How To Read The News In Totalitarianism

One of the first memories I have of news and people discussing news is of my parents trying to figure out whether the president was dead.

This is because in Portugal in the early sixties, the news of course couldn’t publish anything that the regime disapproved of. When they announced Salazar was dead, and who his successor was, mom’s answer was “he’s been dead for x months” (aka since he’d disappeared form in public/or they’d noticed a shift in governance) “they just finished the behind t...