As leaders stabilize their rule, they use propaganda to legitimate their authority. Discrediting the press is a kind of insurance policy. When journalists turn up evidence of the government’s violence or corruption, the public will already be accustomed to seeing them as partisan. Even those who demonstrate their loyalty can never be certain of their standing with the leader. Any critique, no matter how veiled, can lead to arrest, meetings with security forces or censors, or public denunciations by the leader and his allies on television, radio, or Twitter. This encourages self-censorship,
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