x Claudio Fabian Guevara: Narrative strategies of the 'fake news' or information fraud on key facts of history
The collusion of the media system with organized crime on a planetary scale is a fact of the first order to analyze the current passage of humanity. Journalism has ceased to be the fourth power, or a counterpower, to unite with traditional powers to the effect of oppressing citizens (1).
The debate around the fake news shies away from the real debate. There is no system of truthful public communication, at the service of humanity, that protects societies from the systematic twisting of the reality that the press executes coordinated with political, economic and judicial hitmen.
This trend is advancing, especially in institutionally weak countries. In Argentina and Brazil, a unified command is consolidated, a government-justice-media symbiosis that concentrates never-before-accumulated virtual reality creation powers. In this Totalitarianism 2.0 the news is characterized by a great toxic content and cultivate a large-scale information fraud about key facts of history. The mind of the colonized citizen is thus formatted, which justifies and defends colonial domination.
While the Parliaments debate how to regulate media and networks to combat false news, we live in the era of information fraud. And of course: we did not find out.
Information fraud concept
A fraud is an action contrary to truth and rectitude. It involves a deliberate planning to present false facts or documents as real, for cheating purposes.
There are differences between false news and organized informational fraud. In the fake news, the lack of veracity can be inferred by context.
In the information fraud, the adulteration of the truth has a greater thickness, reaching the context and the historical background. It is about the coherent and planned manipulation of an interrelated set of discourses. They are disinformative practices carried out systematically and repetitively within an ecosystem of hegemonic media.
Certain hypnotic truths, repeated incessantly, validate each other. The veracity of this extended system of self-referential messages is never discussed within the ecosystem. Worse yet: any expression that does not respect the sacred character of certain news dogmas is thrown into the periphery of the deniers, conspirators and marginal.
Informational fraud naturalizes a vision of the world upside down, provokes a "common sense shift" as Michel Collon says, a distortion of the values that should inspire the public agenda. It installs a robotic news system, paralyzed in the hypnotic repetition of slogans and sound bites.
It is a model of poisoned communication, designed to inoculate toxic emotions in the audience. It disseminates a Manichean vision of the world, which stigmatizes certain sectors, at the same time that it glorifies war, the police state and the militarization of growing areas of social life.
They are not differences of opinion or ideologies. It is not error, chance or negligence. There are rules of journalism that are not met, and others that are fulfilled in reverse.
The news legs up
Throughout the twentieth century the professional journalism community agreed on criteria of newsworthiness that guided the newsrooms when it came to ranking the different news units. In short, to define the "importance" of a newsworthy event, the number of people affected is evaluated, their geographical proximity, the impact they can have on future events and other criteria. There is also a check of sources, cross-consultations, alternative sources and a set of resources that add multiperspectivity to the journalists' gaze.
These professional methods of work are similar to the protocol required by a justice official to determine the steps to take in the face of a judicable event. However, these practices that distance arbitrariness and caprice when it comes to selecting and presenting news events have been replaced by an imbalance that goes beyond ideological discrepancies.
In some cases, an exaggerated amplification of the problems; in others a fierce censorship filter, a media siege that veils what actually happens; and lately, the conjunction of judicial maneuvers with media lynchings that enhance the virtual creation of reality by a small elite of global programmers.
The information fraud intensified after the attack on the Twin Towers and the launching of the War on Terrorism. The official version of what happened on September 11, 2001 is a gigantic "narrative montage" on which the denunciation books and the evidence that refutes the official version are multiplied (2). The saga continued with the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and a news chain replete with catastrophic and spectacular events. The story as a whole tends to create fears and enemies, to justify wars and sabotages against governments and entire peoples.
Five ingredients of information fraud
The news propaganda plants contain hidden strategies of high persuasive power that in many cases we do not yet understand. But there are visible elements that can be identified to move towards an ecology of information.
Next, five narrative strategies of information fraud. They are manipulated simplifications of the world, and as such, of high impact. They are basic ingredients of poisoned communication that stuns broad world audiences:
1. Verosimiles
The construction of likelihoods fits perfectly with the notion of "post-truth", understood as "the quality of being perceived as true, without necessarily being true". The difference between a "credible" and a real news is that the credible only "pretends" to be true. A plausible contains real elements combined with false ones in a way that achieves credibility. They draw a "possible world," or "virtual world" within certain shared assumptions and generalized opinions. They are news cocktails that combine real elements with half-truths and lies, falsified documents, photos and tricked footage (3).
