Marius Dragomir, Director of the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS), CEU discusses in his article how “an increasingly autocratic regime has evolved into a comprehensive program of media capture” in East and Central Europe.
Two one-week summer courses in 2021, co-organized with CMDS, are focusing on related topics. Free media, fact-based narratives, and effective investigative data journalism are essential to hold populist governments to account and fight resurgent authoritarianism supported by propaganda and misinformation globally.
They will address issues of autocratic governments obfuscating their actions and limiting data access to escape public scrutiny (Interviewing Data Journalism) and provide examples of how the construction of disruptive narratives can counter propaganda with facts combined with the passion of narrative (Disruptive Narratives: Re-Constructing the Truth in the Age of Multimodal Propaganda).