Fresh News, innovative news: popularizing Cambodia’s authoritarian turn

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to advance understanding of how the new logics of an expanding digital media system can be mobilized in the service of authoritarianism, by tracing how an online news platform support the legal and discursive production of hegemonic authoritarianism in Cambodia. A state crackdown on independent media has been accompanied by the rise of private digital news outlet Fresh News, which has played a singular role in enabling, legitimizing, and seeking to craft support for Cambodia’s recent shift from competitive to hegemonic authoritarianism. Fresh News represents an authoritarian innovation which can be broken down into three main components: articulating a government-aligned definition of democracy which celebrates strongman rule and rejects liberal democracy; supporting an ongoing judicialization of Cambodian mega-politics; and disseminating a “fake news” discourse which seeks to achieve an epistemic shift. The ambiguous status of Fresh News as a private though overtly state-sanctioned enterprise is a key aspect of these authoritarian innovations, as it popularizes Cambodia’s authoritarian turn from the vantage point of an elusive distance from the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Cambodia
• authoritarianism
• hegemonic authoritarianism
• digital media
• news

Introduction

After two and a half decades of competitive, though flawed, elections in which the electoral arena was slanted in favor of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), Cambodia has shifted to de facto one-party rule. In 2017, the Cambodian Supreme Court dissolved the countrýs main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), and in 2018, a single party parliament consisting of 125 CPP MPs took office after elections that were neither free nor fair. Such a shift from competitive to hegemonic authoritarianism is, on a global level, rare.¹ For the CPP to successfully navigate this abnormal political trajectory calls for great authoritarian inventiveness.

In this article I focus on a particular online news outlet – Fresh News – as a governance innovation in support of this shift to hegemonic authoritarianism. Since 2016, when Facebook became Cambodia’s most important news source, online news has been the main battle site for establishing political “truths” in a deeply polarized society. The CPP has targeted independent media outlets, political opponents, and civil society groups by using information politics as a weapon. Fresh News has played a singular role in enabling, legitimizing, and seeking to craft popular support for a less democratic Cambodia.

Contemporary authoritarian practice is often characterized by “authoritarian innovation,” a term which refers to “novel governance practices designed to shrink spaces for meaningful public participation.”² This perspective emphasizes the dynamism and purposefulness of authoritarian politics as well as the fluidity of governance arrangements, which may include public-private partnerships. I use this perspective to analyze how the new media logics of digital journalism are weaponized to support authoritarianism, an area comparatively overlooked by current scholarship on the digital strategies of authoritarian states. In Cambodia, the rise of private media actor Fresh News accompanying a state crackdown on independent media is an authoritarian innovation which can be broken down into three main components. First, Fresh News has been crucial in articulating a government-aligned redefinition of democracy which celebrates strongman rule on nationalist grounds.³ Second, Fresh News reporting has repeatedly been the basis for legal action, and should therefore be considered an integral part of an ongoing judicialization of Cambodian mega-politics.⁴ Third, Fresh News contributes to an epistemic shift which reflects the emergence of a global “fake news” debate.⁵ These authoritarian innovations, relying on the artfulness of non-state actors in popularizing authoritarianism, are likely to have long-term implications for the hardening of authoritarian rule.

Online news as authoritarian practice

When theorizing the relationship between media outlets and regime type, a dominant assumption in political science, heralding back to modernization theory, has been that private media help destabilize authoritarian regimes. Only recently, with a rise in interest in authoritarian resilience, have scholars addressed the opposite scenario, in which market-based media outlets function as propaganda devices for the consolidation of contemporary authoritarian regimes.⁶ Yet this perspective is generally based on traditional broadcast media.

With the advent of the Internet, scholars are divided between those who argue that digital media platforms undermine authoritarianism and those who argue these bolster it, or what Espen Geelmuyden Rød and Nils Weidmann have termed “liberation technology” versus “repression technology” perspectives.⁷ Literature on the digital strategies of authoritarian states from both perspectives shares an overwhelming focus on social media,⁸ digital activism,⁹ e-governance,¹⁰ censorship and filtering of online content,¹¹ and the tracking of suppliers and consumers of digital content.¹² Comparatively little attention has been given to the role of government-sponsored digital journalism.¹³

In this paper I further understandings of online news as a digital tactic by authoritarian states by analyzing Fresh News as an integral part of the Cambodian government’s digital and overall strategies for authoritarian stabilization. To understand what authoritarianism is in the contemporary world, Marlies Glasius argues for a shift in focus away from national regime types and the quality of elections, to authoritarian practices with fluid governance arrangements, including public-private partnerships. She argues for a definition of authoritarianism “that is substantive and dynamic rather than negative and systemic; that focuses on sabotage of accountability rather than the quality of elections alone; and that lends itself to assessing political institutions within, below or beyond the state.”¹⁴ Authoritarianism, she suggests, should be viewed in practice-oriented terms:

[It is] … a pattern of actions, embedded in an organized context, sabotaging accountability to people (“the forum”) over whom a political actor exerts control, or their representatives, by disabling their access to information and/or disabling their voice.¹⁵

Importantly, the core of authoritarianism should not be understood as a mere lack of accountability, but as accountability sabotage. This reflects how discourses and institutions of accountability are ubiquitous and often imitated in the contemporary world, whilst in practice accountability is actively subverted.¹⁶

Mediating access to information and voice, online news outlets lend themselves particularly well to authoritarian practices. The expanding digital media system has afforded populists and authoritarians particular opportunities by allowing them to bypass traditional, established media outlets.¹⁷

The rise of government-sponsored digital journalism in Cambodia is an overlooked aspect of a digital strategy for political survival. Existing scholarship on the Cambodian government’s media strategy leading up to and during the transition to hegemonic authoritarianism has focused on a crackdown on independent media beginning in 2017¹⁸ and the CPP government’s response to the new pressures of social media, including Facebook activism.¹⁹ Yet Fresh News is a key part of the government’s digital strategy, filling the silent spaces left by the crackdown on independent media. With its largest audience on Facebook, it has also benefited from the rapid spread of Facebook in Cambodia.

