Since Brexit and the election of President Trump, there has been much discussion in the Mainstream Media (MSM) about “Fake News” and how it was used to influence the unsuspecting people of Britain and America to vote the “wrong way”.
In this article, I explore the phenomena of “Fake News “ and will show that rather than being a recent invention of the alt-right it is the de facto default position of much of our news, as it is presented to the public, by the MSM.
So confident are the BBC at identifying “Fake News” that they have produced a handy guide “How to report fake news to social media” and they have run an article on “Fake News” for children through the CBBC channel. The Guardian has had several articles on Fake News.
The definition of “Fake News” promoted by the MSM seems to be a simple.
“ This story was made up, or, more sinisterly, there is an allegation that a foreign power is engaging in generating “Fake News” to influence the democratic choices of the free world”.
Although to suggest that Western governments do not try to influence the governments and policies of foreign powers is absurd, as this has always been the raison d’être of diplomacy. However, whilst all this may well be true, it is my contention that “Fake News” is much, much more than this and is indeed endemic within the MSM. It is my assertion that most news is in fact “Fake News”, other than information that is rigorously and unambiguously provable in a mathematical sense of the word “proof”, in that it is news that you do not agree with.
Here are some examples of “Fake News” techniques that are deployed by the MSM to promote, what I would see as, their mainly progressive and statist agenda:
“Fake News” by Commission
Someone has deliberately made this news up e.g. the apocryphal, “Freddy Starr ate my hamster” lies at one end of this spectrum but a small publicity event by a celebrity or organisation, which is then uncritically promoted by the MSM, lies at the other. A news outlet may report on the actions of an organisation such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies, thereby providing an anchor for a supportive news story promoting a leftwing perspective. As far back as 2011 The Spectator published a leader stating that “‘institutes’ funded by research grants (which means, usually, tax money) will always argue for more expensive meddling by the state and that the Institute for Fiscal Studies was “the most striking example” of this.
“Fake News” by Omission:
An incident or situation is ignored because it doesn’t fit to the prevailing narrative of the news outlet. The rape crisis in Sweden or the recent and ongoing riots in France are often cited as an example of “Fake News” by omission.
“Fake News” by Collusion
“A third of UK lives on inadequate income, says think tank” is an article based on a report that uses a definition of inadequate income that includes couples earning £38,000 pa! A think tank produces a report and the media then highlights this information. Often the providence of the think-tank is ignored but is given spurious gravitas. Alternatively, a Social Science department will produce qualitative, self-referential research and this is given uncritical publicity. The output from other think tanks are ignored or attacked at launch.
So invidious is “Fake News” by collusion that a successful think-tank who continually produces evidence that goes against the progressive/statist narrative will be neutralized by the creation of a mirror image think tank but with an alternate and often similar name. For example Migration Watch (launched 2001 and funded solely by donations from the public) was particularly effective at attacking the open borders policy of the Labour Government and achieved a high degree of credibility even from its opponents. The subsequent rise to prominence of Migration Observatory launched in 2011 within Oxford University and funded from the public purse that promote the benefits of migration was not, in my opinion, coincidental. One of Migration Observatory’s key funders is the Charity “Unbound Philanthropy” who openly promote a globalist agenda of open door immigration.
“Fake News” by Framing
When progressive ideas/ideals are attacked from the right, those attacks are described using active verbs such as “rebutted” or “dismissed” whereas when small government ideals/ideas are attacked from those of a statist persuasion these are described using passive verbs such as “defended” or the charge is “denied”.
E.g. “Trump tries to explain remark about Sweden amid confusion” BBC; or “ The Brexit gamble “ Guardian, both 20th Feb 2017.
A common technique deployed by the BBC involves a media package on a government initiative being prefaced by an attack on the proposition by the statist opposition even before the launch of the proposal is aired.
“Fake News” by Prominence/Prioritisation
Here the MSM chooses only those stories which support their agenda. At best this is due to confirmation bias within the newsroom, at worst and conspiratorially, is this being driven by embedded organisations such as Common Purpose? There is a galaxy of newsworthy articles that arrive in the newsroom on a daily basis. Only those articles that can be used to promote the progressive agenda are selected. For example, it may be that hundreds of “black on black” knife attacks occur every year, whereas a “white on black” attack, whilst significantly less common, can be promoted as a “Racist attack” which can be then used to drive through social change in line with the statists’ agenda.
