Post-truth and propaganda

A long read on why it is time the rest of the media stopped treating Fox as TV news, and some UK tabloids as newspapers.

George Osborne becomes editor of the London Evening Standard. Donald Trump blames GCHC for bugging him because of something he saw on Fox News. The lines between right wing media and right wing politicians seem very blurred nowadays. This should not come as a surprise, because right wing media have been becoming much more like propaganda outlets than normal media organisations for some time. The conventions of journalism may have pretended otherwise, but it time we recognised reality.

Let me define two archetypes. The first, which could be called the truth purveyor, is the one we are familiar with, and which much of the mainstream media (MSM) like to imagine they correspond to. The aim is provide the best information to readers or viewers. The second is propaganda. One way of characterising the two archetypes is as follows. Readers have certain interests: objectives, goals, utilities etc. The truth purveyor will provide readers with the information they need to pursue those interests. (As exemplified here, for example.) Propaganda on the other hand, to borrow from Jacob Stanley, aims to provide information that will deceive people from seeing what is in their best interest. Propaganda provides information that supports a particular political goal or point of view.

Take, for example, the issue of welfare benefits. Media as the truth-purveyor type will try and present a rounded and accurate picture of those claiming welfare benefits. Right wing propaganda on the other hand will focus on examples of benefit fraud, or cases where the benefit recipient will be perceived by the reader as taking advantage of the system, with little or no attempt to put the example in any kind of context. This slanted coverage is designed to give the impression that benefit recipients are often scroungers and skivers. The political goal is to make it easier for governments to cut welfare payments, which in turn may allows taxes to be cut.

These are archetypes, and any media organisation will mix the two to some extent. Many would argue that even the most truth-purveyor type organisation may still embody certain assumptions or points of view that distort their readers view of what should be in their best interest. (As argued in Manufacturing Consent, for example.) Mediamacro is an example of this. But that should not blind us to what is happening elsewhere. Lines like “liberals’ nostalgia for factual politics seems designed to mask their own fraught relationship with the truth” [1] suggest nothing new is happening, let’s move on. That would be a huge mistake. It is like saying all news is propaganda, who cares. But because there are two archetypes, organisations can gradually move from one to another, and that movement is important. It played a crucial role in the success of Brexit and Trump.

In both in the UK and US there is a large part of the media which is becoming more and more like a pure propaganda outlet. We are used to thinking about propaganda as being associated with the state, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. In the UK and US, we now have propaganda machines that support political ideas that are associated with the far right, and political interests associated with the very wealthy. Their output is governed more and more by whether it assists those two goals.

Apologists for this right wing propaganda say that most media organisations have their particular political bias, and that will be reflected in the opinions you see in that media outlet. But I’m not talking about opinion pieces or leaders, but about the selection of stories and increasingly about making up stories. I cannot see either the Guardian, Mirror or MSNBC only reporting terrorist incidents by white supremacists, and ignoring those by Muslims. Nor would these organisations make up claims about foreign cities being ‘no go areas’. Suggesting an equivalence between The Mail and The Mirror, or between Fox and MSNBC, is a trap that many fall into.

Now it is natural, in a liberal democracy, that the part of the media that conveys propaganda should pretend it is just a purveyor of truth. When its propaganda becomes self-evident, it is also natural for it to claim that this is because it is others who are distorting the facts. In this sense, the fact that Trump and his supporters talk about the dominant liberal media producing fake news, and the right wing tabloids talk about bias at the BBC should not worry us at all. It is merely indicative that those making the allegations are in the business of, or supporting those, supplying propaganda. [2] More importantly, if we allow this attempt at deflection to move us away from examining what different parts of the media are doing, then the propagandists have won.

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I think it was Charlie Bean who first told me about the stupidity of a firm announcing that it was going to have to make redundancies, without specifying where those redundancies would be. It is foolish because the atmosphere of uncertainty created means that those most able to leave, who are almost certainly the brightest and best and therefore those that the firm would like to keep, end up leaving the firm because they can. Voluntary quits mean the firm no longer needs to create redundancies, but its loses its best quality staff to other firms.

