Fake news and the MSM

Donald Tusk, President of the EU Council, wondered this week about the ‘special place in hell … for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

In Dante’s Inferno the deepest circle in hell is reserved for traitors. Sounds about right for people who lure their nation down a road with no idea where it leads.

There was, inevitably, an outcry in response to Tusk’s comments. But an EU source confirmed that he stood by his words. “He remains of the view that while the truth may be more painful, it is always more useful.”

That’s not just true, it’s far more significant than the “special place in hell” remark it followed. The truth isn’t always comfortable. Indeed, it’s often challenging.

That’s something that needs to be said and repeated . Especially today. There is a spirit in the air that says “only what I want to hear is true”. The spirit is entirely non-partisan, embracing both left and right. Corbynistas in Britain or Trumpists in the US are as eager as each other to denounce the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media) for peddling ‘fake news’. But when you look more closely, you find that what they’re really objecting to is news that makes them uncomfortable.

There is, for instance, an inclination in certain circles of the left to feel that the government of Venezuela deserves unqualified backing because it proclaims itself to be Socialist, and in such circles, merely to make the claim is enough to win support. It isn’t true of everyone. Emily Thornberry, for instance, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman recently pointed out that, while calling himself a socialist, President Maduro has betrayed every principle of socialism.

Emily Thornberry gave a thoughtful and thought-provoking speech on Venezuela
and, remarkably, the Guardian reported on it fairly and extensively

It was interesting reading the report of her speech, in that MSM outlet the Guardian, which gave it balanced and extensive coverage. For instance, she argued, in my view courageously and convincingly that, for all Maduro’s failings, it was wrong to recognise the legitimacy of the self-proclamation as interim president of his opponent Juan Guaidó:

We need to give them time, and that offer has been made internally and externally. We need to ensure that happens – that is the best way to proceed, rather than to suddenly say: ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough. We recognise X. We do not recognise Y any more.’ It’s not the way to treat another country, even a country in as desperate a situation as Venezuela.

Such good sense and moderation isn’t universal in the Labour Party. Many in Labour still claim that the desperate state of Venezuela is all the fault of US sanctions. They refuse to accept that Venezuela is an oil economy and has faced sanctions for a far shorter time than Cuba, which does at least manage to feed its people and provide them with healthcare.

But these people don’t read MSM papers like the Guardian. Instead, they read outlets like vezenuelaanalysis.com which tell us that what is happening in Venezuela is an attempted coup against Maduro. And what is this source of information? It’s an online paper founded with money from the Venezuelan government and which claims to be supported today entirely by its readers – though we don’t know who those readers are. A recent reposting of a link to one of these stories included the comment “You won’t see this in Western media”. Well, that’s true. And I would hope not. Because the media I read – the Guardian, the Independent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others who aspire to professional journalism – don’t take their information from sources whose background is unclear, whose standards are unknown, and whose bias is obvious.

But the beauty of this Venezuelan paper is that it tells its readers what they want to read. And to many people that’s what matters today: not to learn from what they read, as I did from Thornberry’s remarks, but to have their faith confirmed. Because they aren’t looking for evidence, they are driven by belief. And that seems to be a deeply ingrained need in many circles today.

Look at the anti-vaxxer movement. It is having some success, with vaccination rates too low in more and more countries. But somehow anti-vaxxers see no connection between those low rates and the rising numbers of infections, and even deaths, from entirely preventable diseases.

We even see believers in a flat Earth growing in numbers, even though in one instance at least, their very attempts to prove their faith depends on systems based on the Earth being round.

There’s a widespread thirst for belief, not knowledge. Independent of evidence.

The other end of the political spectrum is entirely symmetrical. In the US, the National Enquirer is trying to pressurise Jeff Bezos over some compromising texts and images a hacker has passed them. There can be differing views over whether or not Bezos should have sent those messages. What, however, seems clear is that he is being targeted because he’s the owner of the Washington Post or, as Trump calls it, the Amazon Washington Post (Bezos is also the founder of Amazon).

Here’s the Tweet in which Trump reacted to the first announcement of the revelations about Bezos:

So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!

What doesn’t Trump like about the Washington Post? In the same way as the Maduro fans who can’t cope with Guardian, he hates the fact that the Post sometimes publishes information that isn’t – how shall I put this? – entirely flattering about him.

Both the Maduro supporters and the Trump fans reject the ‘mainstream media’ that sometimes challenges their beliefs with evidence – because those pesky publications insist on standards which involve such boring things as confirmation of sources and careful editing of material for accuracy. That’s not to say they never make mistakes – they certainly do – but it does mean they don’t just spew out propaganda.

