For quite some time, debate about
'fake news' has reverberated clamorously in both mainstream and alternative
discourse. One could easily conclude the issue was a pressingly new plague,
restricted to certain corners of the web - but academic TJ Coles begs to differ.
In fact, he tells Sputnik fake news has been ubiquitous for thousands of years.
It's difficult to pinpoint the
precise moment the term 'fake news' entered the Western political and media
lexicon, but the election of Donald Trump as US President certainly
turbocharged its usage. For the controversial leader and his supporters, the
label can be automatically applied to any and all media reporting critical
of him, while his opponents play much the same game when roles are
reversed.
This tit-for-tat sparring inspired
TJ, director of the Institute for Peace Research, to write a
book on the subject — the fruit of his labours, Real Fake News: Techniques
of Propaganda and Deception-based Mind Control, was
published in September.
"All that talk made me think
'hang on a minute, we've always had fake news'. It's the nature
of power — all power structures want to maintain and expand
their power, so it's therefore important to present information that
benefits them, and keeps populations in a psychological and/or
intellectual prison. The 'fake news' peddled by elite financial,
commercial and political financial interests, duly regurgitated by major
media organizations, eclipses any bogus story perpetuated by alleged
'bots' on Twitter, or whatever," TJ says
.
Babylonian
Beginnings
In his work, TJ traces the birth
of fake news all the way back to ancient Babylon, when rulers sought
to perpetuate the notion they were descended from Gods and thus had a
right to dominate and control the populace — history's first recorded
instance of the 'divine right of kings'.
Similarly, Plato famously
popularized the idea of the 'noble lie' — privileging untruths told
for the benefit of elites and the population alike. These ideas very
much endure in the modern day — TJ notes Wikileaks' dump of the
Clinton campaign's internal emails amply demonstrates her team felt it wouldn't
be good, or necessary, for Hillary's supporters to be aware
of her close connections to Wall Street, so did their utmost
to conceal the mephitic kinship.
Hillary Clinton and Goldman Sachs
CEO Lloyd Blankfein
"Elites the world over are
acutely aware information is power, and actually quite open about their
use and abuse of the news to shape public perceptions and preserve
sociopolitical conditions benefitting them. For instance, the UK Ministry
of Defence regularly publishes projections of how planners think the
world will look in 10 — 20 years, and they routinely note the media
is one of the key ways to maintain the current paradigm, and discuss
the various ways information can be 'weaponized' against the public,"
he says.
TJ suggests elites shape and control
the public mind so effectively because they exploit fundamental facets
of human nature. First, the well-established instinctive inclination
to reflexively believe something reinforcing one's existing beliefs,
rather than assessing whether alternative facts or viewpoints have any
value, or indeed considering whether what one believes might be wrong, or
informed by confirmation bias.
This tendency is greatly exacerbated
by the use of internet and social media algorithms that present a
'personalized' picture of the world to users, unfailingly presenting
individuals with content they want to see, and tacitly suppressing
information contrary to their existing opinions.
"Elites also know how easy it
is to exploit guilt, which is why atrocity propaganda is so widespread
today. Most sympathize with the victims of major atrocities, and
naturally want to do something to help, so this aspect of human
nature can be easily manipulated to justify aggressive foreign policy
actions — 'look at what we're letting happen to poor defenceless
people, we have a responsibility to protect them' etcetera. It's funny,
when it comes to the economy, the powerful are quick to say people
are naturally selfish, so it's everyone for themselves, but when it
comes to foreign policy, we should care about our fellow human beings
and do something to help," TJ says.
Absence
is Evidence
As the academic's work makes clear,
atrocity propaganda doesn't even need to have any grounding
in reality whatsoever. In the lead-up to the NATO-backed violent
overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the mainstream
media was awash with reports government forces fuelled by viagra were
conducting mass rapes of civilians, and planning a borderline genocidal
massacre of rebel forces — claims used to justify the imposition
of a no-fly zone over the country, and NATO airstrikes.
The stories were subsequently found
to be entirely without foundation —
similarly, serious question marks hover over the veracity of numerous claimed chemical
weapons attacks in Syria, which likewise have provided a pretext
for Western attacks on the country.
"It's especially easy
to exploit guilt when you present bite-sized news reports about an
atrocious event stripped of all context, and exclude the voices
of people who are actually on the ground. Occasionally, contradictory
voices do filter through the system, although largely by accident.
For instance, the BBC made the mistake of inviting Peter Ford, former UK
ambassador to Syria, on air to discuss chemical weapons attacks —
he quickly demolished their propaganda. He hasn't been invited back
since," TJ says.
Ford is surely but one
of a great many talking heads to effectively be banned
from appearing on the BBC for daring to state views and
evidence contrary to ascendant elite narratives. However, the British
state broadcaster's blacklisting activities also extend to its own
employees — in April 2018, the BBC
admitted that for decades, job applicants and serving staff were subject
to political vetting by MI5, in an effort to prevent
"subversives" gaining employment with the Corporation.
Often, individuals were ostracized
on extremely tenuous grounds. For instance, respected film director John
Goldschmidt was blacklisted in the late 1960s, with two projects he
was working on for the Beeb cancelled midway through production
without warning or explanation — MI5 deemed him a potential
subversive as he'd spent a few weeks in Czechoslovakia in his
youth, as part of a student exchange program. Similarly,
award-winning journalist Isabel Hilton was refused a job by BBC Scotland
in 1976 — that she spoke Chinese and had been a member
of Scottish China Association at Edinburgh University made MI5
extremely anxious.
