Dave Lindorff
Salon.com
6 November 2017
These are tough days to be a serious
journalist. Report a story now, with your facts all lined up nicely, and
you’re still likely to have it labeled “fake news” by anyone whose ox
you’ve gored — and even by friends who don’t share your political
perspective. For good measure, they’ll say you’ve based it on
“alternative facts.”
Historians say the term
“fake news” dates from the late 19th-century era of “yellow journalism,”
but the term really took off in 2016, a little over a year ago, during Donald Trump’s
run for the presidency. It described several different things, from
fact-free, pro-Trump online media to sensationalistic and largely untrue
stories whose only goal was eyeballs and dollars. During the primary
season, Trump himself began labeling all mainstream media stories about
him as “fake news.” The idea that there could be different truths, while
dating at least back to the administration of President George W. Bush, when his consigliere Karl Rove claimed that the administration “made its own” reality, gained currency when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, caught making stuff up in a TV interview, claimed that she was relying on “alternative facts.”
That dodge would be fine, on its own. Most people
are primed to believe that politicians lie — whatever party or
persuasion they represent — so their attempts to deny it when called a
conjurer of falsehoods posing tend to be recognized as such.
The corporate media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the
network news programs and even National Public Radio — have all
responded to being called liars and “fake news” fabricators of by
promoting themselves as “the reality-based community” (NPR), or claiming
they are fighting the good fight against ignorance, as demonstrated by
the Post’s new masthead slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Times has
stuck with its hoary “All the news that’s fit to print”slogan, but has
added a page-three daily feature listing “noteworthy facts from today’s
paper” and has taken to calling out Trump administration whoppers as
“lies.”
Last December Congress passed a new law, promptly signed by then-President Barack Obama,
that enacted an Orwellian amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of
2017. Called the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, this
measure tasks the State Department, in consultation with the Department
of Defense, the director of national intelligence and an obscure
government propaganda organization called the Broadcasting Board of
Governors, to establish a “Center for Information Analysis and
Response.” The job of this new center, funded by a $160 million,
two-year budget allocation, would be to collect information on “foreign
propaganda and disinformation efforts” and “proactively advance
fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests.”
What is “fake news”? The target keeps moving
This might all seem
laughable, but as a journalist who has worked in this field for 45
years, in both mainstream newspapers and television and in the
alternative media, and as a long-time freelancer who has written for
publications as widely varied as Business Week, the Nation, the Village Voice and a collectively run news site called ThisCantBeHappening.net,
I have watched as this obsession with “fake news” has turned into an
attack on alternative news and alternative news organizations.
Last Nov. 24, The Washington Post published a McCarthyite-style front-page article declaring
that some 200 news sites on the web were actually witting or unwitting
“purveyors of pro-Russian propaganda.” The article, by Post National Security Reporter Craig Timberg,
was based on the work of a shady outfit called PropOrNot, whose
owner-organizers were kept anonymous by Timberg and whose source of
funding was left unexplained. PropOrNot, Timberg wrote, had developed a
list of sites which it had determined to be peddling “pro-Russia
propaganda.”
For one of the sites on the list, the prominent left-wing journal Counterpunch, founded decades ago by former Village Voice and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, PropOrNot offered up two articles as justification for its designation. One of those articles was by me. It was a piece I’d actually written for ThisCantBeHappening, which had been republished with credit by Counterpunch. The reviewer, a retired military intelligence officer named Joel Harding
(who I discovered is linked to Fort Belvoir outside Washington, home to
the U.S. Army’s Information Operations Command, or INSCOM), labeled my
article “absurdly pro-Russian propaganda.”