No good if you’re flat earther. And the anti-vaxxers, Trump worshippers and Corbyn cult adepts aren’t much different from the flat earthers. Belief trumps information. The truth, as Tusk made clear this week, can sometimes be more painful, and they don’t want that pain.

But the truth’s also much more useful. As I found from Thornbery, in the Guardian this week, when she opened my eyes to another way of seeing things.

A salutary experience which, sadly, the true believers deny themselves.

Emily Thornberry and respect for voters: something they have to earn

The news in Britain is dominated by the offence that Labour MP Emily Thornberry did or didn’t cause by tweeting a picture of a house in Rochester with two flags of St George down the front and a white van parked outside.

The Tweet that caused all the stir

Most people would probably have trouble understanding how this could be offensive at all. You have to take into account that “white van man” is a bit of an emblematic figure in British – perhaps just English – society. He tends to be white and working class – vans are after all useful for carrying tools for manual labour. 

It probably won’t come as a surprise that “white van man” is not an expression generally used to endear, or to express admiration. It can be a way of displaying disdain of the working class, and the white working class in particular.

Flags of St George are not unrelated. That red cross on a white background is the flag of England, separate from the United Kingdom. You tend to see it most during those brief periods between the England football team inspiring shortlived hope in some international competition, and its crashing out of that competition.

It’s true that in between competitions, the flag has some unfortunate connotations. Firstly, it too is more heavily used in the working class than in other sectors of society. And “English” is something one can only be by birth: anyone naturalised is British, but not necessarily English, Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish.

Today there are increasing numbers of black or other ethnic-minority Englishmen. But for the moment, Englishness is still predominantly white.

The photo was taken in Rochester, where Thornberry had gone to campaign for Labour in last week’s by-election. The election was triggered by the sitting Tory MP resigning to fight the seat again for UKIP, the seriously harder right wing party that believes Britain’s problems are chiefly caused by immigrants and the EU – which is in any case responsible for much of our immigration.

Thornberry’s photo might imply that she believes the occupants of the house to be from a poor background and perhaps a little attracted to racist views. UKIP denies it, but its xenophobia is hard to distinguish from racism, and a great many spokespeople from the party have voiced racist ideas (alongside homophobic, Islamophobic, or anti-feminist ones).

So was Thornerry being dismissive towards that particular family? Was she writing them off as UKIP supporters unworthy of her attention as a Labour MP?

Certainly, her party leader (and mine), Ed Miliband decided that she had been unduly dismissive and – dismissed her. She had to resign the shadow Attorney General’s post she held in his Opposition team.

Some find that unfair. Thornberry was the first MP to back Miliband’s leadership bid. Her loyalty to the leader is unquestioned.

My feeling is that Miliband’s reaction was way over the top. Thornberry shouldn’t have put that Tweet out there. But Miliband should have said just that and let the matter drop. Instead, by declaring himself furious at her behaviour, he’s made all the talk of the last few days about Labour, instead of being about the Tories’ failure to hold the seat (yes, UKIP won) and the growing threat that UKIP represents.

Time for the Labour leadership to raise its aim

Curiously, Thornberry was brought up on a Council Estate, in modest circumstances, so she actually knows the world she’s said to have disdained rather better than most Labour MPs. It’s true that now she’s a barrister and an MP, living in – indeed representing – a part of London (Islington) which Tony and Cherie Blair once graced with their presence, until they made so much money that they could move to an even more exclusive neighbourhood. She’s not much exposed to “white van man” these days. Even so, she does know him and I’m sure understands him.

More to the point, I find it objectionable that she was accused of not having behaved with sufficient respect towards a voter. Now that’s code. Labour at the moment is trying to stem the loss of working class support to UKIP by, firstly, aping some of UKIP’s policies, such as getting tough on immigration, not realising that anyone who wants that kind of behaviour will vote for the real thing, not the imitation; and secondly, by putting up a false front of respect towards UKIP voters, as though an appearance of deference might draw them back.

Thornberry is being criticised for not having shown enough respect.

But respect isn’t an automatic entitlement. It’s something you have to earn.

Now, Owen Jones recently pointed out in the Guardian that “according to research by the academic Matthew Goodwin, 81% of UKIP supporters believe ‘big business takes advantage of ordinary people’; a slim majority want the government to redistribute income; and they overwhelmingly agree ‘there is one law for the rich and one for the poor’.”

And they believe that a party entirely bankrolled by big business, run by a man who used to be stockbroker and is on record calling for the NHS to be privatised, will do something to address those concerns?

I can’t help feeling that these views either mask something more fundamental, a xenophobia bordering on racism that UKIP expresses for them. Otherwise, I can only assume such voters have simply made no effort to understand the internal contradictions of their beliefs.

In a free society, their point of view deserves to be tolerated, and argued against in a civilised and peaceful way. But respected? What on earth’s to respect there?