I thought about this when reading about yet more examples of how EU citizens are currently being treated by this government. Colin Talbot has documented what is going on here, but there are literally thousands of similar stories. People who have lived and worked in the UK for years are told by the home office, when their application for permanent residence is turned down, to prepare to leave the UK. Applications which ask for a ridiculous amount of information and are turned down for often mindless reasons. It is a system designed to increase the chances that applicants will fail.

The effect this has, of course, is that those most able to leave the UK, who will often be the most able in terms of the importance of the work they do, will go. Refusing to confirm the rights of EU residents and sending them scary letters is how the UK government is making the same mistake as the firm that announces future unspecified redundancies. I am sometimes told that Brexit will allow the UK to choose the ‘best immigrants’, the ones that will contribute most to UK output and the public purse. Here we see Brexit achieving exactly the opposite: a system designed to encourage the best to leave.

But this is not a new Brexit phenomenon. As I described here, students wanting to come and study in the UK have faced a similar brutal regime, where a mistake by the UK bureaucracy - even when it is acknowledged as such - can lead to additional expense for the student and a period of uncertainty which can only set back their learning. Students midway through their course are told they have 60 days to find an alternative institution to sponsor them or face deportation. The UK Border Agency has no reason to believe that these are not perfectly genuine students who have paid good money to study in the UK, but it chooses to punish them because of alleged failings by a university.

There is an obvious pattern here. It is to treat those who are not UK nationals with a complete lack of humanity. It is, quite simply, very cruel. I talked above about how counterproductive it is, but even if it was not it remains very wrong. It is not something that any democratic government should do. Similar things are happening in the US as a result of Trump’s victory. This lack of humanity comes from a government that begins treating foreigners as a problem, as something to be discouraged, rather than as the people that they are. And it persists because a large part of the press deliberately ignores what is going on. That in turn reduces coverage in the broadcast media.

Contrast this with Germany, which has admitted around 1 million refugees over the last two years. Whatever the motives of the German government, German society adopted a ‘welcome culture’ to these refugees. There have been problems of course, but it is significant that the most serious you may have read about have been made up by certain US media organisations. Contrast this with the UK government shutting down the ‘Dubs amendment’ programme after only a few hundred refugee children had been admitted to the UK. For Germans it seems that refugees are people who have suffered and need help, but for the British they are something to fear and should be kept away at all costs.

Why is Germany welcoming a million refugees and the UK appears to do what they can to keep them out? Is the difference between the two countries something to do with an innate difference in national character? Do we in the UK allow our government to continue their inhuman treatment of foreign nationals because there is

“a special kind of British suggestibility – willingness to obey orders, thinking in generalisations, the search for panaceas, faith in power, which made many British capable of falling to deeper depths than many people of other nations”

Of course not. The above is a quote from Stephen Spender, visiting Germany in 1945, where I have changed German to British. After WWII it was common to believe that what happened in Germany under Hitler could only have happened if there had been some common abnormality in the German character. It was as mistaken then just as it is mistaken now to believe the British are particularly hostile to foreigners. But we should not be surprised when those outside the UK begin to think that way.

There is a much simpler explanation in both cases. The state propaganda machine of Nazi Germany was a critical ingredient in their rise to power and maintaining power. Hitler devoted chapters of Mein Kampf to the study and practice of propaganda. It is perhaps the best real world example of the propaganda archetype I described before. In the UK and US it is very different. Critically propaganda outlets do not have a monopoly of information, and they need to appear much like the rest of the media to retain their readers and their influence on the national stage. But a large part of the UK and US media is nevertheless increasingly acting as a propaganda vehicle, particularly in the area of immigration.

