The sincerest form of propaganda

While propaganda is best sold to people who don’t realise what they’re being sold, its also best sold by people who genuinely believe what they’re saying.

The immense, sophisticated system used by the establishment to guarantee the public succumb to its narratives, creating consent for its otherwise unacceptable actions, is so effective that many professionals are completely taken in by it. Although journalistic failings should be called out, a lot of nuance and complexity is often thrown out in many condemnations of the media. A little more humility for our own limitations in trying to understand the huge complexity of globe spanning events is vital before making bold declarations upon events.

Although purely domestic news is subject to all kinds of manipulations, pressure and biases there is little excuse for remaining deluded by the powers that (shouldn’t) be for too long on any particular issue. There is relatively easy access to the people, locations and evidence involved in most stories to mean that a false narrative is relatively unsustainable. Also, there are often enough open, party or factional political differences to ensure it’s in someone’s interest to reveal what’s hidden. Even so, as the campaign to paint UK Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, as an anti-Semitic proves, a coordinated campaign that crosses establishment, political divides can be successful, requiring no real evidence.

Foreign policy and international affairs are another matter entirely.

Particularly in the US and UK, most politicians on all sides are very quick to agree that bombs need to be dropped on brown people in places that most voters would have trouble finding on a map. As they are to back economic policies that favour ourselves over the same cartographically elusive populations or demonise another government into Marvel bad guy proportions, that would otherwise have remained unremarkable in the public perception. This creates the space for all those who would clandestinely manipulate events to act unhindered, as well as being able to dismiss any counter narratives as the work of THE ENEMY.

Once we get into events in distant places, anyone’s understanding, including politicians and journalists, is hindered by linguistic, cultural and political differences. Trying to get to grips with the minutiae of competing political, security, military and business powers, even in our own country is a minefield through which no two experts will agree on a route. Assuming that any one reporter, commentator or organisation even has a monopoly on the facts of the case is a risky proposition.

If a situation is being manipulated and it’s best to assume that almost everything will be in some form or another, we need to understand at what stage or stages in the process it’s being manipulated. Is the event itself being manipulated? People may mock the conspiratorial sounding false flag attacks, but the fact is they do happen, where a covert attack by one party is carried out in such a manner that it can be blamed on another. Maybe the event never even happened, as in the case of the Gulf of Tonkin incident used to justify the start of the Vietnam war.

Is the source of information being manipulated? Such as the translator or fixer for a journalist being party to one side of the conflict, as we have seen recently in Ethiopia, with TPLF sympathisers translating for western journalists. Particularly in Africa, where there can be dozens of languages in any one region, there are plenty of opportunities for misreporting, without any malign intent, by the time the words of a villager describing an event end up on the page in front of you in English.

Is the reporter even on the ground where events are happening? It’s easy to miss the small print of a report saying where the journalist actually is. This fact isn’t usually hidden in the media, even if it’s not made obvious but in reality the journalist in question may just be relying on the same news agency reports that are available everywhere. The majority of international affairs reporting relies on only three global news agencies, meaning what you see in one mainstream media source may hardly differ from another. Try it for yourself: look at a story about an event in a non-western country in a few different MSM outlets, you’ll often see almost the exact same wording taken from agency sources.

We are assuming that because the piece is being written in the same region as the events in question, the author has some kind of expertise on the subject. This is a pretty big assumption, even before you might consider impugning major failings in the journalist. How long have they been in the region? What languages do they speak? What important figures do they have access to? How many countries is their employer expecting them to cover?

Is what you’re reading actually what the journalist wanted you to read? I’m sure every foreign correspondent can give you an example of how what they sent to the editor wasn’t what ended up in print or more likely pixels these days. Editors, either personally or with pressure from above can transform or even delete entirely work sent to them. If you’re going to assume wrong doing, as opposed to simple failure, this is often the place to start, as it then puts pressure back down the line onto individual reporters. If after two or three goes at pushing a story or an aspect of it, a journalist realises it will never get into a finished piece, what do they do? Risk their job by annoying their boss? Resign in protest? All respect due to those who take the noble route but at least acknowledge the fact that those who choose otherwise are only humans doing a job like everyone else. Often we need to be blaming the system before we unload our ire on those at the base of the media pyramid.