This ecology of online tools functions in a dynamic relationship to offline autocratic politics. From the re-introduction of multi-party elections in 1993 until 2017, the Cambodian state fit the definition of competitive authoritarianism, in which “formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents” and electoral competition therefore is real but unfair.²⁰ The CPP has relied on a broad portfolio of tactics to remain in power since 1993, including repression and coercion backed by an extractive and exclusive political economy,²¹ cooptation of oppositional voices through coalition-building and consensual politics,²² and, increasingly over the last decade, the use of the law to repress dissent.²³ While there have been few formal restrictions on the press, almost all Khmer-language publications and broadcast outlets have toed the line of Hun Sen and the CPP.²⁴ Confronted with rising challenges to his rule, as shown in the contested 2013 election, Hun Sen pushed his regime from competitive to hegemonic authoritarianism.²⁵ This shift was set in motion in 2017, when the main opposition party, the CNRP, was dissolved, the rule of law was breached, and media outlets were nearly monopolized by the government.²⁶ In 2018 national elections, the CPP claimed 77.3 percent of the popular vote and marked two decades of successive electoral victories, fulfilling two common criteria of hegemonic authoritarianism.²⁷

Analyzing Fresh News’s role in Cambodia’s shift from competitive to hegemonic authoritarianism as practices of accountability sabotage reveals how these are bound up with offline measures. One form of accountability sabotage disables access to information, which can include both secrecy and disinformation.²⁸ Fresh News digital journalists have engaged in smear campaigns against CPP opponents and sought to craft support for a strongman variant of democracy by relying on anonymous social media sources. Moreover, Fresh News reports of unsubstantiated online rumors have formed the basis of legal action against CPP opponents, a tactic which is integral to the ongoing judicialization of politics. Another form of accountability sabotage disables voice.²⁹ Fresh News has set out to shape notions of political truth through a fake news discourse, which selectively denies voice.³⁰ These illustrate a need for a shift from an exclusive focus on authoritarian regimes and authoritarian personalities to one which examines the role of authoritarian practices for a socially relevant understanding of authoritarianism today.³¹

Media crackdown and the rise of Fresh News

Cambodia’s recent shift to hegemonic authoritarianism is intimately bound up with state management of information flows. The shift was in response to the rise of a strong and united opposition, which competing in 2013 national elections under the banner of the newly formed CNRP came a close second to the CPP.³² A BBC Media Action study found media to be a key information source for youth when making voting choices, second only to senior family members.³³ The US government-funded Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, Cambodia’s most popular radio stations at that time, countered government narratives with a wide reach to rural Cambodians. Television (38.9 percent) and radio (38.8 percent) were the most important sources of news, with the Internet lagging behind at 15.2 percent.³⁴ Even so, the 2013 election was likened to a test of strength between traditional and new media. Observers noted that online media platforms had created an unprecedented opportunity for the opposition CNRP, which with restricted access to traditional media sources had managed to use social media to its advantage.³⁵ For some observers, the 2013 election results suggested that a continued increase in access to social media without government interference would spur “fundamental political change.”³⁶ By 2016, Facebook and the Internet had become the primary source of news for citizens (thirty percent), followed by television (twenty-nine percent), word of mouth (twenty-three percent) and radio (fifteen percent).³⁷ By the time of the 2018 national elections, 6.8 million Cambodians (42.5 percent of the total population) were Facebook users. This compares to one million users in 2013.³⁸

Launched as a digital news source in 2014, Fresh News cleverly inserted itself into a media landscape turning towards online news.³⁹ Fresh News offered a technological innovation: Khmer-language news through a smartphone application.⁴⁰ By 2019, the application, which sends news alerts throughout the day, had been downloaded over one million times. Fresh News’s Facebook page, also created in 2014, has had an even greater audience, reaching 3.7 million “likes” by September 2020.⁴¹ Fresh News also operates its own television, radio, and YouTube channels, and, as of October 2019, had a total audience of four million.⁴² According to the founder of Fresh News, Lim Cheavutha, their target group is “those who follow politics” – in particular government officials and non-governmental organization (NGO) workers.

The growth of Fresh News has paralleled a government purge of pockets of independent media. These were spaces advocating liberal democratic norms, whose journalists considered themselves to be “enacting the liberal democratic project in Cambodia.”⁴³ Between August and September 2017, the government revoked the licenses of over a dozen private radio stations for alleged tax and administrative violations. Many of these carried programs produced by the US government-sponsored Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, as well as local broadcaster Voice of Democracy. In September 2017, Radio Free Asia, the country’s most popular broadcaster, closed its Phnom Penh bureau after nearly twenty years. The Cambodia Daily, the country’s first English-language newspaper founded by American journalist Bernard Krisher in 1993, ceased publication in September 2017, after being handed a disputed $6.3 million tax bill. In December, the Ministry of Information closed down 330 print media outlets, citing inactivity. The last main remaining independent newspaper, the Phnom Penh Post, was sold in May 2018 to a Malaysian businessman, who as managing director of public relations firm ASIA PR had overseen “Hun Sen’s entry into the Government seat” as a project. Many of the paper’s journalists subsequently resigned or were fired.

