THE December 18 arson attack on institutions of free speech, dissent and democracy was not merely an act of vandalism; it was an assault on the foundations that make democratic life possible. When a newsroom burns, it is not only paper, printing presses and computers that are reduced to ash. What burns with them is the public’s chain of evidence, the accumulated record through which power is scrutinised and held to account. Anger can be dispersed, manipulated, or allowed to fade. The destruction of newspapers and the intimidation of journalists, however, inflict a deeper and often irreparable injury: one that strikes directly at the national interest.
Democracies across the world have recognised this distinction. In the United States, the 2018 attack on the Capital Gazette newsroom was treated as a grave criminal offence, not a form of political expression and met with prosecution and accountability. In France, the attack on Charlie Hebdo provoked a national reckoning precisely because the victims were journalists whose speech many citizens disliked. These cases reaffirm a basic democratic principle: where collective choice is imperfect, as it always is, conflict must be resolved through institutions, not intimidation. Where law prevails, democracy corrects itself; where fear replaces law, coercion fills the vacuum.
Yet the gravest threats to democracy are not always as visible as fire. Often, they take the form of slow, systemic erosion. The press is not destroyed outright, but ‘captured’ — financially dependent, politically compliant, or editorially subdued. A watchdog quietly becomes a lapdog. For democratic institutions to stabilise public life, they must remain independent of both the baton of the state and the purse of the oligarch.
Democracy is frequently reduced to the act of voting alone. History and political economy show why this is dangerously incomplete. Elections are episodic events embedded within a broader institutional framework: courts, accountable policing, professional bureaucracy, and, above all, a free press. When these institutions are weakened or terrorised, ballots become ceremonial. Power no longer flows from consent, but from fear.
This institutional fragility is not merely historical; it has a formal explanation. That explanation was articulated with mathematical precision by Kenneth Arrow, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. Arrow did not set out to undermine democracy. His question was modest and constructive: can a voting system reliably convert individual preferences into a fair and consistent collective decision?
To examine this, Arrow identified a small set of conditions that any reasonable democratic decision rule appears to require. Each sounds intuitive and morally uncontroversial in isolation. Taken together, however, they reveal a fundamental tension. When societies face three or more competing options — multiple parties, overlapping agendas, or rival policy packages — no voting system can translate individual preferences into a collective choice while simultaneously satisfying basic democratic principles such as equality, consistency, freedom from dictatorship and resistance to manipulation. Democracy, Arrow demonstrated, is not impossible but it is not self-executing. It contains inherent trade-offs and therefore requires stabilising institutions to manage them.
No scholar has explained the logic of preference aggregation with greater analytical clarity than Arrow. His conditions can be stated without mathematics, and each helps explain why assaults on the press strike at democracy’s core.
Democracy requires unrestricted preferences: citizens must be able to hold and express genuine views without fear. When intimidation narrows what can be said, democracy becomes ritual rather than choice. Attacks on the media matter because they shrink the space in which honest preferences can exist.
Democracy also requires non-dictatorship. No individual’s preferences should automatically become society’s preferences, even if elections continue to be held. A ruler need not formally declare dictatorship to govern as one. When dissent is silenced and the press reduced to flattery, power behaves as if it cannot lose.
Pareto fairness, the principle that genuine agreement must count, depends on free expression. If everyone truly prefers one option over another, society should reflect that choice. But when fear, censorship, or propaganda distort expression, consensus can be manufactured. A free press is the only reliable means of distinguishing real agreement from coerced compliance.
Independence of irrelevant alternatives demands that public choices be shaped by substantive options, not distractions. Democracy cannot function through engineered outrage or symbolic enemies. A dissenting press keeps attention anchored to performance — prices, corruption, justice, violence — rather than spectacle.
Collective rationality requires coherence. When public choices swing wildly, legitimacy erodes. A free press stabilises politics by grounding debate in evidence rather than rumour. In an era of ‘alternative facts’, journalism functions as the repository of shared reality.
Finally, democracy presumes equality of citizens. Each preference must count equally. When journalists are attacked and dissenters hunted, equality collapses in practice even if elections remain. Democracy may survive on paper, but its substance has already been hollowed out.
Arrow’s deeper message is not pessimism. It is a warning against reducing democracy to electoral arithmetic alone. Collective choice contains built-in tensions, manageable only through institutions that expose manipulation, reveal trade-offs, and force power to confront facts. In the modern state, no institution performs this corrective role more consistently than an independent press.
If one of Arrow’s conditions is most strained today, it is independence from irrelevant alternatives. What once appeared theoretical has collapsed in the age of algorithmic mediation. Preferences are no longer merely revealed; they are shaped. Attention markets inject outrage cycles and symbolic enemies — not to contest policy substance, but to reorder what citizens notice. This is the invisible arson that follows the physical kind. Once the press is silenced, the public loses its factual baseline. Collective preference is no longer aggregated; it is steered.
The danger is heightened by invisibility. Voters experience their choices as autonomous even as preference rankings are subtly nudged by engineered attention flows beyond conscious awareness.
Some will argue that attacks on media institutions are political overreaction, or that journalists ‘invite tension’. Others point to media failures to justify suppression. This is the language of institutional surrender. Burning a newsroom because one dislikes coverage is no different from burning a courthouse because one dislikes a verdict. Flawed institutions are reformed, not destroyed.
Democracies rarely collapse through coups. They collapse through the steady dismantling of mediating institutions — those that preserve evidence, restrain power and reduce conflict to rules. When those institutions burn, elections may continue, but democracy thins into symbolism.
If Bangladesh seeks order, it must protect the institutions that make order legitimate. Police can restore calm for a night; only institutions sustain calm for years. Among them, the press is unique: a public watchdog, an archive of wrongdoing, an amplifier of the powerless and an early-warning system for malfeasance and violence. Burning newsrooms and assaulting journalists are therefore not merely acts of arson. They are attempts to destabilise democracy itself.
Protecting that stability requires more than condemnation. It demands legal and economic safeguards — anti-SLAPP protections, independent media commissions, and transparent regulatory frameworks — that treat press freedom not as a political favour, but as a structural necessity for democratic survival.
Dr Abdullah A Dewan, former physicist and nuclear engineer at Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission, is a professor emeritus of economics at Eastern Michigan University.
