Probably because in a free from authoritarian government the free press is supposed to be the ultimate checks and balances on personal liberty. When you can’t even write something negative about a leader without being dismembered in a hotel and disposed of in duffle bags like trash, that should be ringing alarms for anyone that isn’t licking boots.
It means that the alarm bells went off and people paid more attention to capitalism, and voting in people that actively worked against them, because those elected officials treated people they disliked even worse. Then we got a wanna be dictator that went full “journalists are an enemy of the state” because they say mean (TRUE) things about him. Journalists now choose between being able to eat, or sounding the alarm that costs them a job (and falls on deaf ears).