HE WAS a media darling before his inauguration in 2007, but President Rafael Correa’s adversarial relationship with the press has counted among the defining characteristics of his six-year rule. On June 14th a legislature now dominated by his allies whisked through a bill to regulate the media. Gabriela Rivadeneira, the president of Congress, praised the reform for outlawing practices such as “lynching by media” (roughly, character assassination), and said that the new law would curb the press’s supposed habit of “vetoing and vexing citizens”. Many journalists fear it in fact spells censorship.

The new law, which could yet be modified by presidential veto, forbids the “deliberate omission of…topics of public interest”. (Mr Correa had complained about the lack of coverage of a recent presidential visit to an offshore natural-gas platform that had been nationalised a few months earlier.) It permits censorship under the state-of-emergency rules defined in the 2008 constitution. Media enterprises will be made financially “responsible in solidarity” in libel cases, and a new regulator close to the presidency will be put in charge of administrative sanctions and applying broad new rules governing local audio and video content, including advertising. A large number of radio frequencies are to revert to government control, to be redistributed among the private, public and non-profit sectors.

The law’s proponents say it will give a voice to the silent majority of Ecuadoreans. But the scope for regulatory discretion laid out in the small print of the bill worries critics, who see it as another salvo in Mr Correa’s war against the media.

Mr Correa has already alerted Hoy, a Quito-based newspaper, that he will sue it over a headline saying that he had called gay marriage a “novelty”. In 2011 he launched an $80m lawsuit against a newspaper and its chief columnist, who was later granted asylum in the United States. The president’s supporters point out that no journalist is in jail for defamation. But that is only because he and other government officials have shown clemency to those sentenced to huge fines and time behind bars for libel by judges. (Mr Correa won the 2011 case, for instance, but last year chose not to enforce the judgment.) Police have briefly detained people for allegedly showing the presidential motorcade the middle finger. Mr Correa has railed against Ecuador’s journalists as “contract killers in ink”.