Fake news and ‘RussiaGate’ discourses: Propaganda in the post-truth era

Fake news has long been an issue. Even the term ‘fake news’ is itself a couple of hundred years old. It is synonymous with many others, including ‘propaganda’, ‘disinformation’, ‘information operations’, ‘perception management’, and ‘organized persuasive communication’.

Current popularity of the term is due to the charge issued by President Trump against CNN in January 2017 when he chastised the broadcast channel for its coverage of the ‘Steele Dossier’. The CNN had proceeded with this report upon learning (perhaps even being informed by the FBI) of the FBI’s briefing for the President-elect about the dossier. The Steele dossier, or parts of it, had been circulating within Washington for months and was about to be published (without permission) by the online news site Buzzfeed.

The dossier alleged Trump Campaign connections and possible collusion with Russians and made the astonishing, historically unprecedented claim that Trump was, in effect, a ‘Manchurian candidate’ nurtured by Russia. It was compiled by Orbis, a private investigation agency founded by a British former MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, who at one time had worked for MI6 in Moscow and in the early 1990s headed up the Russia desk for MI6 in London. His company was contracted to compile the report by another agency, Fusion GPS, which was, in turn, contracted by a firm of attorneys working on behalf of the Democratic National Campaign and Hillary Clinton. The dossier may have been influential in the compilation of the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (sometimes acclaimed as the consensus of all 17 US intelligence agencies, but actually a report by a hand-picked team from the CIA, FBI, and NSA that disclaims provability), signed off by the then Director for National Intelligence, James Clapper, and which was published earlier that same month alleging Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump derided the CNN reporting as ‘Fake News!’ Was CNN merely doing its job in reporting the publication of such significant allegations – severely damaging to the President-elect – or should it have invested (much) more in the investigative reporting required to evaluate extraordinary claims of a source that was tied to the Democratic Party, a source (Christopher Steele) whose professional expertise in espionage was embedded in practices of deception? I argue that the ensuing saga of ‘RussiaGate’ which still rages to the present time is itself an example of ‘fake news’. Why? Because much of it is based on allegations which have yet to be proven (and some of them, I believe, are simply false) and yet which are often assumed by media to be dependable. Second, it is misleading. The attention that this discourse gives to ‘RussiaGate’ suggests that the phenomenon is actually significant, unusual, and important for major issues that affect large numbers of ordinary people. It is none of these things: actual instances of Russian ‘collusion’ and ‘meddling’ are relatively insignificant when contrasted with western-based subversion of both social and legacy media by political, intelligence, and commercial agencies – of which Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Limited (SCL) were the most notorious in press coverage of 2018, not least because of their close association with leading figures in the Trump Campaign and, through SCL, with the intelligence and defense establishments of both the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as with the oil and gas industries.

‘RussiaGate’ discourse is generally awarded little to no adequate historical context, and so distracts attention from the substantial proven history of US ‘meddling’ in other countries’ elections (which I do not have the space to unpack here), sometimes egregiously through invasion and occupation (as in Iraq 2003, when the pretexts for invasion was totally fabricated, and these fabrications were lapped up by mainstream media). ‘RussiaGate’ discourse suggests by implication that anyone concerned about the health of democracy in the United States would worry about ‘the Russians’, whereas, on the contrary, Russians should appear very low down on the list of relevant preoccupations. There are enormous challenges to the integrity of the democratic process in the United States none of which has anything to do with Russians. These include the vulnerability of voting machines to hacking. Then there are the organized efforts to ‘suppress’ voting (especially by people of color) by striking people off voting lists either because they have committed felonies or, even more outrageously, because they have names that are similar to people who have committed felonies, or who not recently voted and have failed to respond to requests for confirmation of address. Other methods of voter-suppression include reducing the hours available for voting, failing to supply functioning voting machines, and intensifying requirements for voter identification at the polls. Gerrymandering has largely removed uncertainty in US elections, with the results of 94 percent of House races being predetermined. This contributes to low turn-out, with only half of Black Americans bothering to vote. Of great concern is the ‘Citizens United’ legislation passed by the Supreme Court under former President Obama. This has opened up the US political process to vast sums of anonymous ‘dark money’ from any part of the globe, laundered through Political Action Committees (issue-oriented rather than candidate-oriented) and unaccountable if spent over 90 days prior to the election. This is all in addition to more traditional sources of lobbying, among them Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, whose foreign policies are highly questionable from the standpoint of world peace.