Television production of false rescues, protest demonstrations or victims of government attacks has been widely documented by organizations such as Red Voltaire or Veterans Today. In the last decade the likelihood abounds (4).
Within this category, speculative lies refer to probable future events ("Mexican drug violence could spill over the US border") or future consequences of government actions ("Not attacking Iraq would be suicidal for the US. . "). Usually it is information originated in speculations of the top leaders, impossible to contrast in other sources, and therefore, impossible to refute.
The credible ones are only possible by means of a cut of the historical context and the complexity of the reality. For this, the most relevant data are deliberately hidden to understand each event (5). An example is the process of wars and invasions in the Middle East. The news script propagated by the hegemonic media disguises this military "continuum" in the form of local conflicts, apparently disconnected from each other, hiding the presence of foreign engineering in the events.
2. Child stereotypes
They are repetitive stories in their structure, designed for an immature audience.
They build the opposition between villains and heroes, and the staging of an "outrage" or a "danger" that requires reparation.
The news feeds on fearsome terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, gassed people, nuclear attacks in 45 minutes, demonstrations bombed by their own government and dictators "lynched by their own people." Each chapter gives rise to the emergence of the "liberating army", or in recent years, to the narrative novelty of the "spontaneous rebellion of the people", capable of organizing itself to take entire cities, defeating the police and military apparatus in a matter of days , or even, to blow up strategic ministries by annihilating high military commanders (6)
Stereotypes repeat structures and characters in different formats. The news contents reinforce each other with the cinema and the web. Many news are designed as "mini-films", which allow us to mark the field of good and evil, and appeal to intimate emotions in a few seconds. We often see the same characters and stereotyped situations in the news as in the movies. All these great channels, validating each other, generate more powerful "reality effects".
3. Analytical preaching
Herbert Marcuse defined this concept as "authoritative identification between person and function", or in other words, the association of certain individuals or groups to fixed patterns. A specific noun, almost always linked with the same adjectives and attributes, converts the phrase into a hypnotic formula that is infinitely repeated, and fixes the meaning in the receiver's mind.
Within the framework of analytical preaching, the leaders of Western nations are always presented as civilized, well-thinking and smiling, and associated with terms such as "democracy", "reconstruction" or "humanitarian intervention". Instead, their political opponents, or antagonistic social movements, are presented as crazy, evil or irrational, associated with terms such as "dictatorship", "violence" or "violation of human rights".
The analytical preaching is an informative fraud because it takes away the multidimensional and paradoxical nature of human nature, and feeds a Manichean conception of the world, which divides between angels and demons, saints and sinners.
It invites the purification of the world through the extermination of the "axis of evil". The result of this bombardment is the mental programming of the citizen, who will perceive in a negative way, even without remembering the reasons, certain countries, characters and social movements stigmatized in the news.
4. False symmetries
A "false symmetry" is a journalistic narrative that, appearing neutral and / or balanced before a conflict, describes the contestants as parties with similar responsibility in the dispute. An example is the case of Palestine. The false information symmetry equals occupants and occupants, oppressors and victims. The press often narrates violent events in terms of Palestinian "provocation" and Israeli "retaliation". This language "discreetly imputes the initial responsibility to one of the belligerents", in this case the Palestinians, for the appearance and prolongation of the conflict (7).
The political effects of the installation of a false symmetry in public opinion are not negligible. There is a "common sense shift", that is to say, before the disproportion of the lying discourse of power, many political and diplomatic sectors, intellectuals and journalists, rehearse a position that tries to "stay in the middle". Thus, they support "sensible" solutions, which "with the consensus in the international community", remain intrinsically unjust and arbitrary anyway.
5. False asymmetries
A "false asymmetry" is a construction that exaggerates until the paroxysm the importance of insignificant events, or the blame attributed to certain actors. For example, it gives a country a disproportionate responsibility in problems of a universal nature: corruption, violations of human rights or excessive use of force by the government. Another example: to attribute to a political party or a social movement a criminal or threatening character based on simple episodic events, or a saga of false information.
A "false asymmetry" uses credibility, child stereotypes and analytical preaching to create an unfounded perception that certain people or social groups are especially problematic, dangerous or morally reprehensible.
Thus, on the basis of false facts or half-truths, biased statistics and double-standard exercises, "target" leaders, groups and countries are stigmatized. The bombing of news builds a collective perception of certain actors as "the most thieves", "the most repressive" or "the most dangerous".