Independent journalists I interviewed said this crackdown on independent media outlets was motivated by government efforts to limit alternative narratives on imminent political developments. In September 2017, CNRP President Kem Sokha was arrested and charged with treason. In November 2017, the Cambodian Supreme Court, controlled by allies of Hun Sen, dissolved the CNRP, ruling that it had sought to seize power through a popular uprising – charges rejected by the CNRP as politically motivated. In July 2018, national elections were held in the absence of the main opposition party.

Although a private news outlet that supports government claims is not a new phenomenon in Cambodia, the symbiotic relationship between Fresh News and the CPP government is unprecedented.⁴⁴ The founder of Fresh News, Lim Cheavutha, is a former designer and reporter who developed Fresh News during his time as CEO of Deum-Ampil (DAP) News. DAP News, established in 2006 by CPP loyalist Soy Sopheap, was the first Khmer-language news outlet to focus on its online edition, which delivered a pro-government take on news. Yet Fresh News has far outrivalled its older sibling in significance.

Democracy restated

The competitive authoritarian CPP regime of Hun Sen has advanced a discourse of “people’s democracy” centered on social and economic development, which it has framed as integral to peace-building in the wake of Cambodia’s lengthy civil war.⁴⁵ The CPP has portrayed Hun Sen as a reincarnation of historical king and alleged inventor of democracy Sdech Kan (reigned 1504-1512), a commoner who ascended the throne after toppling an unjust king.⁴⁶ The CPP has done so in response to two challenges it has faced: transforming the state from socialism to a patronage-driven multi-party system, and countering any potential threat posed by Cambodia’s monarchy, which had been restored in 1993.

The shift to hegemonic authoritarianism has been accompanied by the dissemination of novel notions of democracy, for which Fresh News has been a key actor. On September 3, 2017, CNRP President Kem Sokha was arrested in his home in a large-scale operation involving 100 police officers. Fresh News livestreamed his arrest, even though there had been no prior warning that an arrest was to take place. Kem Sokha’s arrest followed the closure of independent radio stations in the preceding weeks, which limited alternative framings, although the final issue of the Cambodia Daily reported on the arrest with the headline “Descent into Outright Dictatorship.”

Fresh News ran the government’s statement on the arrest as its top story, complemented by myriad statements in support by public officials.⁴⁷ These justified the arrest by referencing a 2013 video of Sokha which had been broadcasted by the Cambodia Broadcasting Network and had reappeared on Fresh News three hours before the arrest.⁴⁸ In the clip, Sokha claimed to have received assistance from the US government as part of a strategy to trigger political change in Cambodia.⁴⁹ The Cambodian government cited this clip as evidence of treason, punishable under article 443 of the Cambodian criminal code.⁵⁰

In the week leading up to Sokha’s arrest, Fresh News published posts from a Facebook account under the name of Kone Khmer (“Child of Cambodia”).⁵¹ These posts included a claim that the CNRP had received funds from a Serbian group and had trained party activists in Jakarta, Indonesia.⁵² The posts outlined a US-backed “color revolution” to overthrow the Cambodian government involving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the American Embassy in Phnom Penh, NGOs, journalists, and the CNRP.⁵³ Fresh News reporting spread these accusations of treason, which eroded the democratic credentials of the CNRP, civil society organizations, and independent media outlets, from an anonymous source – disabling access to information through secrecy.

Linking democratic and nationalist credentials is commonplace in Cambodia, where the notion of democracy is conflated with national preservation.⁵⁴ The specter of US interference has become a common refrain invoked by the CPP, which blurs the boundary between democracy and national interests. This is demonstrated with the name of the anonymous Facebook account. Kone Khmer evokes nationalist identification between national and democratic representation, while painting the opposition as antithetical to both Cambodia and democracy. This invocation of authentic Khmerness has important historic parallels to related notions of the “son of the soil,” such as Khmer daum (the original Khmer), a term once used to promote national sovereignty. ⁵⁵ Kone Khmer sometimes refers to a specific individual, such as the author who used this pen name for a series of Fresh News editorials. But Kone Khmer also can allude to a voice that speaks on behalf of Khmer citizens as a whole. This latter perspective is apparent in a statement by Lim Cheavutha during an interview:

I confirm that Fresh News is the news of the real Khmer and there is no support from any foreign country, like other newspapers that … publish fake news to poison Cambodian society. … Fresh News is 100 percent Khmer. … I can even add that Fresh News belongs to Kone Khmer. So, whatever is for the benefit of Khmer, the benefit of the entire Khmer citizenry, we support it.⁵⁶

Similarly, in the lead up to national elections in July 2018, a series of Fresh News opinion pieces appeared under the title “A Khmer viewpoint” (Tossânah Kone Khmer, literally “the viewpoint of children of Cambodia”) signed with various pen names, including “A citizen in Phnom Penh,” “an old Buddhist lay priest,” and “a civil servant.” These purported representatives of different segments of Cambodian society elaborated a shared interpretation of the imminent elections, in which the CPP ran uncontested by any major opposition party. One typical opinion piece entitled, “A Khmer viewpoint: earth and sky rumble and shake as a sign of the victory of the angel army,” referred to rallying CPP activists as an “angel army” (kângtoap tevada), led by “the Strongman of Cambodia, a strong and able commander, who wins one hundred battles out of one hundred, and has shaken heaven and earth in Phnom Penh and the entire Kingdom of Cambodia.”⁵⁷ The unnamed author argued that Hun Sen’s imminent electoral victory was cosmologically sanctioned and resulted from his prowess.