There are substantial indications that the discourse of ‘RussiaGate’ and allegations of Russian involvement in ‘Fake News’ production has in many ways been propelled by the machinations of US, European, and Russian intelligence agencies. It has also invited partisan coverage among ‘liberal media’ supporters of the Democratic Party (notably among mainstream media aside from Fox News, other Murdoch media, and the Sinclair chain), largely in alignment with the war industry of the military-industrial-surveillance establishment – set on a course of anti-Russian vilification since the ascent of Vladimir Putin to power in 1998 – for whom ‘RussiaGate’ is solely about Trump’s ‘collusion’ with the Russian government or Russian ‘oligarchs’ and their alleged interference with the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. They forget, among many other things, that the ‘Steele Dossier’ was contracted by the DNC and that Steele was a former MI6 agent who likely used other former agents in the compilation of his report (including Pablo Miller, who had recruited Sergei Skripal as double agent in Russia – Skripal may conceivably also have contributed).

An important topic within ‘RussiaGate’ discourse is the alleged hacking by Russian intelligence of Clinton/DNC/Podesta emails in 2016, and Democrats like to assert that the Russian government then made these emails available to Julian Assange (Assange denies this). This perspective marginalizes evidence that the hackers were not, in fact, linked to the Russian intelligence or that only one of two substantial phishing attempts was sourced to Russian intelligence, or that US intelligence had ‘planted’ traces to make it appear as though the hackers were Russian or alternatively, that the emails were leaked – not hacked – by a discontented insider (sometimes identified, without proof, as Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered), and that the leaked emails were provided to Julian Assange, for Wikileaks, through this route. A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, even claims to have participated in the transfer of the leaked material to Assange, and there have been at least two other similar claims.

It is also possible that the emails were both hacked, possibly by Russian intelligence, and also leaked by an insider. Within or close to the Trump campaign, there were many who exuded passionate interest in the emails and in whatever dirt it was anticipated they would expose about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and the DNC, and who indicated they would willingly participate in efforts to access such fertile political materiel. Among these was junior foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos was approached by Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor based in London and former director of a school of diplomacy, who informed him that the Russians were in possession of the dirt. Papadopoulos conveyed this information to the intelligence-linked Australian ambassador to London, Alexander Downer. The information passed slowly from Downer to Australian intelligence to the FBI. While it was generally assumed that Mifsud represented or was close to Russian intelligence, Julian Assange – supported by investigative journalist Elizabeth Vos – has cited evidence that would place Mifsud much closer to western intelligence. This opens the door to the possibility that the whole narrative of Russian hackers may have been cooked up between US and British intelligence with the purpose of removing Trump from power or ‘containing’ him.

Protection against such propaganda as we have experienced in this period requires much more and much better education about ‘media literacy’. Unfortunately, even in the West, which has a modest tradition of teaching about media literacy and of researching media operations, too many media teachers and researchers routinely demonstrate naivety as to the extent to which western mainstream media, and even many ‘alternative’ media (e.g. Wikipedia) are exploited by political, intelligence, and commercial powers for the purposes of deception and warfare. This is a question which needs sustained attention and I do not have the space here to do it justice. We have to understand that not only the basic principles and objectives of propaganda (or fake news) remain constant (e.g. to demonize an enemy, to develop a favorable or unfavorable image of somebody or something) but also the technologies and methodologies of propaganda (or organized persuasive communication) evolve and become much more sophisticated over time – as illustrated in the work of Cambridge Analytica and its parent SCL for GOP candidates in the Colorado races of 2014, and for later campaigns of John Bolton, Ted Cruz, and the Trump Campaign. Sophistication is also illustrated in the work of organizations such as Bell Pottinger (which among other things was contracted by the Pentagon to produce jihadist ‘beheading’ videos) or Palentir Technologies, all of these enjoying substantial connections to the security establishment and sometimes involving exploitation of social media and other big data sources for the purposes of covert micro-targeting in support of what are invariably right-wing, even fascist causes. These techniques exhibit degrees of sophistication that render the supposed interference in the 2016 campaign by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency – as alleged in the early 2018 indictments of Special Counsel Robert Mueller – laughable attempts at manipulation that appear light years behind the methods that are commonly employed in the West (by 2016, SCL had engaged in some 200 elections worldwide).

