With democracies under siege around the globe, it is tempting to see an independent press as freedom’s bulwark. In 2023, for instance, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called independent journalism “the foundation of democracy and justice” and “the very lifeblood of human rights.” But the sobering reality is that even the bravest, most determined journalists cannot shore up democracy without strong institutions. The media can expose abuses of power only if civil servants, government insiders, and other sources share sensitive information. And the press’s reporting, in turn, can constrain authoritarians’ power only if it spurs further action. Without prosecutors empowered to bring charges against wrongdoers, judges willing to strike down overreach, legislators daring enough to demand investigations and change laws, and citizens outraged enough to protest, any revelations by journalists will fall on stony ground.
As the assault on press freedom intensifies in the United States, it is instructive to examine the role that journalism has played in other countries facing democratic erosion. The cases of South Korea, Brazil, and El Salvador show the promise—and limits—of the media in bolstering democracy and curbing rising authoritarianism. In these countries, journalists have exposed corruption and mobilized citizens to protest leaders who were abusing their power. But only when other influential institutions and individuals such as courts, businesspeople, and whistleblowers helped check executive overreach did journalism effectively hold power to account. Members of the press in these countries have a warning: the U.S. institutions that support journalism and translate its work into real protections for the public are faltering. And if these institutions are not strengthened, no reporting—no matter how dogged—can arrest tyranny.
NEWS STORY
The collapse of communism in the late 1980s ushered in a captivating narrative about how authoritarianism can be vanquished. First, courageous journalists break a government stranglehold on information. Then, a disillusioned, outraged public takes to the streets calling for freedom. It was an alluring premise: if people are told the truth, dictators will fall.
But that was always an oversimplification that overstated journalism’s power. And in the intervening years, tectonic economic shifts have weakened journalism’s financial pillars. The rise of the Internet broke journalism’s economic model by driving down advertising revenues and widely circulating information the public once had to pay to receive. A 2025 report by the nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders noted that 34 countries are experiencing “mass closures” of news outlets, and in 160 out of 180 countries worldwide, media outlets struggle with financial stability.
And the delivery of news has fragmented. Silvio R. Waisbord, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, notes that 30 years ago, “the mainstream press had the attention of the elites and the public.” Now, “stories written from an accountability perspective are not reaching the people who should be exposed to the information.” The digital revolution has also given governments and political partisans more opportunities to manipulate the information citizens receive.
If institutions such as the judiciary are compromised, journalism cannot prompt change.
Waisbord grew up under the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 and went on to study democratic erosion in Latin America. Generally, he has found that the press is most effective as a tool to counter authoritarianism when it can exploit dissent among elites to extract information. For example, a sprawling 2014 corruption scandal that convicted business leaders and politicians in Brazil and other Latin American countries was sustained by press reports that relied on leaks about testimony and wiretaps from government insiders determined to focus public attention on wrongdoing. Such exposés can, in turn, stiffen the spines of institutions that check authoritarian power such as the legislature, the judiciary, and the military.
In the United States in the 1970s, journalists at The Washington Post relied on an FBI insider—the fabled Deep Throat, later revealed to be the agency’s third in command—to reveal a multitude of crimes by President Richard Nixon and his associates. The journalists used Deep Throat’s information to pry more revelations from Nixon aides troubled by their own complicity in abuses of power. And those revelations prompted action by the judiciary and Congress. The Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s claims of executive privilege and forced the release of the infamous Oval Office tapes. When the House Judiciary Committee subsequently pursued impeaching Nixon, Nixon’s own Republican Party members turned against him, warning him that they would vote to impeach, prompting Nixon to resign.
But if the institutions that can act to redress injustice are docile, captive, or compromised, little or nothing changes. And if people simply do not see what journalists publish in an increasingly siloed and isolated news landscape, they are unlikely to press for change, either.
