Steven Bartlett

So they do it through the level of media ownership.

So who owns the media becomes the most important question.

And then the person who's in charge of the media can then influence in some ways what it's able to say.

So it doesn't give you complete control.

So actually in Hungary you still had –

A couple of very small but still existing independent websites who turned out to be very important.

But you had an attempt to control, most of the television was controlled either directly or indirectly by Orban.

And it looks to me like Trump is trying to achieve something like that.

There's a piece of that that also involves culture and universities as well.

pressure on universities so that they don't produce people who are too critical.

In the U.S., you've had the Trump administration took over the Kennedy Center, which is the most prestigious arts venue in Washington, and tried to change its nature and tried to change its, you know, who could play there and who couldn't.

And the result is actually that it's now been shut down for two years.

Yes, although the mechanisms have been different.

I mean, I was involved in the argument, you know, some years back about this.

You know, I think it was incorrectly called cancel culture, but whatever.

The argument that was happening inside universities and some press and other institutions about what you could and couldn't say changed.

And I thought it was, you know, that there was this peer pressure and sometimes institutional pressure on people and people were canceled.

That means they lost their jobs or they were kicked out of whatever group they were in because they'd said something the wrong way.

You know, I argued against that and wrote about it and so on.

What you have now is a little different.