Hun Sen’s morphing political identity is thus integral to shifting notions of democracy. Government critics have regularly referred to Hun Sen as a strongman. Hun Sen has not embraced this term, though indications are that neither has he disapproved of it.⁵⁸ Fresh News is the first news outlet to use the term “strongman” as a legitimate title that casts Hun Sen in a positive light. Since at least 2016, Fresh News has used this term for Hun Sen in both English and Khmer, alternating in Khmer between Boros klang nei Kampuchea (Strongman of Cambodia) and Boros klang Decho (The Strongman Protector).

Fresh News routinely uses this term for a select group of world leaders with authoritarian leanings, including Vladimir Putin and Rodrigo Duterte.⁵⁹ In an article entitled “The Age of Strongmen in Asia,” an anonymous author using the pen name Kone Khmer compared the rise of China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Hun Sen, considering them to have heralded in a new Asian strongman era.⁶⁰ The author claimed that “Western-style democracy is not a real need in Asia", where democracy must include “the Asian mind set and the mind set of each country.” The dissolution of the CNRP in this reading followed from an Asian strongman, Hun Sen, upholding Asian values when faced with foreign interference.⁶¹

This discourse of a strongman frames electoral victories as a confirmation of popular support for strong authoritarian leadership. Indeed, the Hun Sen government did make a point to hold parliamentary elections in 2018, and cited voter turnout as evidence of the legitimacy of that election. The strongman discourse offers an interpretation of leadership in which legitimate power can be confirmed by elections, but is not defined by it.

The judicialization of mega-politics

A second authoritarian innovation which Fresh News has been integral to is the judicialization of mega-politics, which began with the arrest of Kem Sokha and the subsequent dissolution of the CNRP.⁶² The judicialization of politics – the heightened involvement of judiciaries in political matters – has been a global phenomenon over the past century. Ran Hirschl has defined this as a reliance on courts for addressing core moral predicaments, public policy questions, and political controversies. He labels the third category as “mega-politics,” which he describes as an emerging reliance on courts and judges for dealing with “core political controversies that define (and often divide) whole polities.”⁶³

The judicialization of mega-politics is on the rise across Asia. The record of these judicial electoral interventions is mixed. They have shored up electoral governance, as in Indonesia, and undermined it, as in Thailand, varying outcomes best explained by “the diffusion or concentration of power among post-transition elites.”⁶⁴ When power is concentrated, elites have both the motive and the means to use judicial activism for antidemocratic ends, but when power is diffused, elites lack the means to bend the judiciary and therefore prefer for it to be a credible arbitrator.⁶⁵ In Cambodia, similar to Thailand, political power is structured “around a single power center that critically influences judicial behavior,” in this case a party-personalist regime.⁶⁶ Like the situation in Thailand,⁶⁷ the Cambodian political landscape reflects Ran Hirschl’s “hegemonic preservation” thesis, which considers judicial empowerment “an efficient institutional means by which political elites can insulate their increasingly challenged policy preferences against popular pressures.”⁶⁸

Fresh News has played a key role in this agenda, by sabotaging accountability in a number of ways. By sharing anonymous leaks and unsupported rumors, Fresh News has disabled access to information. By elevating these to the status of newsworthiness, Fresh News has been complicit in defining what information is deemed to be juridically significant evidence. This has also disabled voice, as the anonymity of Fresh News’ sources prevents questioning.

A case in point was the arrest of Kem Sokha in September 2017. The accusations linking Sokha to a US-backed conspiracy to topple the government were originally posted anonymously to the Kone Khmer Facebook account and supported primarily by Facebook photos from the accounts of the concerned individuals. Fresh News then republished these posts without further investigation, offering no corroborating evidence or providing the names of sources.⁶⁹ Once these claims were parroted by Fresh News, they not only had nationwide reach, but were also seemingly sanctioned by a respectable news outlet.

These Fresh News reports then prompted a response from the authorities. In late August 2017, National Police Commissioner Neth Savoeun was reportedly assigned to investigate the claims that the CNRP had received Serbian funds and had trained activists in Jakarta.⁷⁰ When Kem Sokha was arrested in September of that year, Prime Minister Hun Sen cited claims of a US-backed conspiracy – reproduced and popularized by Fresh News – as the reason.⁷¹

Hun Sen particularly referenced the 2013 video of Kem Sokha, which had appeared on Fresh News mere hours before the arrest. In October 2017, the Ministry of Interior filed a lawsuit against the CNRP, in which the video was included as key evidence.⁷² In its November ruling to dissolve the CNRP, the Supreme Court cited Sokha’s 2013 speech as proof that the CNRP was guilty of breaking the 1997 Law on Political Parties, which had been newly amended in July 2017 to make it illegal for a party to “support, develop plans, or conspire with individuals who carry out activities opposing the interest of Cambodia.”⁷³

At Kem Sokha’s trial, which began after a long delay in January 2020, material posted by the anonymous Kone Khmer account was presented as evidence. The “accountability sabotage” this represented became a key point of contention: Kem Sokha refused to respond to claims made by an anonymous source and requested the court provide a clear source of evidence. One of Kem Sokha’s defense lawyers then requested that evidence pulled from the Kone Khmer Facebook page be excluded because of the page’s questionable reliability. The presiding judge rejected his request.⁷⁴

Fresh News has also been a platform for government officials to present new evidence against those deemed to be potential threats to the CPP. One instructive example is the August 2017 closure of the non-profit National Democratic Institute (NDI), a US-funded organization affiliated with the US Democratic Party. This closure followed the pattern outlined above: Kone Khmer posted images from an NDI training session, claiming these were evidence of an NDI plan to help the CNRP defeat the CPP in the 2018 election.⁷⁵ Fresh News then wrote an article about the post,⁷⁶ which was subsequently shared on social media by government officials, prompting additional articles. Ministry of Interior official Huy Vannak told Fresh News that NDI had not registered with his ministry.⁷⁷ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did likewise, and Kong Vibol, head of the national tax authority, said the NDI had not registered properly for taxation.⁷⁸ A few days later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered the NDI to cease operations and expelled its foreign staff, citing its failure to register with relevant government agencies within the legally stipulated timeframe.⁷⁹The NDI's closure was thus justified with reference to information coming out of a conversation between government officials on the Fresh News pages.