Alternatively, the MSM may focus on the tragic death of a single child on a single day so as to promote a particular agenda, ignoring the sixteen thousand other children under five who died that same day somewhere on Planet Earth of disease, malnutrition, war etc.
“Fake News” by Distraction
This technique is deployed by the BBC when an event is too large to ignore but runs counter to the progressive narrative. I call this the “Oh look! A squirrel!” technique.
“Fake News” by Crowding Out.
Undue prominence is given to peripheral news items rather than spend time on a substantive event that runs against the progressive narrative, thereby crowding the story out and denying it the appropriate airtime. Yesterday, Monday 20th February 2017 there was an excellent example of this “Fake News” technique when the significant and welcome news that Amazon had announced five thousand jobs were being created in the UK, in graduate level STEM industries (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics). This was not supposed to happen under Brexit according to the remoaning narrative of the MSM, so was ‘crowded out’ by the BBC on Radio 4. The BBC placed more emphasis in the morning news on the fact that two UKIP Branch Chairmen had resigned in Liverpool, which had suddenly become much more pertinent because of the Stoke by-election (irony alert!).
“Fake News” by Tone
A newsreader can change the meaning of a news article or cast a dubious slur on an individual by the way he delivers the news package merely from the tone and emphasis they place on a word or phrase. President Trump recently alluded to this in his now famous Press conference (Feb 16th 2017)
Organisational culture is invisible when viewed from within the institution. There is a prevailing zeitgeist within any newsroom and an unconscious, let alone conscious, bias is inevitable. This is acceptable within news organisations with an open approach to their political bias. However, diversity of opinion is needed within the newsrooms of organisations who portray themselves as unprejudiced purveyors of the News and are funded by taxation i.e. the BBC. It would be interesting to know how many BBC journalists are sympathetic to President Trump or who voted to leave the European Union and support Brexit. Indeed it is my suspicion that the BBC newsroom for example would, at best, have a small minority of individuals who voted Conservative, an overwhelming majority of LibDem and Labour supporters and none who voted UKIP.
So, why now the sudden interest in “Fake News” by the MSM? It is my contention that with the disintermediation of news brought about by the advent of social media, the stranglehold of the news agenda that the MSM has enjoyed since the invention of the printing press has come to an end.
The MSM no longer gets to filter and pasteurise the News, they are now merely several news channels amongst a constellation of alternative channels and it is reacting, as any vested interest group threatened by a disruptive technology reacts, with fear, threats and a gasping incomprehension of the new technological landscape. This was beautifully encapsulated in the recent and yet already famous discussion between Sebastian Gorka President Trump’s aide and BBC Evan Davis on the flagship news programme Newsnight, where Gorka explained unequivocally that,
“We are not going to put up with distortions from people who believe that they have a monopoly of the truth simply because they have a sixty-year-old masthead above them”.
And so, in summary, it is my assertion that, apart from clear fabrications, “Fake News” is just news that you don’t agree with, and the MSM, the progressives and the establishment are just going to have to “suck it up”, just as readers and viewers with a less statist perspective than the purveyors of legacy MSM have had to endure since the mid 1960s.
They don’t know they’re doing it even when they’re commenting on it! Example: BBC reporter on Trump’s attack on the media as being biased, agenda-driven, dishonest and corrupt – “These comments will seem absurd to some…” HA! No, you’re on your own there, matey, those comments seem bang-on truth to me and your own biased commentary has just demonstrated it.
I haven’t seen or heard a newsreader who can deliver reports in a neutral way since the 1980s and it was a dying art then. It must be a requirement for the lot of them to have attended over-acting school and all the evidence of what they learned is there: cliched walkie-talkie presentation with dramatic hand -twirling, hand-wringing, hand-waving, head-jerking (‘guru’ Norman Smith particularly good at head action); constant tense measurement between hands of an invisible object, walking through people in a crowd, a pub, a classroom even, as if no one else was there, talking, talking, talking; inflection, pitch, tone, volume of delivery all modulated for maximum emotive effect. Facial expressions change in a millisecond depending on the nature of the topic: sad, serious, solemn, sympathetic (accidents, deaths, Labour losing an election); amused, cheery, sneery, superior (someone does something ill-advised or distasteful).
