Note: If you are convinced the West is in an information war with Russia and losing it, this post is not for you. At best, you will think what-about-ism reigns supreme in these few paragraphs, at worst, you'll go full Louise Mensch on the basement dwelling mouse tamer (computer mouse, that is) responsible for the post. If this describes you, please head over to Disney.com for a more sedate web experience.
The blogster hates the term "information war", despises its emotional appeal, the alert and fear implication, the social us-versus-them-if-you-are-not-with-us connotation. Sure, the English speaking world has been using the term war with enough gusto to dilute the meaning a bit, but still.
As bad as the term itself is, it is made worse by the fact that the 'battle lines' are less than clear. Many politicians and pundits use it in the context of West versus Russia, some include 'former Soviet Union', others include the terrorist threat du jour, so Al Quaeda a decade ago, ISIS now. Of course, there is the unbelievably gross InfoWars website with its New World Order paranoia, originally for domestic US consumption, now gone worldwide - because it is the worldwide web after all.
Add a large dose of 'fake news' and generic social media hype, and you have a concept that can mean almost anything you want it to mean as long as you can sustain the rhetoric of fear and threat.
The blogster believes there is really nothing fundamentally new, but that coaching traditional propaganda and lies as "information war" can serve to increase the perceived threat and aggression to levels that can led to physical violence or, at least, to increased domestic censorship to 'defend' against purported aggression.
Some articles screaming information war are relatively benign. Were it not for this awful phrase, this article in the Seattle Times would be a good read. Unlike others that simply repeat one or two tired stories, the article does have some solid research to it. Yet, having 'losing the information war' as its foregone conclusion is counter productive, or even dangerous if you look at the sheer volume of alarming writings and reports.
Add pieces like Marie Le Pen's Troll Armies and others, and normal news consumers may well feel under threat by sinister, vaguely Russian controlled forces.
Yet, if you just dig a little bit deeper, all the characteristics and stories associated with the current 'information war' have been there for a long time, just take the Wikipedia entry on disinformation.
So, what is going on?
Social media, yes. But that's not all.
The March 2017 publication on the Information Battle of the governments of the former Soviet Union gives some insight:
If we are suffering from a deficit in factual or evidence-based reporting, it is certainly not a new phenomenon. The British tabloid press will hardly be remembered as champions of truth-telling. For decades, media critics have lamented what they saw as a growing tendency among the press to privilege gossip over facts, sensationalism over serious news, and spectacle over informative reporting.
But the same cannot be said of their broadcasting counterparts in the UK, and especially the BBC which continues to enjoy an unrivalled reputation for quality, accuracy and balance. According to Ofcom’s most recent data on news consumption, BBC television news is ranked higher than all of its competitors in this respect, with 61 percent of its users considering it both an accurate and trustworthy news source (compared to 45 percent for CNN and 35 percent for RT).
In the global news market, the longstanding Anglo-American hegemony established through CNN and BBC World was first challenged by the rise of Qatar-based network Al Jazeera in the early 2000s.79 The channel’s early success owed much to its reputation as a source of alternative frames for the US-led War on Terror, and the reactionary responses of US political elites seemed to underline its disruptive potential.80 But it was the launch of its English language channel in 2006, fronted by established and respected western journalists, which marked the most significant disruption to the BBC-CNN duopoly.
What Al Jazeera exposed in both the BBC and CNN was not lies or propaganda in a crude sense, nor an exclusive preoccupation with issues that conformed to a Western ideological agenda, nor the omission of critical perspectives of Western governments and ideals. But they did expose a tendency towards selection of stories and facts that, on balance, aligned with a Western neoliberal consensus and definition of world problems. It was into this fracturing and polarising global agenda that RT emerged with an explicit mission to cover issues and perspectives marginalised by the so-called ‘mainstream media’.
What this really boils down to is the loss of dominance, and it is this loss that is compounded by the internet and social media in particular.
To quote Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State:
“Let’s talk straight realpolitik,” Clinton said. “We are in a huge competition” for global influence and global markets. She described countries circling around huge new oil discoveries in the south Pacific. “China is there every day, figuring out how they’re going to come in behind us, come in under us,” she said.
She also said the U.S. had to do more to communicate its values and spread its influence to the rest of the world through government-backed media, such as Al-Hurrah Television, which broadcasts in the Arab world.
“We are engaged in an information war and we are losing that war,” she said. China and Russia have started multi- language television networks, she said, even as the U.S. cuts back in this area. “We are paying a big price” for dismantling international communications networks after the end of the Cold War, Clinton said.
Her last paragraph is as much an acknowledgement that - in the eyes of the governing elites - information was a weapon long before the current wailing, and that the West was pretty darn good at using it.
Guess what, the West is still good at it. From the highly respected Austrian newspaper publisher who worked for the CIA to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein's astounding revelations about the CIA and the Media, to the German intelligence agency BND bragging about "fixing" unfavorable reporting after the 1968 invasion of Prague by the Soviets to the media campaign around the Iraq War, the West has played the game well.
No upstanding western publication has used 'information war' to describe these measures.
As a former professor at a university in Munich, Germany, once succinctly put it: Information always has to to with in formation.*
Rumors, lies, omissions, and verbal abuse do not go away if they are censored and disappear from public view.
To the blogster, one big problem with the 'information war' hype is that all sorts of alleged or real events or lies are lumped together. Isn't there a difference between a thousand or even one hundred thousand people on Facebook claiming a mass shooting was a hoax and government propaganda accusing another country of crimes against humanity or use of weapons of mass destruction?
The first may cause pain for survivors and families. And this can and will be used by otherwise reasonable democratic parties for legislation that can create a pathway to censorship.
The second will kill hundreds of thousands or more.
The blogster still prefers to see them. Dealing with numbnuts after a disaster is doable. Being steered by lies into supporting wars is evil. Being able to find out later that these lies had the impact they had is priceless.
* Roth, Universitaet der Bundeswehr, Muenchen
No comments:
Post a Comment