Finally, Fresh News functions as an amplifier, which by disseminating private conversations publicly makes these punishable under the law. In October 2017, the Facebook account Seiha leaked a private phone call in which former Deputy Prime Minister Lu Lay Sreng of the royalist Funcinpec Party called King Sihamoni a “castrated chicken” for failing to act against the government crackdown. He also alleged that Hun Sen paid Funcinpec to take over vacant CNRP National Assembly seats, when these were distributed among other parties following the CNRP’s dissolution.⁸⁰ Over the following months Fresh News published twenty-seven articles detailing this conversation.⁸¹ Both Hun Sen and Funcinpec sued Lu Lay Sreng for defamation. In February 2018, Lu Lay Sreng was found guilty of defaming Hun Sen, even though Cambodian law defines defamation as public speech, and his remarks had been part of a secretly recorded private phone conversation. In court, Hun Sen’s lawyer, Ky Tech, argued that “the conversation was private, but when it was posted to Facebook by Seiha, the public could hear it.⁸² The role of Fresh News, as the disseminator of online leaks, can consequently be understood as that of a loudspeaker, which makes private comments punishable.

Fake news

A third authoritarian innovation in which Fresh News plays a key role is a government-aligned fake news discourse. In academic discourse, “fake news” is a broad category which includes satire, parody, fabrication, manipulation, advertising, and propaganda.⁸³ Authoritarians worldwide have weaponized this notion to cherry-pick which news items carry truth value.⁸⁴

The notion of fake news (pormean klaeng klay or pormean min pit) first appeared in Cambodia in the wake of the 2013 election, when Facebook became a platform for both opposition leader Sam Rainsy and Prime Minister Hun Sen to construct competing political narratives. Fabricated stories and online leaks – originating from both political camps – became everyday occurrences.⁸⁵ The Facebook pages of Cambodia’s political leaders are regularly hacked and fake information posted. Unsurprisingly, the government has responded with initiatives to control information disseminated in public.

Already in 2012, the government had announced its intention to pass an anti-cybercrime law.⁸⁶ In April 2018, it proclaimed it would draft a fake news law. The following month, the Ministries of Post and Telecommunication, Information, and Interior adopted a joint inter-ministerial directive on website and social media control, designed to block online media platforms that “cause chaos and threaten national security and defense.”⁸⁷ Three weeks before the July 2018 national election, the three ministries announced a second joint-directive against websites and social media companies that published alleged fake news. Phos Sovann, a Ministry of Information official, appealed to media outlets to respect the principles of the National Election Commission, which had issued a code of conduct forbidding journalists from disseminating news that could lead to “confusion and loss of confidence” in the upcoming election.⁸⁸ The government’s fight against fake news was thereby overtly tied to establishing control over the narrative about the election. In March 2019, the government announced the creation of a spokesperson unit to address criticisms made by journalists.⁸⁹

An annual media correspondents’ dinner, instituted by Hun Sen in 2017, illustrates how the media crackdown has increasingly been framed as an issue of fake news. In 2017, Hun Sen lambasted what he called “unprofessional” journalists who were critical of the government and failed to issue corrections requested by officials.⁹⁰ The following year, Hun Sen justified the crackdown on independent media by accusing shut down media outlets of spreading fake news, drawing parallels to Donald Trump’s promised “fake news awards.”⁹¹ In 2019, Hun Sen went further, stating that unlike with sports, there are no shared international standards for information and politics, justifying the government’s claimed right to define the veracity of news.⁹²

Fresh News has had a central role in propagating this government discourse of fake news. As an authoritarian innovation, this discourse serves to disable voice, by shutting down expressions of criticism and critical questioning of power-holders.⁹³ Only a small minority of Fresh News coverage of alleged fake news refutes rumors that do not appear to have political ramifications.⁹⁴ More commonly, it refutes stories which cast the government in a negative light. In March 2018, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that Cambodian authorities had opened fire on a group of villagers protesting over a land dispute in Snuol, Kratie Province, “killing as many as eight people and injuring dozens of others.”⁹⁵ The following day, an analysis penned by Chao Chak Smok (“he who dreams too big to be true”) appeared in Fresh News, entitled “For what purposes do anti-government newspapers create fake news?”⁹⁶ The anonymous writer charged that the RFA had “an opposition tendency” and branded its reporting on the Snuol protest “fake news.” The following day, the prosecutor’s office in Kratie issued a press release, published by Fresh News, parroting the Fresh News charge that RFA reporting on the Snuol event was “fake news.”⁹⁷ If there was truth to the RFA reports, the Snuol event was a game changer in that the government narrative on violent land conflict shifted from accusing villagers of provoking heavy-handed measures to denying that those events had even taken place.