In fact, the article was a
pretty straightforward report on the Sept. 29, 2016 findings by the
joint Dutch-Australian investigation into the July 2014 shoot-down of a
Malaysian jumbo passenger jet over Ukraine, which concluded that Russia
was the culprit. I noted in the article that this investigation was not
legitimate, because two nations — Russia and Ukraine — were known to
possess the Buk missiles and launchers that had brought down the plane,
but only one of them, Ukraine, was permitted to offer evidence. Russian
offers of evidence in the case were repeatedly rebuffed. The report also
failed to mention that the Ukrainian government had received veto power
over any conclusions reached by the investigators.
Was my report “fake news” or propaganda? Not at all.
The fake news in this case has been what has been written and aired by virtually all of the U.S. media, including the Times, the Post and
all the major networks, about that horrific tragedy. They all continue
to state as fact that a Russian Buk missile downed that plane, though no
honest investigation has been conducted. (Technically it is true that
the Buk missiles are all “Russian,” in that they were all manufactured
in Russia. Left unsaid is that Ukraine’s military had Buk launchers
since their nation was part of the Soviet Union and continued to
purchase them after independence.)
Laziest form of media criticism
“Labeling news reports that you don’t like as ’fake news’ is the laziest form of media criticism,” says Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a New York-based journalism review. “It’s like putting your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la’ really loudly. Both the government and the corporate media have reasons for not wanting the public to hear points of view that are threats to their power.”
While Kellyanne Conway
claimed her right to offer “alternative facts” as a way to justify
getting caught in a lie, there are also alternative facts which are real
but don’t get reported in the corporate media. A classic example was in
the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the entire corporate
media reported as fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction and was attempting to develop a nuclear bomb.
There were plenty of
alternative news organizations who quoted UN inspectors saying that none
of that was true and there were no WMDs or WMD programs in Iraq, but
they were simply blacked out by the corporate media like the Times, the
Post and the major news networks.
These days another
dubious story is that the Russians “hacked” the server of the Democratic
National Committee. It may have happened that way, but in fact, the
vast intelligence system the U.S. has constructed to monitor all
domestic and foreign telecommunications has offered up no hard evidence
of such a hack. National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have suggested that some evidence indicates a DNC insider must have been involved.
There is certainly fake
news all over the internet, and baseless conspiracies run rampant on
both the left and the right. But all too often, articles like mine cited
by PropOrNot (a genuine purveyor of fake news!) are being labeled as
propaganda in what Naureckas says is simply “the use of irony as a
defense mechanism” by news organizations that themselves are actually
guilty of publishing really fake news, as the Post did with its PropOrNot blacklist “scoop.”
“What the government and the corporate media are trying to do, with the help of the big internet corporations,” argues Mickey Huff, director of the Project Censored organization in California, “is basically to shut down alternative news sites that question the media consensus position on issues.”
A wide threat to online media
That’s a threat to any
online news organization, including this one, that depend upon equal
access to the internet and to fast download speeds. Already, Huff
charges, there are reports that Facebook is slowing down certain sites
that have links on its platform, in a misguided response to charges that
it sold ad space to Russian government-linked organizations accused of
trying to influence last November’s presidential election.
An end to internet
neutrality, the equal access to high-speed internet for surfing and
downloading that has been guaranteed to all users — but that is now
under attack by the Trump administration, its Federal Communications
Commission and a Republican-led Congress — would make it that much
easier for such a shutdown of alternative media to happen.
The real answer, of
course, is for readers and viewers of all media, mainstream or
alternative, to become critical consumers of news. This means not just
looking at articles critically, including this one, but going to
multiple sources for information on important issues. Relying on just
the Times or the Post, or on Fox News or NPR, will leave you
informationally malnourished — not just uninformed but misinformed. Even
if you were to read both those papers and watch both those networks,
you’d often be left with an incomplete version of the truth.
To get to the truth, we
need to also check out alternative news sources, whether of the left,
right or center — and we need to maintain the critical distinction
between unpopular or unorthodox points of view and blatant lies or
propaganda. Without such a distinction, and the freedom to make such
decisions for ourselves, maintaining democracy will be impossible.
Featured image is from ThisCantBeHappening.net.
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