I recently reread my father's diaries from the 1960s: pages of hurried scribbles of an ambitious twenty-something, furious about the hypocrisies and injustices around him.

For years, I read his journals as the record of a frustrated man trying to practice a profession the system has stripped of its purpose. He was a journalist in a country where reality was pre-written: the Soviet Union.

This time, I read them as a stark warning: good reporting can exist without a free press.

In an age of AI and resurgent authoritarianism, we risk rebuilding the same trap in a different form: individual reporting can still matter while journalism as a whole becomes irrelevant to society's ability to understand itself.

The comparison may sound absurd. The Soviet system censored what people could know while flooding them with one official story. Today's information environment works almost in reverse: not one official story but endless ones, not scarcity but excess.

Algorithms and the companies behind them rank, filter and increasingly synthesise more information than any of us can process. Facts can travel widely without ever forming a coherent picture. Fragment truth, personalise it, drown it in abundance, and suppression becomes less necessary. Noise does the censorship’s work.

That matters because we still understand press freedom mainly through censorship: can journalists publish what power wants hidden, and can they survive doing it? When they are jailed or murdered, the assault is obvious. Harder to recognise is a press that remains free in form while becoming hollow in function.

My father’s diaries show the........

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