Starting with the Snuol incident, Fresh News portrayed the opposition as complicit partners of independent media in spreading fake news. Chao Chak Smok attributed the creation of fake news to a joint opposition agenda promoted by journalists, the political opposition, and some NGOs.⁹⁸ The indefatigable Kone Khmer, meanwhile, maintained that the opposition was conducting nothing short of a “fake news campaign” and called for caution against journalists, “inciting” politicians, and foreign-funded civil society organizations.⁹⁹

In connection with the 2018 election, Fresh News reporting on alleged fake news stories rose sharply, often blaming the banned CNRP as the originator of these. The increase suggests an ambition to take control over the national narrative on an election that as a one-horse race lacked popular legitimacy. A few days after the election, an opinion piece in Fresh News signed Chao Chak Smok charged that in questioning the legitimacy of the election, Sam Rainsy was “spreading fake news” and was seeking to “distort the truth and confuse national and international opinion.” The anonymous author concluded that Sam Rainsy and his associates were traitors, slaves serving foreigners, and people of a foreign ideology (neak bârotes niyum) – neatly tying fake news charges to the larger nationalistically imbued discourse of democracy propagated by the news outlet.

Post-truth as a shorthand for the contemporary epistemic moment is conceptually diverse. It spiked in usage in 2016 during the pro-Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in the United States, referring to how both campaigns were marked by “the routine abandonment of facticity, the repetition of unfounded assertions, and attacks on the news media.”¹⁰⁰ This is reminiscent of Fresh News reporting. In a grand reading, post-truth signals nothing short of “the collapse of the modern project of disciplining knowledge by promoting the scientific model as the only legitimate knowledge.”¹⁰¹ Read in this way, post-truth applies little to epistemic change in today’s Cambodia, where the CPP has long justified its rule not on technocratic but morally imbued discourses of the man of prowess and the meritorious benefactor. The shift to a strongman discourse with heavy nationalist overtones relates less to the collapse of a scientific form of knowledge than to the transformation of morally based claims to legitimate power.

Mostly, however, claims of the emergence of a post-truth era denote the build-up of critical discourse about the press.¹⁰² Independent journalists I interviewed were concerned that Fresh News reporting erodes media literacy and has lessened trust in professional journalists. Their response has been, however, limited to providing fact-checking accounts of Fresh News stories. In the words of one journalist:

I don’t think Cambodia can avoid this [government] mouthpiece. It is too strong to resist. But the last independent media outlets must play some role in convincing the public […] to love truth.

A state-private partnership?

Neither the government nor Fresh News claims the latter is an independent media platform. Initial support came from Huy Vannak, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Interior, as well as CPP-affiliated business mogul Kith Meng, owner of the Cambodia Television Network (CTN).¹⁰³ According to Huy Vannak, “everyone has to follow Fresh News … every government, they need to have the media they trust to send out information.”¹⁰⁴ Government spokesman Phay Siphan has referred to Fresh News as “a space for the government to share the news,” stating that it receives information from the government.¹⁰⁵ Similarly, Lim Cheavutha has stated that “if he [Hun Sen] wants to spread news he comes to me.”¹⁰⁶ The labels used to characterize Fresh News reflect this relationship. While English-language media typically refer to Fresh News as a government mouthpiece, local media characterize it as “close with the government” (dael chit sneut cheamuoy rothaphibal).

This arrangement puts Fresh News far ahead of its competitors with breaking news. Nop Vy, head of the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, distinguishes Fresh News from independent outlets, “which aim to break stories with some level of independence and insight,” by how Fresh News “just provides information.” According to Nop, Fresh News works closely with police, military police, and government officials.¹⁰⁷

Most contemporary authoritarian regimes rely on both state media and private media to “do their bidding,” with China and Russia “cutting-edge users” of this model.¹⁰⁸ Media outlets may be owned and run by the state, or nominally private but under de facto government control. Yet in the Cambodian case, why does the government not seek to conceal its links with Fresh News, or alternatively turn Fresh News into a state-owned media platform? After all, in China, although the news media system since commercialization (begun in 1992) is defined by a mix of Party logic and market logic in which private-public partnerships are a common arrangement, majority ownership rests with the state.¹⁰⁹

A powerful reason for maintaining Fresh News as a private enterprise arguably has much in common with why media industries in China have been commercialized. China’s market-driven media industry sustains authoritarian rule, by providing “more convincing and sophisticated messages” compared to the “mouthpieces” of earlier communist regimes.¹¹⁰ In Cambodia, the widespread unpopularity of established state-owned media outlets, such as the Agence Kampuchea Press (national press agency) and National Television of Kampuchea (TVK), prevents the state from claiming ownership of Fresh News, amidst hopes that its status as a private business initiative can increase popular trust. Its digital format, managed by a private owner, allows Fresh News to deliver its trademark breaking news in the blink of an eye. In the words of Lim Cheavutha, “Because I need to push the notification [to my application rapidly], I just spend one minute to [reach] over one million users.”

Conversely, Fresh News and government assertiveness over their close ties can be understood as a way of normalizing the undeniable control that the government exercises by highlighting Fresh News’s mission to transmit exclusive information provided by the state. In the words of one VOA journalist, “If I were the CEO of Fresh News, I would say that we are a bridge between the state and the people.” This dynamic has shifted the national media conversation. Independent journalists whom I interviewed explained that following the blackout of independent media sources, their main strategy to identify newsworthy stories is to follow Fresh News reporting, and then approach these stories in a critical manner. This demonstrates that Fresh News to a large extent now sets the news agenda.

Conclusion

I have sought to advance understanding of how the new media logics of digital journalism are weaponized in the service of authoritarianism, by analyzing the role played by Fresh News in connection with Cambodia’s shift to hegemonic authoritarianism. It must be stressed that this analysis addresses the production of authoritarian innovations, not how these are received. The effectiveness of some of these practices is evident, such as the enabling of deepening authoritarianism through the judicialization of mega-politics. We do not know, however, whether these authoritarian innovations can successfully craft support for deepening authoritarianism.