DEFENDING THE DEFENDERS
South Korea, Brazil, and El Salvador all faced grave threats to democracy, and their different fates illustrate what kind of institutional ecosystem helps a valiant press defend freedom—and how even brave journalists can be muzzled. During South Korea’s nearly quarter century of authoritarian rule from the 1960s to 1980s, many news outlets were cowed into docility, dutifully echoing government propaganda. Even after massive protests by South Korean citizens forced the military dictator Chun Doo-hwan to step aside in 1988, the country’s young democracy struggled. Its repressive intelligence apparatus remained strong; legislators balked at the compromises necessary to pass laws and bridge old enmities, generating gridlock and intensifying partisanship.
When President Park Geun-hye took power in 2013, she adopted an authoritarian style that reminded many South Koreans of the 15 years of repression her father, Park Chung-hee, imposed after he seized power in a 1961 coup. She pressured the CEOs of public broadcasting companies to fire journalists, blacklisted thousands of artists from receiving government funding, and weaponized defamation laws to persecute reporters.
But the emergence of democracy in South Korea had also encouraged the creation of new press outlets committed to exposing abuse and corruption. Park Geun-hye was ultimately brought down by an improbable cooperation between Hankyoreh, a left-leaning daily newspaper established in 1988, and two more-conservative television stations. Soomin Seo, a former reporter and associate professor of journalism at Sogang University’s School of Communication, researched how the outlets uncovered payoffs to Choi Soon-sil, the president’s close adviser. Her analysis revealed that, frustrated by what they saw as political pressure on media leaders to halt coverage of the scandals, reporters from competing outlets shared sources—a remarkable departure from the norm. Although reporters did not disclose the identity of their sources, their scoops—one of which was prompted by the acquisition of a laptop showing that Choi had helped edit some of Park’s speeches—suggested that government insiders may well have assisted journalists.
Even brave journalists can be muzzled.
The revelation that Choi’s daughter was offered entrance to a top university despite mediocre grades stirred particular public outrage because ordinary Koreans cram for years for notoriously competitive entrance exams. That prompted nationwide rallies calling for Park’s resignation. Citizens formed human chains around the National Assembly to block armored vehicles, sewed and hung banners, provided food and drink, and otherwise sustained anticorruption demonstrations. Seo tells me that South Koreans’ fearlessness in protest was driven by their searing memories of dictatorship. “We were the first generation who could travel abroad freely, who grew up in a liberal postdictatorship generation,” she says. In the end, South Korea’s legislature voted to impeach Park. Public protests continued for months while the country’s constitutional court deliberated whether to uphold the impeachment; ultimately, the court unanimously voted to remove Park from office.
In late 2024, South Korea’s legislature again impeached a president—this time for unconstitutionally imposing martial law. Yoon Suk-yeol had already been criticized for presiding over extensive government raids of newsrooms and journalists’ homes on charges of spreading “fake news,” vetoing general labor protections, and whitewashing investigations of government failures. After Yoon imposed martial law, around-the-clock news coverage helped prompt South Koreans to take to the streets. Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation, a legacy television and radio broadcaster, was particularly assertive, including on its wildly popular YouTube channel. According to a 2024 report by the Korea Press Foundation and the Reuters Institute, 51 percent of South Koreans get news from YouTube, the highest percentage among 47 countries that were surveyed.
South Korea’s legislature and judiciary again proved willing to buck presidential power. The constitutional court upheld Yoon’s impeachment unanimously, even though—as was the case in 2017, when Park was ousted—many of the justices had been appointed by the presidents they removed.
SOURCES OF STRENGTH
Brazil’s success in holding President Jair Bolsonaro accountable for plotting a coup after his election loss in 2022 also highlights how vital internal government dissent and an independent judiciary are to the press’s efforts to expose and curb autocracy. After Bolsonaro became president in 2019, he relentlessly attacked the press, mounted disinformation campaigns, and threatened the independence of Brazil’s elections. Brazil was ruled by a military junta from the 1960s to the 1980s, initially supported by a press that believed that temporary leadership by the military could restore stability and fend off communist threats. But Pedro Doria, a columnist for O Globo, the country’s leading daily newspaper, tells me that the resulting long, brutal junta made publishers ashamed of their early compliance and determined to be bolder when Bolsonaro threatened democratic norms. Journalists, businesspeople, and lawyers felt “really clear” that “we had to scream from the beginning,” Doria said. They felt they had to signal to Bolsonaro and any potential Bolsonaro supporters in the military that Brazil could not retreat to dictatorship.
