Donald Trump vomited into cyberspace on Saturday, claiming Barack Obama had his “wires tapped” in the month before the election, although he cited no evidence whatsoever.
The evidence, in fact, was a Breitbart article, itself citing an
article on the website Heat Street, which quoted “unnamed sources”.
Before we get to the truth, we must examine the lies. Because the lies are winning – and new research from academics at Columbia University shows how. Columbia’s researchers analysed 1.3m articles published online in the run-up to the US election. The results show that it is not the internet as a technology that fragments the truth, or favours fake news and outright lies. It is the overt adoption of disinformation and propaganda strategies by politically motivated rightwing outlets that creates this effect.
Network analysis shows that the huge, established corporate media outlets, ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to CNN, inhabit an almost completely separate world from the news consumed by rightwing voters. The sun of this “alt-right” solar system is Breitbart, around which numerous other paranoia-vendors orbit.
What’s striking is the lack of overlap. The network graphics show the same kind of picture you get when you juxtapose Palestinian Twitter with Israeli Twitter – parallel universes.
Two other results stand out. First the lack of diversity in the far-right media. While left and centre-left media in the US was diverse and critical in its support for Hillary Clinton, the likes of Breitbart, Zero Hedge and Truthfeed were clustered at the extreme end of pro-Trump partisanship. They are all, basically, in the same business.
Second, the upstarts proved capable of bullying and temporarily sidelining their only mainstream rival – Fox News – until the Murdoch-owned network fell into line as the purveyor of pro-Trump stories. Before the primaries, the five most shared stories about Fox on Breitbart were all themed around its alleged support for “illegal aliens”.
The report’s authors insist that it is neither fake news nor Facebook that poses the real challenge to the mainstream media, but a “propaganda and disinformation-rich environment”. They offer no suggestions for how to counter this, so I will.
First, recognise how the right’s kit of parts fit together. The rightwing certainties and paranoias and the anti-truth despair don’t feed off each other accidentally – they are designed to work together. With luck, at some point we will find out who came up with the design. But at a deeper level, the liberal media of the west is getting hoist with its own 72-point-bold-sans-serif petard here.
If you have a theory of ideology, none of what is happening should be a surprise. If you understand that the media is configured to represent the interests of those with economic power – the path from the normal way it does business to what the right is doing now should be recognisable.
In Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Vladimir Putin, we have politicians prepared to break with globalisation, multilateral obligations and the rule of law. They must discredit the mainstream media not because it is an eternal vendor of the truth, but because the old way it represented the interests of the elite no longer works.
A normally functioning rightwing media attacks the striker, the “benefit scrounger”, the migrant – but always in the name of the rule of law. It exposes wrongdoing among the elite for the same reason corporate lawyers exist – to create a relatively level playing field on which the rich can exploit the poor. It leavens this with vast amounts of celebrity news, manufactured in collusion with the PR industry and understood, even by its consumers, to be partially false.
But something massive happened between 2008 and 2017: the ideology of the ruling elite fell apart. They kept the global finance system alive with $12tn of printed money and the philosophy of “extend and pretend”. But it’s hard to keep an ideology alive that way. People’s brains demand coherence – and what the liberal conservatism of the Wall Street Journal could not provide, the racist xenophobia of Breitbart did.
We have to learn something profound from this. In an ideological crisis, facts alone do not win arguments: narratives do. The clearest difference between the liberal-democratic newspapers – including this one – and those of the right is that the former have no overarching narrative. They espouse a series of good causes. They partake in stolid investigations hidebound by numerous self-imposed rules, as a result of which nobody gets busted. Having bought the ideological self-justification that “I just report the truth”, many journalists and editors are clueless as to why this “truth” is now being walloped by outright lies.
Trump and Breitbart are crafted around an appeal to unreason based on narrow self-interest. Not a single dollar would flow to Breitbart unless large numbers of American voters conceived their self interest in the way Breitbart does. This is the paranoia of white people in the face of multi-ethnicity; men in the face of an irreversible rise in women’s freedom; the paranoia of the small town in the face of the big city.
I want journalists to fight this by becoming partisans of the truth. We should do it as Robert Capa did on D-Day, as Ed Murrow did when he narrated the blitz and as the Russian writer Vasily Grossman did when he strode into what was left of Treblinka. We must do it by writing story after story about the resistance of ordinary people; the humanity of the victims; the inhumanity of racial and sexual violence; by looking beyond minor facts to the major ones. And by taking a collective corporate decision to shrink the celebrity gossip machine, which is eroding truth even within media empires committed to it.