The different innovations I have discussed fall outside a perspective of authoritarianism which focuses on regime classification on the basis of the quality of elections. If we instead adopt the perspective that contemporary authoritarianism is characterized by innovative practices, and that the core feature of authoritarianism is “an active practice of disrupting or sabotaging accountability,”¹¹¹ we are well-equipped to make sense of the prominent role played by Fresh News in connection with Cambodia’s authoritarian turn. This lends credence to Marlies Glasius’s assertion that “a practice-oriented definition, rather than a system-oriented definition, is better suited to understanding authoritarianism today.”¹¹²

By drawing on the logics of digital media and the particular opportunities for accountability sabotage they afford, Fresh News has been a key actor at all stages of Cambodia’s transition to hegemonic authoritarianism. Authoritarian innovation disabled access to information. Fresh News’s smear campaign against the political opposition and its dissemination of new notions of a strongman variant of democracy relied on the republishing of posts from anonymous social media sources and anonymous opinion pieces. Its exclusive live-streaming of Kem Sokha’s arrest and selective attention to unsupported online rumors made Fresh News the protagonist of the judicialization of mega-politics. Authoritarian innovation also disabled voice. The cacophony of online voices has enabled Fresh News to take on the role of arbiter for identifying fake news while simultaneously pumping out exclusive information to set the national news agenda. The ambiguous status of Fresh News as a private though overtly state-sanctioned enterprise is arguably a key to these innovations, popularizing Cambodia’s authoritarian turn from the vantage-point of an elusive distance from the state.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor of Critical Asian Studies, two anonymous reviewers, as well as Nicole Curato, Diego Fossati and Aim Sinpeng for valuable comments on this paper. I am grateful to the journalists that agreed to be interviewed, to Andrew Nachemson for sharing interview material, as well as to Shaun Turton for digging out information from his archives. Remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Astrid Norén-Nilsson is an associate senior lecturer at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. Her scholarship focuses on the politics of Cambodia in the post-conflict reconstruction era. Her research interests include political and civil society elites, authoritarian innovation, nationalism, and changing notions of democracy and citizenship in Cambodia. She is the author of Cambodia’s Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy (Cornell SEAP 2016) and has published extensively, including in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Peace Review, Pacific Affairs, SOJOURN, and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs.

Notes

1 Morgenbesser 2019, 159 names four cases for comparison: Algeria under Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Cameroon under Paul Biya, Guinea under Lansana Conté, and Russia under Vladimir Putin.

2 Curato and Fossati 2020.

3 Lai and Slater 2006 define strongman rule as a personalistic authoritarian regime type in which the leader has a military background.

4 On mega-politics, see Hirschl 2009.

5 On fake news, see Tandoc Jr, Lim, and Ling 2018.

6 Zhao 1998; Stockmann 2013.

7 Rød and Weidmann 2015.

8 Gunitsky 2015; Howard et al. 2011; Shirky 2011; Gainous et al. 2018.

9 MacKinnon 2011; Howard and Hussain 2013.

10 Åström et al. 2012; Maerz 2016.

11 Hussain and Howard 2014; Hellmeier 2016.

12 King, Pan and Roberts 2017.

13 An exception is a small body of recent work on China’s first digital-only news outlet Pengpai. Maria Repnikova and Kechang Fang argue that Pengpai, which combines quality political and investigative reporting with innovative propaganda and a slick digital interface, is a Chinese Communist Party response to a global journalism crisis which represents not only the upgrading of direct propaganda, but a transformation of the media industry to digital-only content. See Repnikova and Fang 2019; also see Peter et al. 2016.

14 Glasius 2018, 523.

15 Glasius 2018, 527.

16 Glasius 2018, 526.

17 McNair 2017, xiv.

18 Schoenberger et al. 2018; Beban et al. 2020.

19 Vong and Hok 2018; Hughes and Eng 2019.

20 Levitsky and Way 2010, 5.

21 Loughlin 2020.

22 Norén-Nilsson 2016.

23 Un and So 2012.

24 Strangio 2016.

25 In the 2013 elections, the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) finished a close second to the long-incumbent Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), winning forty-four percent of the popular vote compared to the CPP’s forty-nine percent. This broke for the first time the CPP’s steady increase of its vote share in each election since the 1993 reintroduction of multi-party elections. The CNRP rejected the official election results and organized mass protests, until demonstrations were banned in January 2014.

26 Morgenbesser 2019, 160.

27 Morgenbesser 2019, 159–160.

28 Glasius 2018, 527.

29 Glasius 2018, 527.

30 Glasius 2018, 527.

31 Glasius 2018, 517.

32 The CNRP was formed with a merger in 2012 of the Sam Rainsy Party and the Human Rights Party, the two main opposition parties at the time, which both identified as democratic. In the 2013 election, the CNRP campaigned on a platform that challenged Cambodia’s development path under the CPP, and which promised to improve living conditions for different demographic groups.

33 BBC Media Action 2014, 29.

34 Phong et al. 2015, 19.

35 Men 2014, 111–112.

36 Men 2014, 107.

37 Phong et al. 2016, 19.

38 See http://geeksincambodia.com/cambodias-2018-social-media-digital-statistics/; Men 2014, 109.

39 Mech and Turton 2017.

40 Meyn 2017. The number of Cambodians with smart phones increased from 19.8 percent in 2013 to forty-five percent by 2018. See Phong et al. 2016, 7.

41 The Facebook page is set up in such a way that those who “like” Fresh News automatically receive Fresh News updates on their Facebook newsfeed.

42 Fresh News television is carried by cable companies with nationwide reach, and its radio station broadcasts in all provinces.

43 Beban et al. 2020, 95.

44 Hun Sen’s family members and allies have long promoted a pro-government agenda through traditional media outlets. Hun Sen’s daughter Hun Mana is a media mogul whose holdings include the popular Bayon television network and the Kampuchea Thmey Daily newspaper.