Bored stiff with all their tricks, I watch the mainstream news as little as possible these days, preferring to glean the basics from teletext or a different perspective on Russia Today.
‘Fake News’?! They should know – they’ve all been producing and presenting it for at least 60 years. We need weekly deliveries of sacks of Saxa.
Thanks Pam, you`ve just delivered a master class.
I must confess I have not had your powers of observance, but on reflection I should have known some of this all along.
There used to be a chap that delivered the football results, from the tone of his voice, before you heard the actual result, home win, away win or draw (not so sure about a no score draw), as soon as you heard the number of goals for the home side you could often divine how many the opposition scored.
Roger, appreciate your comment. Did you watch that Ch4 doc last night “Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?” (Answer: NO, it IS mad, always has been, and like all mad things is highly dangerous to our basic freedoms.)
It was that old Leftie arch-hypocrite Trevor Phillips, the one who coined the oxymoronic (emphasis on the ‘moronic’) phrase ‘islamophobia’ and now pretends he’s having some kind of conversion on the road to Damascus in realising the damage he and his ilk have done to this country and its real people, our democracy, free thought and free speech. Too bloody late, Trevor, if you were really that bothered, you’d hang your head in shame, exile yourself from your cosy little Metropolitan elite chattering class bubble and go back to Jamaica or wherever.
Nigel was on it, more than a match for the egregious Phillips, which makes it worth watching in itself. But the most maddening, yet heartening part of the programme was listening to a group of mainly soppy, brain-dead university students debating what was ‘SAFE’ to say and who should be denied a platform at universities to speak about topics they found non-PC and ‘offensive’. Personally, I found all but one of these students extremely offensive to the point of giving me the heaves.
Apparently, wearing sombreros is offensive to Mexicans – no, don’t ask me to explain their twisted mind-set, you’ll have to watch it for yourself. ONE young man, the only one of the group with an intact cerebral cortex, demolished their inane arguments like a knife going through the soft, fatty matter that passed for brains in the others. Oh, how I applauded him and took comfort that there are at least SOME young people, a minority probably, that have the intellectual rigour we need for our future survival. I wish I knew his name and could congratulate him.
Let’s not forget ‘a story too good to check’ – just in case it’s not true. I love the ‘public think’ clips of film of people being asked about something in the street. They wouldn’t ask around until they get the answer they want would they?
Excellent article!
Thanks Mike
I have been subject to the selective vox pop technique myself. As a candidate in the 2015 GE I was interviewed by the Guardian. Clearly as an educated and articulate individual, my interview was not used but that of another candidate, a butcher, I believe. A good man and I’m certainly not denigrating him, but less articulate and more in tune perhaps with what and how the Guardian wished to portray UKIP members to its readership
Standard procedure. They interview then only use it if it backs what they’d like you to say or seem like or the misleading selcctive quote.
I was once interviewed by black school kids for BBC 2 I think it was or Channel Four. We got on fine and I was very frank about homelands. They understood that very well in view of colonialism. Come the programme not a second was used. Just a shot of them walking into the place where the interview was held. They were probably choked expecting to hear their points made on TV. Blatant!
My fave is if lefties say anything about the NHS it’s ‘activists fight for health care’. If the right do the same it’s ‘extremists attempt to exploit the NHS’.
I used to joke with reporters that I’d write the story for them for a fee. A computer could do it once programmed with the standard verbiage. All the stories are the same basically. Same old questions same spin.
It’s all rigged.
Heard on the World Service the other night: serious lampooning of Trump, not by a commentator but a journalist over his remark on Sweden – not a mention of that riot!
Brilliant Rob. Seems social media have some use after all.
Not sure about your references to ‘statism’ – ‘establishment’ would do!
Hi Quercus
Thanks for the Hat Tip!
I’m struggling to come up with an alternative to the redundant Left wing v Right wing dichotomy; hence the globalist/statist label. Not satisfactory I know, but any suggestions gratefully received.
Rob