Once you gain attachment to an idea of what is happening, especially when you are being paid to appear as authoritative on a subject, there’s a huge psychological barrier to get over to admit that you’ve got it wrong. For a journalist, you’ve then got the problem of how you’re going to convey that to your employers and readers, knowing it’s going to have an impact on your credibility. Hence it’s easier to live with the cognitive dissonance than resolve the conundrum. Once you construct a narrative of understanding of events, then you continue to see all evidence presented to you through this prism and evidence to the contrary is pushed aside by justifications formed by your narrative: it’s just enemy propaganda, it’s just an isolated event etc.

In my long, gradual struggle to better understand world events and the media I have made these mistakes myself and being open about these failures is the best way of avoiding them in the future. Of course I have the luxury of not earning the slightest bit of money from my efforts that would create greater psychological pressure on me, but even so, I have keenly felt the emotions of dealing with the awful realisation that I have been wrong. I’m happy to recount them here because it’s a vital part of how I try to analyse the multiple, complex streams of information that make up coverage of events elsewhere in the world. Knowing that no matter how sure I may feel about my comprehension of a situation I may still, at least in part, be wrong, provides a humility to break down any barriers to new evidence.

Back in 2011 during the NATO intervention in Libya I ended up in a argument at a friend’s house about the justification for the intervention. At the time, even though I assumed there was likely to be at least something dubious going on, I believed that there was a genuine threat to Benghazi which needed to be addressed. Back then, in my naivety, I still had some faith in the MSM but also assumed that as Al Jazeera was broadly reporting the same thing as everyone else it must be relatively true. After all, they’d managed to upset the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel and others with their reporting, it seemed logical that they wouldn’t be afraid of going against the grain in covering this latest regional conflict. What has become more and more apparent over the years is that, particularly since their patron, the Emir of Qatar handed power to his son in 2013, their editorial policies have more come to reflect the foreign policies of the state. This now often aligns with western interests.

For me these were very early days of using the internet for news, I hadn’t discovered Twitter and besides, it wasn’t anything like the all encompassing news information battle ground it has since become. Independent news was much less developed then and my knowledge of it was limited. Even so, I wasn’t a completely gullible fool: I’d campaigned against the sanctions on Iraq and knew full well that there were no WMDs to be discovered, for instance. The friend who I argued with was prone to somewhat outlandish opinions at times so I wasn’t to inclined to take his word on the issue. However, over the next few years I began to pick up dribs and drabs of evidence that questioned my understanding but I had trouble making that final leap of acceptance, principally because of the heated emotions of the argument I’d had.

Now, let’s be clear. Even a UK government enquiry later affirmed that there was no threat to Benghazi and we backed Islamic extremists against Gadhafi. The propaganda at the time such as Libyan soldiers being issued with Viagra to rape women has all been debunked. It was a war of aggression that committed crimes against humanity by targeting civilian infrastructure, boosted ISIS and similar groups, destabilized not just the country but many others in the region, the effects of which are still very much being felt today a decade on. While there were many legitimate criticisms of Gadhafi, the protests against him were minimal, as well as manipulated by the West and in any event, no way comparable to Arab spring uprisings elsewhere. All of these now incontestable facts are never spoken of by the media and the myth fabricated at the time remains the common public understanding of events.

I made a point of apologising to my friend for my mistake. I never again want to be so wedded to an idea that I shut myself off to contrary evidence.

In 2014 I visited Xinjiang province in China. There had recently been a number of serious terrorist attacks by Islamic extremist, Uighur separatist groups and a major security exercise was in place to protect important sites. There had been some reporting on the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighurs but the subject had been largely ignored by western media. In fact, it was this under- reporting which led me to give more credence to the reports than I now realise I should have. More recently I have come to appreciate that my understanding of Chinese history and politics at the time was significantly flawed and that my interpretation of things I saw there was through this flawed vision. We have since seen a massive increase in western propaganda that has completely distorted the public perception of the issues, including outright fabrications. That’s not to say that China has always done the right thing in Xinjiang or has never committed human rights abuses there. I think there was enough evidence to show that some non extremist/separatist Uighurs did have some legitimate grievances against the government.