45 Norén-Nilsson 2016, 120–129.

46 Norén-Nilsson 2016, 39–64.

47 These included the Pailin local government, the Ministry of Justice, the provincial military commanders of Kampong Thom, Battambang, and Preah Vihear, the heads of special army units 1 and 70, and the Ministry of Defense’s Department of Military Service head, General Meas Savorn.

48 The Cambodia Broadcasting Network is based in Australia and privately owned.

49 The two-minute video is authentic. It was cut and edited from a thirteen minute clip of Kem Sokha speaking at an event in Australia. In it, Kem Sokha states that he had received political advice from the United States, including a recommendation to resign from politics to drum up grassroots support, following which he created the human rights NGO Cambodian Center for Human Rights in 2002. He said he also was advised to take Serbia as a model, where President Slobodan Milosevic resigned following mass demonstrations over disputed elections. During Kem Sokha’s trial, which began in January 2020, Sokha and his defense team requested that the full video be shown, as they argued that the shorter version is misleading, and suggests violence in a way the full video does not. Sokha’s lawyer stated that the speech referred to changing the government through democratic means. The video is the only piece of evidence the government presented to support treason charges.

50 Fresh News 2017d.

51 https://www.facebook.com/konkhmer05. The profile has been removed.

52 Kijewski and Meas 2017.

53 Mech and Turton 2017.

54 Norén-Nilsson 2016, 118–119.

55 Penny Edwards characterizes the notion of the Khmer Daum as a “figure of fiction” which “emerged in the twilight of colonialism” and traces how it came to be promoted by the Khmer Rouge. She notes that from the very earliest Khmer newspapers onwards, pseudonyms have been used to conceal the identity of authors while allowing them to “bask in the fantasy of antiquity through such alter egos as Son of the Khmers and the Original Khmer.” Thus, Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, used Khmer daum as a nom de plume in the Khmer language press. See Edwards 2007, 1–2, 15.

56 Unofficial transcript of interview with Lim Cheavutha by Andrew Nachemson, January 15, 2019. See also Nachemson 2019.

57 Fresh News 2018a.

58 In 1999, Indian authors Harish and Julie Mehta published a biography of Hun Sen, titled Hun Sen: Strongman of Cambodia, which drew criticism for a pro-Hun Sen bias. Hun Sen did not comment on whether he approved of the book. (See Stephens 1999.) The book was updated and republished in 2013 by Marshall Cavendish International under the even more laudatory title Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen: From Pagoda Boy to Prime Minister of Cambodia.

59 Hun Sen has long been cast as a bong thom (big brother), a leader on top of a patron-client network (khsae) who offers protection to loyalists but punishes those who are disloyal. Although the strongman discourse shares with this earlier imagery an emphasis on the twin notions of protection and menace, they have different genealogies: the bong thom discourse resonates with culturally specific ideas of patron-clientelism, while the notion of the strongman evokes the global rise thereof. See Hughes 2006.

60 Fresh News 2018c.

61 This evokes how, surging in the 1990s, authoritarian governance in Asia was defended by governments with a thesis that “Asian values are less supportive of freedom and more concerned with order and discipline than are Western values” (Sen 1997, 10).

62 Cambodia remained until 2017 on the side of “judicial muteness” (a similarly low degree of judicial independence and engagement in mega-politics) (Dressel 2014, 264), though there were signs over the preceding decade towards judicial involvement in mega-political activities (Un and So 2012, 198).

63 Hirschl 2008.

64 Dressel and Mietzner 2012, 391.

65 Dressel and Mietzner 2012.

66 Dressel and Mietzner 2012, 407. On Cambodia, see Morgenbesser 2018.

67 McCargo 2014.

68 Hirschl 2008, 44.

69 Mech and Turton 2017.

70 Kijewski and Meas 2017.

71 Post Staff 2017.

72 Fresh News, “Why was Kem Sokha arrested?”

73 Supreme Court 2017, 3.2–3.4.

74 Ouch 2020.

75 Niem and Bhaliga 2017.

76 Fresh News 2017a.

77 Fresh News 2017c.

78 Fresh News 2017e.

79 Bhaliga 2017.

80 Funcinpec, which had won no seats in the 2013 election, was allocated forty-one seats.

81 Fresh News 2017b.

82 Niem and Nachemson 2018.

83 Tandoc et al. 2018.

84 Erlanger 2017, Waisbord 2018.

85 Millar 2017.

86 The draft law is available at https://www.article19.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Draft-Law-On-CyberCrime_Englishv1.pdf.

87 Kann 2018.

88 Khy 2018; Boyle 2018.

89 Khy 2019.

90 Kann 2017.

91 Neou 2018.

92 Fresh News 2019.

93 Glasius 2018, 527.

94 In a search for pormean klaeng klay (“fake news”) on the Fresh News website which generated 50 hits, only 5 articles belonged to this category.

95 Radio Free Asia 2018.

96 Fresh News 2018b.

97 Fresh News 2018d.

98 Fresh News 2018b.

99 Fresh News 2018e.

100 Carlson 2018, 1879; see also Jackson, Thorsen, and Wring 2016; Lilleker et al. 2016.

101 Waisbord 2018.

102 Carlson 2018.

103 Meyn 2017.

104 Meyn 2017.

105 Nachemson and Mech 2017.

106 Rajagopalan 2018.

107 Meyn 2017.

108 Walker and Orttung 2014, 71.

109 Zhao 1998.

110 Stockmann and Gallagher 2011.

111 Glasius 2018, 521.

112 Glasius 2018, 523.