A torrent of journalistic investigations into corruption and misgovernance followed. But the first step in revealing wrongdoing is to find government insiders willing to take risks to provide information—people with access to documents and decisions that show the inner workings of government. Patricia Campos Mello, whose investigations were a crucial spur to judicial action against Bolsonaro, recalls that her sources were determined not to see Brazil dragged back into dictatorship and felt that it was a matter of conscience to speak out. “There was so much internal dissent. It was a paradise of leaks,” she says. People “were brave enough to reach out to journalists.”
Her resulting articles for Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest and most influential newspapers, documented financial irregularities in Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign and his government’s subsequent use of social media to target opponents. Bolsonaro attacked Campos Mello on social media and in public statements, repeating a source’s false charges that she traded sex for leaks and triggering a flood of sexual-assault threats and online harassment against her. (A court eventually awarded Campos Mello compensation for “moral damages.”)
In the end, Campos Mello’s articles and the subsequent public outrage helped push the judiciary to prosecute Bolsonaro. Brazil’s independent judiciary proved vital in translating investigations into action. Federal and special election courts changed electoral rules to bolster elections’ fairness, restrained the use of social media in the country, and convicted Bolsonaro for plotting to stay in power after his 2022 election loss. Because enough opposition lawmakers remained in the legislature, Bolsonaro had neither the absolute sway nor the dealmaking ability to replace judges, Doria says. When journalists did their jobs, Campos Mello says, they “could trust the judiciary would do something.”
SOLITARY CONFINEMENTS
In El Salvador, by contrast, even an outspoken press has struggled to constrain authoritarian repression. In 1992, El Salvador became a democracy after a bloody 12-year civil war. Its constitution attempted to shield the army and the judiciary from politics. But these institutions remained vulnerable to political interference, and widespread poverty and social inequality continued to plague the country. Nayib Bukele was elected president in 2019 by Salvadorans terrorized by drug gangs and disgusted by a political establishment they saw as feckless and corrupt.
He soon gutted the country’s already fragile institutions and blocked avenues of resistance, moving quickly to neuter the legislature by sending members of the Salvadoran military into the parliament building in 2020 in an effort to coerce support for his power grab. Later, his party won a supermajority in the legislature. Those loyalist legislators then replaced many judges on El Salvador’s Supreme Court, which in turn reinterpreted the constitution’s limits on presidential tenure to allow Bukele to win reelection in 2024. Bukele has now decreed that he can stay in office indefinitely.
The Salvadoran digital outlet El Faro has a 15-year track record of fearless investigations, particularly its exposure of politicians’ ties to hated drug gangs. After Bukele took power, it continued to chronicle the erosion of democratic freedoms and government abuses of human rights, aided by alarmed inside sources. But El Faro came under relentless assault by the government—including surveillance, money-laundering charges, and smear campaigns by the very institutions that supported democracy in other countries: the judicial system, public prosecutors, and a legislature compliant with Bukele.
In 2022, the outlet discovered that at least 22 of its 30 journalists had been hacked by a state operator. El Faro published this information along with an editorial directed to its sources, advising them that they should assume that people in the government knew that they might be sources. Fears of government retribution then prompted a sourcing crisis, says El Faro’s director and co-founder, Carlos Dada. “All of our sources disappeared, and we needed to start again” to build “a system of protection for them.” El Faro kept reporting, publishing video interviews earlier this year with a prominent gang leader describing deals with Bukele. But threats of imminent arrest led most of the outlet’s journalists to flee the country, and it now operates in exile in Costa Rica. El Faro is not alone: the Salvadorian Press Association recently noted that over the past six months, at least 53 journalists have fled the country.
“Bukele controls all the institutions,” Dada laments. “Not only the legislature and the judiciary [but] also the attorney general’s office, the army, and the police.” That means “there is no protection [and] no counterbalance. We are defenseless except for our journalism.”
