Would silencing dissent succeed if the media refused to collude?
Around the world, people who stand up to injustice are silenced, criminalised, and branded as threats. It’s been happening for generations. Again and again, dissent is recast as extremism. Malignant media and governments co-script the narrative, portraying those in resistance to oppression as fringe criminals rather than citizens demanding change.
The UK government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is another chapter in this long history. Since its proscription, over 1400 people have been arrested — some for nothing more than displaying a slogan on a T-shirt or placard of support.
The UN has called the move “disturbing” and disproportionate, warning that it is crushing political expression. Yet the press and government work together to brand activists as violent extremists instead of asking the obvious: why are those exposing the profiteering of war treated more harshly than those selling the weapons?
On Saturday, 7th Sept, 890 people were arrested during a peaceful protest in Parliament Square organised by Defend Our Juries. Witness statements and video evidence shows police intimidation and aggression towards bystanders and demonstrators alike.
However, the aggressive arrests were cynically reframed by the media as violence on the part of the protesters.
Independent Media reporting on the ground contradicts that narrative. The Canary observed police “manhandling disabled older people“, with disproportionate force used despite the protesters’ peaceful sit-in. Officers were seen dragging away frail and elderly participants merely holding placards.
The same tactic is visible around the world. In 2024, Kenya’s Gen Z protesters filled the streets, chanting opposition to corruption and inequality. The government responded with abductions, torture, and over 60 killings, while newspapers called the protesters “rioters”.
In Senegal, security forces opened fire on political demonstrators and arrested hundreds, with Amnesty demanding justice for thousands of victims of repression since 2021.
The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests saw pro-democracy demands echo through Beijing and 400 cities. Hundreds – possibly thousands – were killed when the state imposed martial law and unleashed troop violence. Independent and foreign reporting was shut down while state outlets recast the uprising as “riots.”
Under the Trump regime in the US, student-led campus protests for human rights and immigrant justice are being met not just with disciplinary measures, but with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions and visa revocations.
As student media organisations have urged: “Ethical journalism demands that we minimise harm”, calling on newsrooms to rethink anonymity, exposure, and takedown policies when survivors become targets.
Whether the cause is democracy, climate, or freedom from oppression, the pattern is strikingly similar: redefine dissent as a security threat, and the media will help justify the crackdown.
Yet history tells us that those once labelled terrorists are sometimes those who change the world for the better.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, branded a terrorist by Western governments. The Suffragettes were hounded as extremists. Martin Luther King Jr. was treated as an enemy of the state by the FBI.
Years later, these struggles are now celebrated and seen as examples of how media suppression helps erase dissent from history – but only because the people and movements standing up for justice refused to accept the labels imposed on them at the time.
The lesson is clear: labelling peaceful dissenters as “terrorists” and “extremists” is a control tactic. When governments face resistance, they pretend public safety and public servants are at risk. They collude with the media to repeat that message without questioning its motive, so repression escalates unchecked.
But in the rare cases of the media changing its approach, reporting the truth and allowing readers to make up their own minds, public opinion shifts.
In 1970, at the height of the anti-Vietnam war protests across the US, National Guard troops shot dead four unarmed student protesters at the Kent State campus in Ohio. Until then, the local newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, had been reporting the protests as “riots,” echoing the official government angle. But the shootings prompted its editor to go out to the protests, to “get the facts right, even when there is chaos, violence and confusion.” The paper’s coverage deviated from mainstream line and exposing the reality of police brutality. It was strongly criticised at the time, but later won a Pulitzer Prize — and was instrumental in changing public opinion and fuelling broader anti-war resistance.
Would today’s mass arrests and deportations of student protesters in the US be tolerated if coverage headlined their demands rather than dismissing them as extremists?
From Nairobi to Sydney, from Dakar to London, resistance is under attack. Protest is not a threat to national security. Civil disobedience is not extremism. Those who resist unjust and outdated laws are often standing on the right side of history.
Malignant media mislabels them terrorists. History shows they are dissenters. Dissent is the heartbeat of democracy.
We need a Media Revolution for Dissent.
