Discussion | Do Media Make Authoritarians? A Conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Fred Turner
At the start of World War II, millions of Americans believed that mass media had brought European fascists to power. Today, many are once again convinced that media — social media — are driving the rise of authoritarianism. Historians Ben-Ghiat (NYU) and Turner (Stanford) compare and contrast these claims. Together they explore how mass and social media have empowered autocrats in the past and how social media is used by dissidents to create transnational communities of support.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and other fellowships, an advisor to Protect Democracy, and an MSNBC opinion columnist. She appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other networks. Her latest book, a New York Times bestseller, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020; paperback with a new epilogue, 2021), examines how illiberal leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century.
Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture since World War II. He is the author of five books, including most recently, with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America, and The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. Turner has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.