Trump’s row with the FBI shows he is a lying fantasist. If the liberal media has any principle left it is not the comment pages but the front page headlines that should say: “President exposed as lying fantasist.”
Before we get to the truth, we must examine the lies. Because the lies are winning – and new research from academics at Columbia University shows how. Columbia’s researchers analysed 1.3m articles published online in the run-up to the US election. The results show that it is not the internet as a technology that fragments the truth, or favours fake news and outright lies. It is the overt adoption of disinformation and propaganda strategies by politically motivated rightwing outlets that creates this effect.
Network analysis shows that the huge, established corporate media outlets, ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to CNN, inhabit an almost completely separate world from the news consumed by rightwing voters. The sun of this “alt-right” solar system is Breitbart, around which numerous other paranoia-vendors orbit.
What’s striking is the lack of overlap. The network graphics show the same kind of picture you get when you juxtapose Palestinian Twitter with Israeli Twitter – parallel universes.
Two other results stand out. First the lack of diversity in the far-right media. While left and centre-left media in the US was diverse and critical in its support for Hillary Clinton, the likes of Breitbart, Zero Hedge and Truthfeed were clustered at the extreme end of pro-Trump partisanship. They are all, basically, in the same business.
Second, the upstarts proved capable of bullying and temporarily sidelining their only mainstream rival – Fox News – until the Murdoch-owned network fell into line as the purveyor of pro-Trump stories. Before the primaries, the five most shared stories about Fox on Breitbart were all themed around its alleged support for “illegal aliens”.
The report’s authors insist that it is neither fake news nor Facebook that poses the real challenge to the mainstream media, but a “propaganda and disinformation-rich environment”. They offer no suggestions for how to counter this, so I will.
First, recognise how the right’s kit of parts fit together. The rightwing certainties and paranoias and the anti-truth despair don’t feed off each other accidentally – they are designed to work together. With luck, at some point we will find out who came up with the design. But at a deeper level, the liberal media of the west is getting hoist with its own 72-point-bold-sans-serif petard here.
If you have a theory of ideology, none of what is happening should be a surprise. If you understand that the media is configured to represent the interests of those with economic power – the path from the normal way it does business to what the right is doing now should be recognisable.
In Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Vladimir Putin, we have politicians prepared to break with globalisation, multilateral obligations and the rule of law. They must discredit the mainstream media not because it is an eternal vendor of the truth, but because the old way it represented the interests of the elite no longer works.
A normally functioning rightwing media attacks the striker, the “benefit scrounger”, the migrant – but always in the name of the rule of law. It exposes wrongdoing among the elite for the same reason corporate lawyers exist – to create a relatively level playing field on which the rich can exploit the poor. It leavens this with vast amounts of celebrity news, manufactured in collusion with the PR industry and understood, even by its consumers, to be partially false.
But something massive happened between 2008 and 2017: the ideology of the ruling elite fell apart. They kept the global finance system alive with $12tn of printed money and the philosophy of “extend and pretend”. But it’s hard to keep an ideology alive that way. People’s brains demand coherence – and what the liberal conservatism of the Wall Street Journal could not provide, the racist xenophobia of Breitbart did.
We have to learn something profound from this. In an ideological crisis, facts alone do not win arguments: narratives do. The clearest difference between the liberal-democratic newspapers – including this one – and those of the right is that the former have no overarching narrative. They espouse a series of good causes. They partake in stolid investigations hidebound by numerous self-imposed rules, as a result of which nobody gets busted. Having bought the ideological self-justification that “I just report the truth”, many journalists and editors are clueless as to why this “truth” is now being walloped by outright lies.
Trump and Breitbart are crafted around an appeal to unreason based on narrow self-interest. Not a single dollar would flow to Breitbart unless large numbers of American voters conceived their self interest in the way Breitbart does. This is the paranoia of white people in the face of multi-ethnicity; men in the face of an irreversible rise in women’s freedom; the paranoia of the small town in the face of the big city.
I want journalists to fight this by becoming partisans of the truth. We should do it as Robert Capa did on D-Day, as Ed Murrow did when he narrated the blitz and as the Russian writer Vasily Grossman did when he strode into what was left of Treblinka. We must do it by writing story after story about the resistance of ordinary people; the humanity of the victims; the inhumanity of racial and sexual violence; by looking beyond minor facts to the major ones. And by taking a collective corporate decision to shrink the celebrity gossip machine, which is eroding truth even within media empires committed to it.
Trump’s row with the FBI shows he is a lying fantasist. If the liberal media has any principle left it is not the comment pages but the front page headlines that should say: “President exposed as lying fantasist.”
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