Other recent and related examples of fake news include the Western assertions, largely supported by the formal Dutch inquiry, that MH17 was shot down by Russian BUK missiles over the Donbass in 2014. These assertions were promoted to a considerable extent by an outfit, Bellingcat.com, that has since been exposed as linked to a propaganda agency (‘think tank’) – the pro-NATO Atlantic Council – with help from Ukrainian intelligence. The Dutch inquiry assumed Russian guilt by excluding it from the central investigating team, while Ukraine, whose motivation for such an act was stronger, was cast as victim, included in the team and, along with other members of the team, entitled to veto evidence. Politicization of international agencies and committees of inquiry should be anticipated and investigated, not excluded as inconceivable. Along with common and false western media assertions as to how Russia ‘seized’ Crimea in 2014 (the pro-Russian majority in Crimea voted to request Russia to annex the territory rather than suffer the privations of the anti-Russian regime that established itself by coup in Kiev earlier that year), the MH17 ‘atrocity’ narrative has been central to the escalation of hostile Western rhetoric against Russia, for the purpose, it may be assumed, of ultimate regime change in Moscow within an overarching context of hundreds of years’ competition for hegemony in EurAsia – often considered by geo-political strategists as the key to global empire – further exacerbated by the comparative success of China’s One Belt, One Road initiative.

Similarly, western mainstream media accounts have unerringly privileged Washington claims of use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime against the western-supported and anti-democratic jihadist groups that have sought to destabilize Syria from even before 2012: East Ghouta in 2013, Khan Sheikhoon 2017, and Dhouma in 2018. Many credible sources have debunked these claims empirically, showing either that there were no chemical weapons (as in Dhouma), or that they were deployed by western-backed Jihadist agencies, not by Assad (as in East Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoon). In the case of western press coverage of the Syrian crisis, one has to be highly skeptical as to the degree of dependence (in the absence of strong independent media reporting strength on the ground) on deeply problematic news sources such as the White Helmets and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, organizations that are funded by western governments or government-linked agencies as components of sophisticated disinformation campaigns.

Contributing equally to the West’s long-unfolding anti-Russian campaign has been reporting of the ‘Skripal affair’ early in 2018. Mainstream western media overwhelmingly supported false British government claims of Russian responsibility even before there could possibly have been evidence to support such claims. It was false to claim that the A-234 (‘Novichok’) organo-phosphate compound could only have been produced in Russia. The Czech Republic later claimed to have researched Novichoks. Iranian scientists have published research on Novichoks. The United States had been instrumental in previously persuading the UN agency OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) not to include Novichoks on its prescribed list. The United States was instrumental in decommissioning the Novichok production facility in Uzbekistan in the 1990s. Britain’s Porton Down is also likely to have researched Novichoks – claiming not that they had never done so, only that such an agent could not possibly have escaped their facility. There is even room to doubt whether the Skripals were actually poisoned by the A-234 compound or whether this was applied to a sample after the Skripals were exposed to a less harmful agent. Equally false was the claim that the compound was ‘military-grade’ and fatal (expert scientists have told the media that graduate students could produce Novichoks in a university laboratory; and the Skripals survived). The media failed to exhaust – or were deterred by D-Notice censorship – possible connections between Sergei Skripal and Christopher Steele (author of the ‘Steele Dossier’), and between Skripal and his former MI6 handler Pablo Miller (a fellow resident of Salisbury, also the home of Porton Down). Equally absent was media research on the potential links between the Skripal poisoning and the sale by the former head of the Soviet Novichock program, Leonid Rink, of A-234 vials to Russian Mafiosi in 1995 (one of which was used in the murder of a banker in 1996). Such an old sample would likely have had a far less potent impact. Equally false was the British claim that only the Russian government could possibly have had a motive to assassinate Skripal. The Russian government had imprisoned Skripal for several years before his release to Britain in a spy-swop; why did they not assassinate him then, and why wait over a decade to do so? (I deal with the subsequent evolution of this strange narrative in later versions of this article).