This change is measurable, as this report of a study shows. To quote “over the last 10 years [the UK press] appears to have been complicit in the narrowing of a discussion that is now characterised by an increasingly negative tone.” The anti-immigration propaganda in the Mail and Express reached a peak just before the referendum. As Liz Gerard describes here, these two papers printed on average two or three hostile immigration stories in each issue in 2016. The day before polling, the Mail printed six whole pages devoted to immigration. You would have to be a fool to believe these were ‘reflecting the interest of readers’: it was designed to push the referendum vote the way these papers wanted. It was pure propaganda.

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The are lots of stories around about a post-truth world created by social media. It is usually written up as if it is a new phenomenon created by new technology, but as Timothy Garton Ash notes ‘post-truth’ is nothing new. Equally the hype over Cambridge Analytica (here or here), whether it is accurate or not, is just the technological extension of something that is already happening, and has happened in the past. Most people still rely on the MSM for their news. Post-truth mainly comes from the part of the MSM whose business is propaganda, and the inability of others to treat it as such. Fake news stories on social media did not win the election for Trump. Fox News almost certainly did.

As Tim Harford notes, successful attempts to divert those in a democracy from the truth have a long history. Scientists published evidence that smoking caused lung cancer in the early 1950s. It took decades for that information to lead to campaigns to discourage smoking and for smokers to acknowledge there was a problem, and the reason it took decades was that the tobacco companies conducted a PR plan with that aim in mind. Exactly the same happened with climate change, with considerable success in the US as we are now witnessing with Trump’s election. As a tobacco firm wrote “doubt is our product”.

As Tim and George Lakoff explain, simply rebutting lies with facts can often be counterproductive. The Leave campaign's £350 million a week was a classic example. The more it was talked about, the more it became fixed in the mind of voters. The regrettable truth is that most people do not read the detail, but instead just absorb the headline. In many ways the EU referendum is a classic example of how facts can lose out to propaganda.

All this can just seem depressing, but it is not if we learn some obvious lessons. The first, which Ben Chu explains, is for policy makers not to fall into the trap of appeasement.

“Christina Boswell and James Hampshire have highlighted how the public discourse on immigration in Germany was transformed between 2000 and 2008. Social Democratic politicians used familiar arguments about the economic benefits of immigration. But they did this alongside a campaign to promote positive narratives about immigration and its place in the country’s history to counter entrenched perceptions of Germany being kein Einwanderunglsand (“not a country of immigration”). This twin approach largely succeeded in changing attitudes, flowering in the generous position taken by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat government towards Syrian refugees in the summer of 2015.

By contrast in the UK, at the same time, Labour began to talk up “British jobs for British workers” and never seriously rebutted the dominant and dismal narrative of the tabloid press about immigration being an economic burden and culturally corrosive, arguably helping to set the scene for the current bout of self-harming Brexit-related xenophobia.”

Now politicians here may respond that the German example is impossible given the strength of the propaganda coming from UK tabloids (compared to its relative absence in Germany), but that just strengthens my point that we should start recognising that propaganda for what it is. That recognition needs to start in the rest of the mainstream media. According to a study outlined here, “a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system ... This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.”

But the authors also note that “Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.” What this traditional media needs to do, in both the UK and US, is to recognise propaganda for what it is, and treat it with the disdain that it deserves.

In the US that is quite a challenge because a lot of that propaganda is now created or recycled by the President himself. In the UK it is a challenge because the right wing tabloids have the government’s support, and the government holds the purse strings of the BBC. [4] It is very easy just to ignore what is happening, and carry on as usual. But this inability or unwillingness to recognise the danger posed by propaganda is part of the reason 2016 happened. Liberal democracy’s survival in the UK and US may depend on recognising and resisting what is in the process of destroying it.

[1] Taken from Stahl and Hansen. The implication that they draw, that propaganda as news or post-truth or whatever you want to call it can be combatted by a “democratic revival” seems simply naive. To see the profound difference between, say, the Blair government compared to what came before and after them, you only have to look at how they regarded academics.

[2] For those who say how do we know who is telling the truth, then you are part of the problem.

[3] And among academics, UK nationals as well. 

[4] And, it seems, increasingly supplies its journalists.

