with Russia Today, RT and Sputnik and others, and China with CGTN and Xinhua, it actually became clear that it started with autocracies, but actually governments including increasingly a lot of democracies were finding ways in which to take back control, if you like, take back control of certainly of certain political narratives. And they were doing it, and some of them were doing it in a very kind of concerted and deliberate fashion, such that, you know, by the time we get to 2025, you can see around the world, an awful lot of governments, not just autocracies, but a lot of democratic governments have successfully kind of”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yes, and that is the key, I guess, in the sense that when I was doing all that work and I could see the growing technology platforms and see that they become this de facto public sphere, it was obvious that they were going to play an incredibly important part in political communication globally, and they have, and they are, what was really not clear to me then was that If you like, governments would fight back. At the time, it felt as though governments were kind of in retreat and nation states were in retreat and that if you like the people had jumped over the barricades and they had taken control and there was all this talk about the end of power and the end of institutions and how we were seeing sort of this dissipation, this democratization. And that was all the kind of the language and certainly it was the language which the platforms put out. But what became clear?”
2025-11-28 · Intelligence Squared · Why Do Authoritarians Want To Control The News? With Martin Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT