Steven Bartlett

So he's now heading in that direction.

But even inside the United States, which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world, you can see the Trump administration seeking to shape

the information space in new ways.

So we have federal regulators who are now willing to put pressure on television stations if the president asks them to.

We have the president putting his thumb on the scale of people who are acquiring new media companies in order to make sure that the new owners are somehow friendly to him.

TikTok, CBS, CNN, these are all media companies where the president is trying to get people who are sympathetic to him in charge.

And this is, by the way, you know, we all have this idea about censorship, that it's like there's a guy in a room and he's crossing sentences out of a newspaper article.

You know, that's what censorship is.

But actually, nowadays, that's not how media control works.

So in Orban's Hungary, in Erdogan's Turkey, what happens is that the leadership –

It encourages or helps business people or groups close to them to acquire media properties.

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.