The EU referendum and the media

The government is to send a 14 page leaflet to every household setting out the ‘facts’ that make a vote to stay in the EU the sensible thing to do. Anything wrong or undemocratic about that? US readers might be rather surprised to learn the official In and Out groups are only allowed to spend up to £7m each on campaigning: we in the UK have this rather quaint and intensely democratic idea that money should not be able to buy elections. But the government’s leaflet, which will cost nearly £10 million to produce and distribute, does not count as part of that. [1]

For that reason alone, this leaflet is both unfair and undemocratic. But most of the complaints about this seem to have come from those supporting the Leave campaign. Is this because others who might normally be expected to speak up for fairness and democracy are staying quiet because they support staying in the EU? I honestly do not know, for reasons that will become clear.

What I think is pretty clear is that a large majority of what you might call the establishment, and also a majority of what was once called ‘the chattering classes’, plus a majority of academics (e.g.), are in favour of staying in the EU. One of those is Timothy Garton Ash, who wrote an article in the Guardian recently about BBC coverage. He complains that because the BBC is focused on being fair to both sides, it is failing to be informative. I couldn’t help thinking to myself as I read this (very fair and sensible) article, welcome to the world that many scientists (including social scientists) have had to live with for quite some time. Here is the BBC’s mission, which I was discussing recently in a talk on a different topic.

The world that Garton Ash describes is a world where, on any subject that is contested by significant (to the BBC) groups, evidence is only presented with counter evidence for balance, even when the quality of the counter evidence is weak or non-existent. It is a world where the view of the massive majority of scientific researchers has to be ‘balanced’ by the pseudo science of special interests. It is a world where everyone is an expert on economics. It is a world where the visual media refrain from presenting facts if those facts might be seen as ‘political’. It is the ‘shape of the earth:views differ’ world, and the world where everyone just knows that in 2010 the UK government was saved from the brink of bankruptcy. [2]

As we are seeing in this EU referendum, setting up everything as a two sided debate does little to inform anyone. It can even be counterproductive, setting the climate change scientist (full of natural scientific caution) against the climate change denier (chosen for their rhetorical ability). It is a format that militates against evidence: you cannot normally show a chart in a debate, and so instead we get the presentation of summary statistics that are selected on the basis of how best they support a view rather than how best they summarise the data. (UK spending on flood prevention is a clear example of how that happens.) It is a format where even numbers lose their meaning, and where dots are hardly ever connected. [3]

It is not hard to see how that happens, particularly when media organisations are fighting for their survival. Some things can be done, as long as they are seen to be non-political. For example journalists can use statistics in a way that informs rather than confuses. For example less status should be given to journalists who have good political contacts, and greater status given to those who know their subject and can quickly source experts. Above all else, we have to do all we can to resist government attacks on the public media.

But these changes will not make a major difference. I suspect that the BBC, for example, will only start to fulfil its mission to inform and educate when it is safe for it to do so. In the meantime we will have to put up with the uniform ‘views on the shape of the earth differ’ style of reporting. The government’s leaflet on the EU may be one consequence. Our membership of the EU may become another.

[1] That the government has resorted to trying to rig the vote in such a blatant way is interesting on many levels. (If you think this language is too strong, how would you react to the government doing the same before a general election?) I suspect the government was unprepared for the impact of being on the wrong side of most of the print media. In many other respects, it reflects chickens coming to roost. (One I did not mention here is voting ‘reform’ which tends to exclude the young who tend not to vote Conservative, but who also tend to favour the EU.) But the move may also reflect continuing hubris. Is it wise to associate the Remain side so clearly with a government which is right now losing popularity? It would have been so much better to do a 2003 Euro entry type exercise. The government must have known it would come out in its favour, so why was this not done?

[2] Just in case anyone does not get the reference, more detail here. I’m not sure whether this example represents ignorance, or journalists talking to the wrong people (i.e. some City economists), or not presenting the facts because this would be seen as ‘being political’. Probably a mixture of all three.

[3] For example, compare how much information you get from this 2 minutes (from the excellent John Van Reenen) to ten times that amount of normal reporting.