I live in a democracy, Spain, and the government controls the press through subsidies and ads. All mass media is losing money; our biggest media conglomerate has been in a hole of almost 1 billion euros for decades. The president of the country openly brags on TV about how he controls the public prosecutors. A former president (of the same party) changed the law so the government elects the judges directly decades ago.

Of course you will never hear about this because we are not Poland or Hungary, we did not have the audacity of voting the way they did :)