A "false asymmetry" violates basic principles of presumption of innocence and reverses the burden of proof. The news system functions like a summary court that proceeds to the instant lynching of the accused, who are usually denied the right to defend themselves.
A "false asymmetry" also violates basic principles of journalistic newsworthiness. He can attribute greater importance to a conjugal infidelity of the president, than to his decision to bomb a country and unleash a war.
The kidnapped democracy
A country can not be considered a democracy if a large majority of its population is subjected to manipulated communication and fundamentally false information (8). The communicational atmosphere of a country not only affects the political system: it is also a public health problem. Poisoned communication sickens audiences, generates all kinds of neuroses and confronts citizens among themselves. In addition, it converges with other phenomena in the general dumbing down of the population.
The emergence of the Internet and the development of social networks allowed many to believe in a tool to partially balance this situation, with the proliferation of alternative information channels, or with the possibility that each citizen becomes a news broadcaster. However, in fact, the filtering of search engines and the algorithms of the networks make it possible to make visible or invisible certain contents from the desktop of the planetary programmers, or even to personalize the results of the searches with pre-designed contents for the user. This facilitates the construction of a "perceptual bubble", and in short, a more effective social control.
Items consulted
«Homeland or means». Ezi Zunino Buenos Aires, South American, 2009
Wolf, Mauro. The research of mass communication. Criticism and perspectives, 2nd Edition, Barcelona Editorial Paidós, 1991
Osvaldo León, "Communication, democracy and social movements", at Alainet.org
Giulietto Chiesa, «War and Lie» the political and military control of our societies. On Voltairenet.org
The challenges of the anti-hegemonic communication network, Dênis de Moraes. Alai, 03/05/2013
«Elections Ecuador 2013. Communication Law: Outstanding debt. Eduardo Tamayo G. Alai, 02/15/2013.
«The new challenges of journalism and communication. Interview with Ignacio Ramonet ". Raúl Zibechi. In Desinformemonos.com
Ignacio Ramonet: "The transnationals of communication are in crisis". Gustavo J. Fuchs. Alai, 02/14/2013
"The one-dimensional man". Herbert Marcuse.
"The hypnotized society." Claudio Fabian Guevara. In Rebellion, 2003.
Notes
1 Osvaldo León in "Communication, democracy and social movements" argues that the mass media, those that shape our global perception of the world, have multiplied their impact on social environments and everyday life. We know less and less about first-hand experiences, and more and more about what comes to us from reality constructed by the media. The guidelines of the public agenda, the "informative thermal sensation" that determine the topics of the day, the identification or rejection of certain leaders, or the predominant values in society, are a media construction. Hence the importance of "the silences they keep", the phenomena that make them invisible, or on the contrary, the fears, alarms and false accusations that they are capable of creating and introjecting.
2 "We will never know the truth about September 11. We will not know her for the next hundred years, as Noam Chomsky says. But what we can be sure of for now, without the slightest risk of error, is that the version they have given us is false. We can even prove it ", says Giulietto Chiesa in" Guerra y mentira ". The books that collect evidence in this sense accumulate, and in the US a gigantic civil movement spreads for the truth ignored by the media.
3 In the case of Iraq, the accusations leveled against the Hussein government combined simply "possible" or "credible" elements, with truthful historical facts and false accusations: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear attack in 45 minutes, purchase of uranium and several more. The preparation of the public for this war not only included the plagiarism of the student work referred by the English Parliament, but also false satellite photographs (with which Colin Powell gave a "show" at the UN), false documents that "proved" purchases of enriched uranium and other minutiae.
4 For Totalitarianism 2.0 it is increasingly easy to build credible worlds because their sources validate each other.
5 Manuel Vazquez Montalban calls this "The historical disorientation of the news receiver".
6 The press in the West calls this "republican uprising" when it happens in Syria or Libya. If something similar happened in France or the USA. What would they call it?
7 The tradition of "neutrality" in which the "professional" press tries to position itself is a good breeding ground for "false symmetries". In Iraq, the news attempted to balance its description of the Anglo-American criminal invasion with the continued reference to the crimes of Saddam Hussein, its hypothetical power to launch a devastating attack in 45 minutes and the myth of weapons of mass destruction.
8 Giulietto Chiesa says: "Indecent communication (that is, devoid of intellectual value, decency, culture) and manipulated (that is, misleading, under the multiple forms that can lead to error to those who receive it) deprives the population of intellectual media to defend themselves ".
diariodevallarta.com. Excerpted by La Haine
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