The advent of social media meant that everyone gained a platform on which their opinions could be published and then accessed by a global audience. Blogs and bloggers became alternative voices to the “mainstream media,” and as technology advanced and ideas expanded, this shift in who has a global voice came to embrace podcasts and many other forms of self-publishing. Great – I may not agree with you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.
Blogging blogs and casting podcasts is all well and good, but the narrative that came along with this emergence of “alternative” information resources has been hijacked. There is significant impetus behind the thought that the mainstream media is compromised, that it is dark and not to be trusted, dishonest to the core and should be shunned. The fact that this idea is now shared by individuals as diverse as ordinary people living in Sweden, to small business owners in the UK, to the president of the United States, is an astonishing phenomena of the modern era.
First of all, the idea of an “alternative” media has itself been appropriated. Instead of it meaning an independent person who has an opinion that they’d like shared, “alternative” media now is a title that has morphed into including some very mainstream channels, like, InforWars, or Breitbart, or RT.
These outlets have awarded themselves the “alternative” badge because they are not trading in regularly accepted facts, but in a mixture of absurd claims and outright lies, usually backed up by grains of truth sprinkled throughout the story or a seemingly credible talking head to give the claims a veneer of credibility.
Pages and pages could be written on specific stories, but to give them the justification they deserve they should be ignored completely. If we lived in a more rational and fact-based world, claims of a flat earth and pizza parlor sex rings and mass shootings being faked and so on should all be dismissed out of hand, simply not worthy of any serious debate.
But, at least temporarily, we’re not living in a rational and fact-based world anymore.
What were cooky fringe of “alternative” outlets pushing ridiculous conspiracy theories about 9/11 or distortions about how the global banking or political systems work have now become either state sponsored and directed (like RT), or big money publishing, like InfoWars and Breitbart. The tenuous claims by these outlets to be “alternative” are no more than a collective denouncement of their enemy – the mainstream media.
Without irony, the people that are peddling these lies even sometimes call themselves “truthers.”
The point of this is not, as RT present their mission statement to be, to get people to “Question More” by highlighting matters somehow being overlooked – the point of this is to misinform, to confuse, to weave distrust into the very fabric of society, and with that, to stoke anger and fear, which both become tools with which to manipulate. And this is not some mischievous kid in mom’s basement, but one of the most prolific sources of disinformation, operating on a global scale – the Russian government.
It’s important not to give RT more credit than they’re due in terms of their audience penetration. They really are a blip on the outlying fields of the media landscape in Europe and North America. However, when the Leader of the UK Labour Party has previously suggested RT programming as a way of avoiding a royal wedding and getting to the “truth” of what’s happening in Libya, that’s when we can see that narratives are starting to merge. How many supporters of Jeremy Corbyn also believe that the BBC is a tool of “tory propaganda” or believe that the “mainstream media” are all following a single and apparently directed agenda? One, apparently, directed against him.
How about when the President of the United States greets an Irish journalist in the Oval Office and misunderstands RTE (Ireland’s state broadcaster) for RT (Russian propaganda) and says “RT, oh good.” How many of the hardcore of Trump’s support believe in the falsehood of the media conspiracy against him to undermine his Presidency? And might this charade end in tragedy because of how deeply some people believe it?
This concocted tale of the” mainstream media” is dangerous on many levels, It causes stress and upset to the victims of the “truthers” and motivates idiots to take automatic weapons into pizza stores to “self-investigate” claims that cannot possibly be true.
But here’s another angle to see this through. At this moment in time there really is an information war being fought, and baseless claims of a dishonest and conspiratorial media pact works to undermine the very genuine efforts of people working to counter the most unprecedented wave of disinformation in history. By demeaning and debasing language that is being fairly applied to Russia’s propaganda efforts in Ukraine, the European Union, and North America, and by accusing the BBC of “propaganda,” the serious fight against REAL propaganda is damaged.
The term “fake news” actually means something, it means a news report that has been deliberately compiled based on falsehoods like, for example, anything that RT has ever said about the shooting down of MH17. In Trumpland “fake news” is a term that essentially boils down to anything unflattering of him or his policies, or anything at all to do with his campaign and how it was assisted by the Russian government.
The problem is that while the term “fake news” is being abused in the United States, it is undermining efforts (which do contain specifics) to fight actual fake news.
While people carelessly accuse the BBC of being involved in propaganda, the long term effect is to neutralize the word beyond recognizable meaning, thus undermining efforts to counter real propaganda.
While people mindlessly mutter about the mainstream media, they’re playing into the hands of those who seek to subvert the norms of western civilization. Those norms include a free, but well regulated, press; as well as libel and defamation laws that can be relied on by injured parties because of impartial courts. This is the reality of the traditional press in developed nations, to think anything else is foolish.
When we imagine a place where the press freedoms are few, where no regulation exists, and there are no reliable arbiters of the law, we can see where the attacks on the “mainstream media” might develop and we understand why this is such a commonly attacked effigy on RT.
To think that journalists across the world are being instructed to follow a common narrative, but that not one of them speaks out against it, and that somehow these underhand instructions to all of these journalists are kept secret, is an amazingly stupid idea. Yet some people believe it. It’s not harmless.
As long as people think this narrative is real, efforts to fight the real scourges of actual fake news and actual propaganda are being damaged. The result can be deadly.
