Dictators Are Buying into Western Media

It’s happening in plain sight—and no one’s even trying to hide it.

By John Jamesen Gould

July 2026

On March 17, the U.S.-based news startup Semafor published an interview between Mohammed Sergie, the editor of its Semafor Gulf vertical, and Badr Jafar, one of its investors — who happens also to be the special envoy of the United Arab Emirates’ minister of foreign affairs for business and philanthropy. The headline: “Why the World Can’t Afford to Lose the U.A.E. Model.” Sergie’s closing question to Jafar: “Why do you think it’s foolish to bet against the U.A.E.?”

The same day, Jafar published an op-ed in the European global-affairs and lifestyle magazine Monocle, arguing that Iran’s recent attacks had shown the UAE — “the most consequential experiment of our time” — to be a nation “whose resilience is built on diversity.” Noura Al Kaabi, the Emirates’ minister of state at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, promoted the Monocle item on X. Ben Smith, Semafor’s editor in chief, shared her post — without comment.

Semafor discloses Jafar’s investment. Monocle identifies his government title. It’s all out in the open.

Two weeks later, Semafor’s CEO, Justin Smith, told the Saudi-owned English-language daily Arab News that Semafor would be “doubling down” on its Gulf expansion and aims to become the region’s “business and economic news platform of record.” The Gulf, he said, will emerge “stronger and more resilient than ever.”

Curiously, Semafor is the same publication that, in 2023, launched a China initiative whose advisory board included figures linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department — the apparatus responsible for CCP influence operations abroad. This partnership was out in the open, too. In fact, it triggered bipartisan criticism in the U.S. Congress, where then Senator Marco Rubio called it “astounding.” Semafor pushed back, saying no Chinese money funded the initiative and Semafor maintained full editorial independence with it.

In April, Wang Huiyao, the founder of the Center for China and Globalization, the Beijing-based organization Semafor partnered with on its China initiative, appeared as a speaker at Semafor World Economy, the brand’s flagship event in Washington, alongside more than four-hundred CEOs — and at least two UAE ministers. Also in April, Semafor announced a new events forum for putting “hard questions” to corporate leaders in Silicon Valley. The advisory board is composed entirely of tech leaders the forum will be covering — including Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang; Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella; and OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar.

Monocle has meanwhile produced entire special editions devoted to the Emirates, with UAE government agencies underwriting advertorial sections — but also with the rest of the editions reading like advertorials. It’s disorienting, even when you look closely. The Dubai government hosts Monocle’s city guide on its official investment-promotion website.

Autocratic states trying to place favorable coverage in Western media isn’t new, even recently. China’s state-run press spent nearly US$11 million over four years with American newspapers — including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — on advertising, principally “native advertising”: paid supplements designed to look like journalism. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two employees of Russian state television for funneling nearly US$10 million to a Tennessee company that used it to pay American political commentators with a combined following of more than six-million people. These analysts said they had no idea where the money came from.

It may be inevitable that mechanisms of influence this crude would break down sooner rather than later. But what a Semafor or a Monocle is doing might be different. It’s not anything as relatively straightforward as native advertising; and it’s not anything as overtly sinister as covert payments. It’s investments, editorial partnerships, event collaborations, and other relationships whose formal shape everyone involved can clearly state — but whose underlying quid pro quo, they don’t.

A lot of public anxiety about media right now focuses on the industry’s expanding club of billionaire owners — Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times, Elon Musk at X. Of course, whether wealthy proprietors with self-interested politics compromise editorial independence is a legitimate question. But billionaires aren’t dictatorships.

Autocratic states are. And dictatorships are corrupt—structurally. Democracies, for all their flaws, distribute power, spread information, and, still, maintain institutions designed to hold authority accountable. Autocracies concentrate power, restrict information, and depend on the suppression of exactly those institutions. It’s not a coincidence that year after year, Transparency International’s most corrupt countries (Somalia, South Sudan, Syria under Assad, Venezuela) are all autocracies. This is a pattern. With a logic.

When capital from structurally corrupt systems flows into the media that democratic citizens depend on to understand the world, that capital arrives with those systems’ structural corruption embedded in it. This doesn’t slip into Western media through the shadows; specific interests invite it in. They even call it transparency. Which works great, because if you handle the disclosure right, it normalizes the relationship, makes it part of the background, removes the element of scandal that might otherwise provoke scrutiny.

Conversations about trust in media haven’t yet much recognized this pattern—or articulated its logic. They probably should.

John Jamesen Gould is the editor of The Signal, a global current-affairs publication based in Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2026 JoD Productions

Image credit: Ahmed Aldaie via Unsplash