However, the point here is not too argue about the specific details about what may or may not have happened but the realisation that by assuming my understanding of the situation and background was correct, I’d misinterpreted what I saw. I’d travelled the region with a Canadian-Chinese friend and I’d had the impression that she had received a lot frostier reception from Uighurs than I had. I’d found them to be very friendly and generally delighted to meet a foreigner. Before writing this I contacted her to get her opinion and apart from one unpleasant instance she had no more than a mild suspicion that there might be something to it – hardly a basis to come to any conclusion about Uighur attitudes to Han Chinese. So, even my memory of events had been tainted by my prejudicial understanding.

Even as tourists I believe we should make an effort to learn about places before we visit and doubly so for a journalist but if we then use that as an eyeglass through which to see everything, we are only going to be looking to confirm our suspicions. This only creates a self reinforcing spiral within media institutions who then seek to buttress the preconstructed narrative.

With this in mind it’s easy to see how intelligence agencies and other malign, covert actors can set seeds of suspicion long before a journalist gets to a place and almost just allow the system to take it’s course. If I’d known in 2014 that Radio Free Asia, the source of much of the western reporting on Xinjiang, had been initially set up by the CIA to disseminate US propaganda in the region and that the US had been acting covertly in the region for years with the aim of destabilising China, I would have been in a much better position to interpret what I saw. It’s not unreasonable to assume that as a relatively authoritarian state, China can act in a heavy handed manner, in a way that should be condemned. The problem is when this is fitted into a false narrative to present it as something more than it is and only to further reinforce that narrative. An account, say, of a Uighur being abused in detention might be true but you’ve only got to look at the endemic level of violence that goes on in US prisons to see that this does not mean it is part of a wholesale campaign to dehumanise that population.

One journalist who has pushed the establishment narrative on Xinjiang is C.J. Werleman for which some have accused him of being a propagandist. I think this unfair, even though I believe he is fundamentally wrong in his understanding. If you look at the rest of his work, he’s clearly no obvious, establishment lackey, given his support for the Palestinian and Kashmiri Muslims. I’ve followed him for a long time, as he has taken a strong personal stance on how poorly Muslims have been portrayed in the media, which I can well relate to. A better explanation of his failings would be that this well intentioned, indeed passionate,  personal crusade has led him to see any evidence of persecution of Muslims as the gospel truth and blinded him to any complexity that could undermine that. His claims that up to nine million Uighurs are unaccounted for, the majority of the population, are beyond absurd.

I had an exchange with him online about an interview he did about Syria with Bilal Abdul Kareem, a black American Muslim journalist, who has been the only long term, foreign correspondent reporting from inside rebel held Idlib province. Kareem has had some questionable interactions with extremist figures in the region and you might ask how he managed to maintain a constructive relationship with Al Qaeda spin off group Hayat al Tahrir al Sham for so long. Werleman refused to doubt anything that Kareem had said and refused to entertain any of my efforts to justify scepticism in his account and I wasn’t even trying to argue any particular point! Who knows if Kareem’s accounts were right or wrong but if you can’t be sceptical about such a clearly controversial figure, you’re not really performing a basic journalistic function.

So, here we see a journalist who demonstrates some of the basic human characteristics, both good and bad that colour reporting on international events. Despite being independent and well intentioned, he has let his framework of understanding determine how he sees events.

Another example of how journalists, like anyone, can construct a framework on which to hang their reporting was revealed in a tweet by Carole Cadwalladr, concerning the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This delusion of the West being a force for good in the world and an exemplar of all that is good in humanity is almost a prerequisite for any MSM reporter. Even sticking to MSM sources, this is a delusion that anyone should be able to see through: endless wars based on lies; support for brutal dictators and extremist groups; coups; unchecked arms sales fuelling conflicts; rampant destruction of the environment; sanctions that have condemned millions to a slow death; economic policies impoverishing the already marginalised; non stop lying and suppression of evidence of our crimes both current and historical. The list could go on. Just because she, you and I may think we have a noble set of values is utterly irrelevant to our collective actions, particularly when we repeatedly vote for the criminals running our countries.