Under the policy, popular children's
book author and playwright Michael Rosen was also outright sacked from the
BBC in 1972 while a graduate trainee for a number of ‘transgressions',
including student activism at Oxford, and producing a film featuring clips
of US soldiers being tested with LSD. The American Embassy
in London complained about the project to both MI5 and the BBC
directly, whereupon Rosen was shown the door.
The policy was wound down in
the 1990s, and it's unknown whether any comparable structures existed
at other major news organizations — although City University research suggests
dissenting voices remain rare in the British mainstream media. The 2016
study concluded UK journalists are overwhelmingly white, male, and
elite-university educated — and are far more trusting of politicians,
the government, police and military than the general population, which the
study's authors partly attributed to reporters' "reliance
on these institutions as sources of information".
Such widespread faith in the
establishment may account for why so many prominent reporters see no
problem with maintaining close relationships with the intelligence
services. The Guardian's Luke Harding has frequently, openly and proudly
advertised his warm bond with British spying agencies in articles and
books — and equally frequently been condemned for uncritically
running stories of questionable probity potentially provided to him
by agency staff. In a September article he
claimed Russian diplomats had held secret talks in London
with associates of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in an
attempt to assist in his escape from the UK. The covert action
would've allegedly seen Assange smuggled out of the Ecuadorian embassy
in Knightsbridge under cover of Christmas Eve in a
diplomatic vehicle and transported to Moscow.
The story was entirely based
on the testimony of anonymous sources, the identity of which
Harding didn't even hint at in the piece. In response, Craig Murray,
former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, slammed the article, calling it a
"quite extraordinary set of deliberate lies" and "entirely
black propaganda" published by an "MI6 tool".
"I was closely involved
with Julian and with Fidel Narvaez of the Ecuadorean Embassy
at the end of last year in discussing possible future
destinations for Julian. It is not only the case Russia did not figure in those
plans, it is a fact Julian directly ruled out the possibility
as undesirable. The entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. It
is very serious indeed when a newspaper like the Guardian prints a tissue
of deliberate lies in order to spread fake news on behalf
of the security services. I cannot find words eloquent enough
to express the depth of my contempt for Harding and Katherine
Viner, who have betrayed completely the values of journalism," Murray
wrote.
© Sputnik
/
A grinning Luke Harding and Mark
Urban in conversation
Similarly, in 2007 the Campaign
Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran published an analysis of
44 articles written by Daily Telegraph Defence Editor Con Couglin
on Iran — including stories suggesting North Korea was helping Tehran
prepare a nuclear weapons test, and the country was grooming Bin Laden's
successor. They found the pieces almost invariably were based on "unnamed
or untraceable" sources in intelligence agencies or the UK Foreign
Office and "published at sensitive and delicate times" when
there'd been "relatively positive diplomatic moves" towards Iran,
and contained 'exclusive revelations' about Iran combined
with eye-catchingly controversial headlines, which were typically based
on a single sentence in the wider article.
Prison
Break
Despite his bleak analysis, TJ does
not view the elite monopoly on information as insurmountable, or
invincible — there's much individuals and groups can do to shatter
the stranglehold.
"People should keep a keen eye
on sources that analyse news reporting and misreporting, such as Glasgow University Media Group and MediaLens,
which offer alternative information and tell
you what media coverage is actively
omitting from the real story. However, change must come from within
too — people should divorce themselves from preconceptions, and
question their beliefs wherever and whenever possible. When presented
with information that doesn't conform to our predispositions, we
should ask ourselves whether it's true, rather than reflexively dismissing
it outright," TJ says.
While having less trust in the
media more generally is a must, the academic also warns against placing
too much faith in alternative news outlets and social networks,
despite them being valuable resources with a significant positive
potential.
"Independent media is growing
in size and strength, but its overall reach is still relatively
tiny — while print circulation is obviously down, people still get the
vast bulk of their information from mainstream outlets. Similarly,
social media could've democratized the spread of information, but it
hasn't — and in fact any such potential has probably been neutered by the
proliferation of ‘fact-checking' resources, which are anything
but unbiased and disinterested arbiters of truth," TJ notes.
It partnered with Facebook
in May to "independently monitor disinformation and other
vulnerabilities" and combat the spread of fake news on the
platform. To date, the collaboration
has resulted in untold hundreds of pages and personal accounts being
shut down — rather than being promulgators of propaganda though,
the overwhelming bulk of the banished were alternative news sources,
political organizations and individuals, highlighting issues and events the
mainstream media downplays or ignores, such as US interventionism, drug
legalization and police brutality.
"The US State Department has
used major social networks to recruit revolutionaries on several
occasions, most notably during the ‘Arab Spring', connecting ‘moderate
rebels' — actually violent jihadist lunatics — in select
countries. Washington wanted Assad, Gaddafi and Mubarak gone, because they
weren't following orders — but there were no Twitter or Facebook
‘revolutions' in the Gulf states, because the American empire wanted their
rulers to remain in place. In Cuba, the CIA even went as far as creating
a social network for the same purpose," TJ concludes.
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