The Dictator’s Guide to Prime-Time Television

The manual of an autocrat for total control of a population includes the broadcast of its personality and ideological cult through mass media. In the twenty-first century, superpowers and traditional totalitarian regimes already execute this spectacular job of shaping the mob’s mind. The blueprint to follow starts with mandating the symbols linked to a State ideology, then fabricating a common enemy even if it’s a by-product of imagination. Last but not least, utilizing education and media apparatus to broadcast the identical speech indefinitely.

In chronological order of how to be a successful autocrat, we look first to the Populist Republic of China. Mao Zedong saw in television as the perfect window to spread the new ideology that has conquered the “country of the middle”. He sent an emissary to the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union to study their television networks in the Chinese-stealing-style. Hence, Mao came up with the wonderful idea that China must have its own broadcast system.

Moving forward in time, China’s Communist Party and State-ruler realized that the television station must modernize to supply the demands of the current era. Subsequently, in 2018, the ancient China Central Television (CCTV), China National Radio and China International Radio will form the China Media Group. Xi Jinping needed a more centralized broadcaster to deepen the reforms of the party and achieve the goals of “socialist modernization and the great rejuvenation of the nation”. In other words, it wasn’t enough to have total control of the speech but to fulfill the insanity of the single party and its social credit system, every network must strictly compel the State-propaganda.

Continuing in Asia, since 1963 the North Korean Workers' Party established the Korean Central Television (KCTV). Imagined by its forefather, General Kim Il Sung, the broadcast network operates relentlessly thirteen hours daily. The program relies entirely on the national anthem Aegukk, the song of the General and hymns dedicated to the ruling family, including the former leader Kim Jong Il and his successors. The platform is purely State-propaganda designed to shape the country’s history while rationalizing the questionable and bloody achievements of the ruling party, the army, leaders and the State ideology, “Juche”. To fulfill the irony of the dictatorship, Juche means human independence, creativity and consciousness.

To illustrate this absurdity, one only needs to look at the network’s legacy of broadcasting fictional achievements, famously inspiring international parodies of KCTV showing its viewers that the national football team won a World Cup tournament they never even qualified for. During televised State military-circus parades and image-worshiping ceremonies, broadcasts feature citizens weeping while the chubby dictator inspects the control of the mob. In 2012, to artificially prop up the illusion of a modernizing State, China's CCTV donated five million yuan, approximately $744,000 dollars, in modern broadcast equipment directly to KCTV so the dictator could have access to 9:16 vertical frames which means your phone.

Traveling to Eurasia, we find the country of oligarchy par excellence, the mother Russia. In the 1990s, the new State government operating after the collapse of the USSR created the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK). It’s run by the Ministry of Digital Development, Communication and Mass Media. Big part of the budget comes from the State oligarchy star company Gazprom which is the cash cow of the Kremlin.

To accomplish a total control of broadcasting networks, the oligarchs’ boss, Vladimir Putin, appointed his friend and propagandist, Oleg Borisovich Dobrodeev as General director of the VGTRK in 2000. He has been sanctioned by the EU, UK, and other European countries for his propagandistic views on the brutal Ukrainian invasion. Detractors in exile and sort of independent views outside Russia declared that the State network spreads propaganda and disinformation: it promotes war as Russia’s fight against “nazis” in Ukraine; Putin’s conservative ideology; control of the political, social and cultural agenda; control of election campaigns as everyone saw in the recent polls, ensuring no opposition leaders have campaign ads; and it hides corruption and oligarchs’ crimes.

The dark-beauty of this autocrat's work and the paved path that the above countries have built lead us to our final example, the rotting democracy of the United States: Donald Trump and his TrumpTV. As everyone must know by now, the war against media established by the White House has provoked the ban of CNN, MS Now and Politico. Then, surprisingly Fox News along with ABC, CBS and NBC suspended their presidential coverage in solidarity. Subsequently, Trump, as an admirer of Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un saw the opportunity to start his State television network.

As you enter the White House webpage, you’ll see a huge kitsch banner saying “Trump TV is here” as an assault on “Fake News” rather than an assault on the free press. Needless to say, one can easily infer that Trump failed to understand the fundamental mechanics of how to be a successful autocrat in the twenty-first century. The whole idea of having a State network is systemic ideological control, not simply stamping a last name on government propaganda. Broadcasting past press conferences as State-mandated reality only highlighted a profound intellectual incapacity, yet it undeniably set a grim precedent for the road toward dictatorship.

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