Media and illiberalism

This chapter provides a critical overview of existing work on media and illiberalism, alongside research that examines issues of media and illiberalism under other headings (principally, populism, democratic deconsolidation, and conservatism). It starts by discussing present uses of “illiberalism” in the study of media and communication and draws on those uses—together with existing definitions of illiberalism in other disciplines—to propose a working definition of the term for media and communication scholarship. We define media illiberalism as a set of ideas and practices that undermine the ideological and institutional underpinnings of liberal democracy, and that either are enabled by media and communication technologies or affect the way they are used. With these conceptual considerations in mind, we then map three different scenarios of interaction between media and illiberalism: media as aids of illiberalism, media as victims of illiberalism, and media as channels of resistance to illiberalism. We conclude the chapter by pointing to some of the possible avenues for future research.