I have had no particular problem with Cadwalladr, she’s clearly capable of questioning aspects of the establishment’s actions with her investigative reporting, she just happened to express the opinion on Twitter, but to have only just realised the West is not the paragon of virtue we’d like it to be is to have spent a career not having noticed the rabid elephant rampaging around the living room. Equally problematic in this instance, is that our supposed failing here is deserting the Afghans in their hour of need. Not that after our four decades of destabilising intervention and brutality of no benefit to the majority of the population, we were finally getting out to let the country be ruled by its own people.

When you are living under this illusion it’s easy to believe that Russia, China or whoever are the bad guys not us.

Take one final example, George Monbiot, primarily known for his radical environmental views, even someone who is prepared to question the fundamental basis of capitalism and other establishment matters of faith. I’d wholeheartedly recommend reading his views on the environment, as well as a number of issues but when faced with anything that deviates from the accepted narrative on the Syrian war and some other issues, he dismisses it as conspiracy theory. Expertise and broad mindedness in one field doesn’t necessarily confer that to another.

The point of discussing all this confusion and complexity is not to get you to throw up your hands in existential despair at never being able to understand what’s going on in the world. It’s to develop a realistic attitude to what we can know about international events. It’s knowing that no single source can ever be the final arbiter of truth. It’s knowing that we and the people informing us may well simply be wrong and although there are great efforts and expense exerted to deceive us, not everyone is in on the conspiracy, they’ve just been fooled as well. Some journalists and outlets can have a well deserved reputation for covering some subjects, whilst being embarrassingly awful on others. Even Fox News or the Daily Mail can occasionally do better reporting on controversial subjects than the liberal media. Not that I’m recommending them, but how and why such things happen can be a useful insight into the complexities of the media, which will have to be left for another day.

If there was only one word of advice to give, I’d say, wait. Some stories are debunked within a day but others much longer. Countless times I’ve waited months to discover, more by chance than anything, a little article that disproves an earlier allegation, by which time the media has no interest in correcting its mistake. The majority of claims in recent years that Russia did something bad fall into this category, or at least it was shown that there was no convincing evidence that it was the Russian government. No doubt they have got up to nefarious activities at some point but most of the claims are driven more by rabid, New Cold War paranoia and outright propaganda than anything resembling evidence. Some stories take years to mature as evidence trickles out. I’d followed allegations that the US had been flying ISIS fighters out of Syria to other regions such as Iraq and Afghanistan for two years before I felt comfortable enough to post an article on such a serious claim. Even the BBC has reported on dodgy deals done to allow ISIS fighters to escape Raqqa, so such an idea cannot be easily dismissed. Both Iran and Russia have made top level, official complaints to the US about it, unlikely if it was a complete fabrication.

Propagandists rely on initial claims not being followed up and even when they are it can already have created too much of a climate of suspicion for the innocent party to successfully counteract.  We can see how intelligence agencies and the military cultivate connections with journalists and feed them the required snippets of information with just enough juicy stuff to mean the journalist has to keep reporting the dubious stuff to retain their inside source.

As I hope I’ve demonstrated, there’s a million ways a report can be inaccurate and plenty of those don’t require malign intent by all involved. Lazy journalism, time pressures or the kind of typical human biases I’ve discussed, that we all are subject to, can affect the process. Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticise these failings and they can certainly get to a high enough level to be effectively indistinguishable from propaganda but you can’t hope to understand events without appreciating these issues. Unfortunately it takes a hell of a lot of time to come to firm conclusions about the reliability of individuals and organisations, to allow us to separate fact from fiction and honest or not so honest mistakes. Time that most people don’t have. We need to remain ever sceptical but humble enough to never forget we can always be wrong and admit it when we are.