How does media control by the incumbent shape political competition? In backsliding democracies and competitive authoritarian regimes, media control—via censorship and propaganda—serves as a powerful tool for incumbents to guarantee regime stability. While past research has focused on propaganda and censorship related to incumbent performance or censorship to limit opposition collective action such as protests, this paper shifts attention to its use to undermine opposition electoral challenge. I propose that opposition parties’ or coalitions’ coverage in regime-controlled media is consciously leveraged to undermine their electoral chances, and its specific form depends on the level of opposition electoral threat. The regime faces a tradeoff in its choice: denying platform and coverage to the opposition (censorship) can prevent information spread but cannot shape voters’ beliefs, while smear campaigns (propaganda) shape beliefs but risk backlash. As a result, censorship dominates when opposition parties pose minimal electoral threat while anti-opposition propaganda does when the opposition enjoys high support.

Empirically, I use a staggered difference-in-differences that exploits a quasi-natural experiment: incumbent-affiliated elites’ sequential capture of all local newspapers between 2015-2018 in Hungary, a pivotal example of media capture under democratic erosion. I apply advanced text analysis techniques to a new corpus of 2 million news articles to identify opposition-oriented censorship and propaganda and use electoral and polling data to measure electoral threat. The findings confirm the hypotheses and provide new insights into how autocratic incumbents use media control to mitigate electoral threats to regime stability, illuminating the challenges of opposition success and (re-)democratization.