Name(s) & affiliation:

  • Dr Ayala Panievsky, Department of Journalism, City St George’s University of London
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Project title:

  • The New Censorship: How the War on the Media is Taking Us Down
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Publication reference, link (APA 7th):

Tell us something about you/your team and how and why you decided to focus on this research

  • When I started my Masters, I was curious about what made journalists and newsrooms so spectacularly ineffective when facing populist authoritarianism. I used to work for Haaretz newspaper, so I was familiar with PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on the media for decades. What stroke me was how big media outlets, with significant power and communicative skills, does such a poor job at protecting its reputation and public authority. This was where it all started.

Summarize the main takeaway of your project.

  • The new censorship looks slightly differently from the old-school one, operating on journalists and audiences simultaneously, manipulating new technology and journalists’ professional norms against them – and us. If we wish to live in open societies, or protect our right to know, we will all have to become media activists ASAP.

What made this project a “polcomm project”?

  • This project focuses on political attacks against journalists, and the media’s responses to them. In this sense, it captures the hostile, high-risk environment in which polcomm is currently shaped. In the last chapter, I try to turn the research findings – by myself and by many other excellent scholars worldwide – into concrete action points for reporters, audiences, and policy makers. I hope at least some of them will choose to follow these guidelines!

What, if anything, would you do differently, if you were to start this project again? (What was the most challenging part of this project? …& how did you overcome those challenges?)

  • To be honest, the most difficult challenge when writing this book was the ongoing war in Gaza, and then in Iran and Lebanon – and how it shifted the public conversation on Israel and Palestine, back home as well as globally. I found myself struggling not to practice some self-censorship myself. In the introduction chapter, I reflect on this process. At times, it felt like there was nothing I could say that won’t hurt either my family and friends back home or my professional community in the UK. While clearly emotionally taxing, I still strongly believe it is necessary for us to insist on having such difficult conversations, even when it is painful, disappointing, heartbreaking.

What other research do you currently see being done in this field and what would you like to see more of in the future?

  • My writing on Anti-media media (in the book and in a separate article) was very much informed by the work of Cherian George in Hong Kong, Kalyani Chadha in India, and AJ Bauer in the US. I think it is critical that more scholars engage – normatively, not just empirically – with the very basic questions that require answers for us to ever improve and empower journalism: What counts as journalism? Who is a journalist? And who gets to decide? It is a political minefield, but unless we go there – bad faith actors will make these calls for us.

What’s next? (Follow-up projects? Completely new direction?)

  • I’m currently working on a few new research projects. One of them seeks to expand our understanding of bottom-up media bashing, which was not studied as comprehensively as top-down anti-media populism. But I keep taking on more and more research projects and initiatives, which probably means I will never publish a second book 🙂
Awardee Interview: The International Journal of Press/Politics Hazel Gaudet-Erskine Best Book Award 2026