Winning the Information War
cepa.org
cepa.org
The news these days is all about "fake news" and how we need stop it, but none of those information outlets seem to acknowledge the bias and falsehood in their own reporting. That's not to say there isn't terrible misinformation on the internet, but all this media buzz regard it seems like an overreaction which could lead down a dangerous road of censorship itself. If the goal really is to advance the truth, then shouldn't the best way of doing that be to focus on telling the truth rather than on silencing those not?
When ever I hear journalists saying we can stop misinformation by quashing all those other journalists telling lies, all I can think of is soldiers insisting we can reach world peace if only we could just kill all our "war-mongering" enemies.
It's a problem now why? Maybe because people didn't do what major media wanted and this is alarming?
The fact there is a such an outcry about "fake news" lately bothers me a lot more than the existence of fake news.
It's a clever tactic, tainted only by the fact that it's obviously driven by fear of the upcoming Trump presidency. Nobody's buying it, though. It was already used as an excuse to delist valid right wing sites from the internet. The public outcry forced them to reverse the decision in less than a day. This will blow over in another week, replaced by the next fear-driven tactic to regain power over the populace.
A lot of people, for instance, believed that story that was going around that the Pope endorsed Trump shortly before the election, or that story that an FBI agent who was investigating Clinton had been found dead along with his wife in a very suspicious apparent murder/suicide.
The site that the Pope story came from said right on its "About" page that it "[...] is a fantasy news website", and "Most articles on wtoe5news.com are satire or pure fantasy". That part doesn't get tweeted or facebooked, though, so quickly gets lost.
The source for the FBI agent murder/suicide was a newspaper that doesn't even exist. All it had was a fairly new website with a handful of fake stories and a bunch of broken links.
It used to be that "fake news" didn't spread far. If the National Enquirer proclaimed that the government was using semen from a captured Bigfoot to artificially inseminate human women in order to try to breed super soldiers, for instance, it would amuse people who say the paper in the checkout line at the supermarket, and a few readers would believe it, and maybe tell their friends in person, but it wouldn't go much farther.
With social media I bet you could get a large number of people to actually believe that there is a Bigfoot semen based super soldier program.
Getting news from social media is the equivalent of in the pre-internet days getting news from idle chat at parties and overheard conversations of the people around you. We all did get news that way back then...but we also subscribed to newspapers and news magazines, and listened to radio and TV news, and would match up what we overheard with those sources, and for the important things could figure out what was likely true.
If there is one common thread in the Kremlin’s many narratives it is the use of conspiratorial discourse and a strategic use of disinformation to trash the information space, break trust, increase polarization and undermine the public space for democratic debate: This is a war on information rather than an “information war.”
Anne Applebaum and the other contributes to this piece blame the Russians for fracturing the agreement on truth in the West but I feel it much more likely that the Washington Post (for whom Applebaum writes) and the State Department (among others) have a much greater share of the blame in the mistrust. Case in point, the huge number of stories in Washington Post promoting the second Iraq war. Or more recently, the Hillary promotion and Trump slamming campaign. I saw a very apt name for Washington Post in a comment section "Pravda on the Potomac".
They really should clean up their act and stop the (obviously not working at this point) propaganda before pointing fingers.
Claims of propaganda, rather than simply disagreeing with your political beliefs, require a bit more than simple say so. Otherwise, one could just point the finger back at you.
I assume the examples you're referring to both the Hillary support and the Trump bashing, which are simply political stances not propaganda... since if you have to go back 13 years for broken trust, to the Iraq war, which was supported primarily by NeoCons in the White House and DNI (not State), and based on leaks to almost every newspaper and politician of the time in the terrified aftermath of 9/11, it's not much to stand on for claims of Propaganda. Colin Powell (of State) was the only one who even bothered to apologize for believing the intelligence presented to him. Trump certainly agreed on live TV.
Frankly, I thought the evidence edit-against- for war (faked bio-warfare photos, questionable yellow cake, etc) was pretty weak, but it's not like it not like WaPo was some amazing outlier.
Pravda on the Potomac :-) Ahhh... for the days when Zerohedge discussed economics.
As for the Washington Post, I don't think it is always correct, but I do believe that it usually is sincerely trying to get at the truth.
Good intentions are neither good outcomes nor good conduct. Incentives seem to trump intentions, and seem poorly aligned with the public interest.
Is this WP version[1] less bad than the LA Times version[2]? Yes. And it's in the entertainment, not the business section. But they still published it. And to be fair to the author, "Hollywood" is good at this game, and regularly suckers some journalist, sometimes quite senior ones, into doing one of these. But they still published it. And to be fair to Hollywood, a former Obama White House official described them as "extremists are people who talk only among themselves". But they still published it.
"Pravda on the Potomac" and "it usually is sincerely trying to get at the truth", do not seem necessarily inconsistent observations.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/with-chan... [2] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-copyright-office-20161...
That is the goal they seek isn't it?
Being candid about the abuse of information on all sides is a REQUIRED first step to discussing Information Warfare in a sensible way. Not doing it immediately introduces cherrypicking, and gives the impression to readership that there is one-sided activity that requires a one-sided response. This itself is disinformation.
I'm not sure we could expect anything else from a career propagandist (Peter Pomerantsev, the author) and think trying to start conceptualizing the propaganda war by reading in some serious way such particularly strategized output from a propagandist is a poor manner to start.
I don't love all the author's work, but it's hard to claim he doesn't know about modern disinformation or hasn't suggested that both sides do it.
https://pando.com/2015/05/17/neocons-2-0-the-problem-with-pe...
Disinformation exposes weaknesses in trust, it does not create them.
Keep in mind the phrase, "Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you read", was popular before I was excreted from the bowels of the mid-20th century.
The term "yellow journalism" pre-dates the 20th century.
And while we can find some admirable examples where journalism discarded its proclaimed "focus on facts" to support a noble cause, and accelerate progress, a price had to be paid sometime down the road.
Because once you break trust on the facts, people will naturally question when you will break trust on intent.
For example the criminal next door who has evaded $100k in fines for dangerous antisocial activities (ie drove above the speed limit to work for the last 10 years) can't be trusted!