INDEPENDENCE NEEDS INTERDEPENDENCE
The effectiveness of the press depends on an interdependent ecosystem of institutions and democratic norms. These include a professionalized civil service and courageous government insiders, an independent legislature and judiciary, and citizens willing to risk protesting openly.
Even in South Korea and Brazil, journalists are feeling more pressure. Seo, the media professor, warned that South Koreans’ rising distrust of kiregi, or “trash journalists,” who have resorted to sensationalism, and a deluge of partisan commentators on social media could jeopardize trust in the press. Brazilian journalists, meanwhile, report censorship pressure from both the right and the left. As judges shut down some right-wing voices on social media, concerns are rising that the very judiciary that prosecuted Bolsonaro has become too powerful.
American journalists are covering the Trump administration with vigor, chronicling the human cost of the administration’s crackdown on immigration, investigating corruption and self-dealing, and detailing his conflicts of interest and the shattering of democratic norms. This coverage can resonate. Videos and articles with wrenching scenes of children torn from their parents during immigrant detentions appear to be one factor depressing Trump’s approval ratings. And a press report exposing a plan by the Pentagon to brief the businessman Elon Musk on U.S. policy toward China led the Pentagon to backtrack, potentially averting overt corruption.
But journalists in South Korea, Brazil, and El Salvador warn that the institutions that make journalism an effective safeguard for democracy are weakening in the United States. Civil servants have been fired en masse and replaced by loyalists, hampering journalists’ ability to obtain sensitive information. The Republican majority in Congress has not defended its constitutional power to make tariff policy and has enabled the Trump administration’s efforts to impound money appropriated by the legislature, undercutting the system of checks and balances. Many federal judges have ruled acts by the administration unlawful or unconstitutional. But unlike in Brazil or South Korea, the U.S. Supreme Court has embraced an expansive vision of executive power. It has ruled in Trump’s favor in multiple cases, including by allowing racial profiling in immigration arrests and the mass firing of civil servants.
Pushing back against abuses of power takes collective action.
And unlike in Brazil, many corporate media owners are fast succumbing to Trump’s pressure. CBS News agreed to pay $16 million and ABC News paid $15 million to settle lawsuits brought by Trump that many First Amendment lawyers believed had no chance to prevail in court. During Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, the publishers of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times blocked their editorial boards from endorsing his rival. Amazon—whose executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, is also The Washington Post’s publisher—donated large sums to Trump’s inauguration and his proposed new White House ballroom. Brendon Carr, the Federal Communication Commission’s chairman, has openly threatened news outlets. Trump continues to publicly insult journalists, recently telling a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy,” and dismissing the 2018 killing and dismembering of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Saudi journalist, with the phrase, “Things happen.”
To be sure, the United States is still far from El Salvador’s dystopia. Dada, the Salvadoran news outlet chief, notes the strengths the United States still possesses. “You still have an opposition; we don’t. You have a very healthy civil society”—including robust public protest and multiple nongovernmental organizations committed to protecting democracy. In El Salvador, unlike in the United States, the army is now loyal only to the president, although the Trump administration has now deployed the National Guard to several cities, purged many high-ranking military officers, and crossed former redlines by making overtly political speeches to generals.
Democracy scholars and press freedom advocates in the United States are clear on what Americans need to do to protect the rights they have long taken for granted. Pushing back against abuses of power takes collective action—as when all but a handful of news organizations refused to accept the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict reporting on military affairs and lost their Pentagon press passes. Standing up to pressure can dispel fear and embolden further pushback—as when congressional Republicans resisted intense lobbying by Trump and joined with Democrats to demand the release of the Epstein files. Fighting baseless lawsuits in the courts defends press freedom, while settling in advance undermines it.
One reason so many Brazilian and South Korean institutions and individuals stood up to democratic erosion was that they retained vivid memories of persecution under dictatorship. Americans have long considered themselves as apart from much of the world, secure in a long history of vibrant democracy and robust journalism. But other countries’ experiences suggest that complacency is a delusion.
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