Post-Fact Politics: Reviewing the History of Fake News and Propaganda
December 6, 2016
Post-Fact Politics: Reviewing the History of Fake News and Propaganda
by Anthony DiMaggio
Much has been made of the Washington Post’s recent “investigation,” published in late November by reporter Craig Timberg, that implicates countless U.S. media outlets in disseminating Russian government propaganda. The Post’s attack on leftist alternative media included outlets such as Truthdig, Black Agenda Report, and CounterPunch, as well as conservative outlets like Drudge Report. The story, as CounterPunch readers may know, draws on “research” from several organizations, including one called “PropOrNot,” an anonymous group of “computer scientists, statisticians, national security professionals, journalists, and political activists, dedicated to identifying propaganda – particularly Russian propaganda targeting a U.S. audience.” The group claims to have identified hundreds of websites that “qualify as Russian propaganda outlets,” reaching millions of Americans.
There are numerous legitimate criticisms of PropOrNot’s claims put forward by skeptics, as seen in recent reports by The Intercept and CounterPunch, among others. The Intercept’s piece focused on the lack of transparency of PropOrNot, considering the refusal of its members to be identified by name or present concrete evidence that various media are in secret collusion with the Ruskies. CounterPunch’s Joshua Frank spotlighted the amateurish, bush-league nature of PropOrNot, after pointing out to the group’s representative CounterPunch’s history of criticizing Russia, upon which it was promptly removed from PropOrNot’s list of propaganda pushers. Revealingly, PropOrNot indicated to Frank that they would also consider removing other progressive media sources from the list if representatives of those outlets contacted them to complain. It’s nice to know PropOrNot has such impeccable investigative standards for identifying propaganda.
But my piece is not primarily about PropOrNot. And it’s not about other mainstream or liberal media stories published by National Public Radio and The Intercept alleging that fake news is being disseminated by savvy American business elites, right-wing Trump-allied media organizations, and random Facebook users. No, my concern is far broader, because I fear that something very important is getting lost in this narrow fixation on fake news. My point is simple: fake news is nothing new. We have long lived in a post-truth society, with political propaganda dominating the “mainstream” news media, and contributing to disinformation campaigns aimed at manipulating public opinion. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky documented the propagandistic elements of the news media in detail in their seminal Manufacturing Consent (MC) nearly three decades ago. Other works preceding MC – such as Herbert Schiller’s The Mind Managers – also emphasized the efforts of political, economic, and media elites to manipulate public preferences via propaganda.
I’ve devoted my academic career to spotlighting propaganda, writing numerous books on the subject. So it’s more than a little disturbing when I see references to “propaganda” in the corporate press that completely obscure the broader role that manipulation plays in reinforcing domestic political-economic elites’ agendas and in padding the pocketbooks of corporate media conglomerates. Empirical media studies have documented since the 1970s the overwhelming government dominance of the news. Government control of the news is uncontroversially labeled propaganda in dictatorships like North Korea and the old Soviet Union, but when journalists working for private media corporations willingly roll over for government interests, allowing them to monopolize newspapers and the airwaves in favor of their own agendas, we call it “objectivity.” So it is in an effort to add some sanity to our modern discussion of propaganda that I draw CounterPunch readers’ attention to the longstanding existence of fake news propaganda in U.S. media.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/06/post-fact-politics-reviewing-the-history-of-fake-news-and-propaganda/
