RUTHFULLY YOURS

The original concept of fake news was called “disinformation,” an invention of Joseph Stalin, who coined the term. Some writings from the time indicated that the Soviets in many cases considered disinformation to be a higher intelligence priority then actual intelligence collection. This appears to be a continuing philosophy, with intelligence collection left to independent hackers and the thrust of state sponsored intelligence going to disinformation (dezinformatsiya).

Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive and cause chaos. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking defector from the Soviet bloc explained in his[i] book Disinformation that the ultimate measure of success for disinformation was when the major organs of the media coud be tricked into unknowingly propagating deliberate falsehoods.

But the Russians are far from the only ones practicing disinformation designed against political systems. The current investigations of alleged “Russian collusion” on Capitol Hill are the result of a disinformation campaign that was begun by the Democratic Party and continued when the mainstream media were fooled into publicizing the accusations as fact.

This is not to say the Russians weren’t involved. There was much made of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s “Trump Dossier.” The dossier contained a lot of unverified allegations against Trump that would lead the reader to assume the Russians were either in contact and helping him or that they had enough information to blackmail him once he was in office. What is less well publicized is that Steele paid for the information, that he paid what turned out to be Russian operatives, and that he was never able to verify the information he received. There have been attempts to breathe life into the dossier by pointing out that parts seemingly have been verified by recent independent revelations. This is, however, part and parcel of a disinformation campaign, finding ways to shore up the reports you have already pushed out.

Of course, this type of reasoning can drive you crazy. If any lie can be proved true, then what is true? Actually, it’s not that difficult. You need multiple sources to confirm a story and they must be vetted to be trusted. This is where the disinformation campaign falls apart. The deeper you dig, the less the “facts” hold up.

This process appears to be happening now with the investigations into the Trump campaign and the Russians. The so-called multiple contacts between the campaign and Russian operatives were a bunch of disconnected and unrelated data points. So-and-so met with this person that has a connection to the Russian government. Look deep and there is a good and legitimate reason. President Trumps’ son-in-law attempted to set up a back channel to Russia. This is standard stuff and we only knew about some of it by intercepting the Russian ambassador’s communications with Moscow, that he knew were being intercepted and read. So, there was a meeting between Jared Kushner and the Russian Ambassador. This we know is true, but the exact contents may or may not have been revealed. If they were, it is still nothing, as back channels are a normal part of statecraft. We also know, or at least most believe, the DNC was hacked and e-mails released. This, however, is not a disinformation campaign since what was in the e-mails is true. This is a crime, as hacking is a crime, but it is not disinformation.

What was begun as a political talking point to explain the unexplainable, that Clinton lost to Trump, morphed into disinformation and is being carried so far that now the Russians have latched onto it to continue a campaign of disruption of the American government and political system.

Last month’s suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester wasn’t the first time an Islamist terrorist targeted young people out for a night of fun. In 2001, a Hamas-affiliated terrorist blew himself up outside the Dolphinarium, a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing 21 Israelis, including 16 teenagers.

But news coverage of the two massacres was strikingly different, as the Manchester attack generated exponentially more attention. The New York Times, for example, offered a handful of small accounts about the Tel Aviv attack. But the Manchester bombing generated dozens of wire service and Times staff updates along with analysis stories and an editorial lamenting the horror of targeting children.

There are reasons why attacks in Europe are covered more exhaustively than those targeting Israelis. But as a result, Americans may not fully appreciate the depth of Palestinian violence because the near-daily examples of it are all but ignored.

The stark reporting contrast between the Manchester and Dolphinarium attacks reveals a change in how terrorism has been covered during the intervening 16 years. The Dolphinarium attack took place about three months before the September 11th attacks that dramatically increased media attention to terrorism.

A significant reporting gap continued after 9/11, however. Two 2002 shooting attacks within 12 days of each other prompted vastly different coverage by the New York Times. The July 4 shooting attack at Los Angeles International Airport, which claimed two lives, produced at least 13 articles. By contrast, nine people were murdered in a July 16 shooting and bombing attack against an Israeli bus going to the settlement of Immanuel. The Times devoted only one article to this slaughter.

The Times commits minimal attention to attacks on Israelis today. Last Friday’s fatal stabbing attack in Jerusalem received a scant 431-word article containing no images or references to “terror,” “terrorist,” or “terrorism.”

Worse, the newspaper ran a 243-word Associated Press article about the attack with a headline emphasizing the terrorists’ deaths, rather than their victim: “Palestinian Attackers Killed After Killing Israeli Officer.”

By contrast, the Times provided much more sympathetic coverage to an April terrorist attack in Paris that similarly claimed a police officer’s life. At 1,037 words, the article was almost three times as long, contained six photos of the attack scene, and referred six times to “terrorism” and thrice to “terrorist attack.”

An attack’s location plays a significant role in determining the extent of news coverage. Commentator Joe Concha calls this the “there versus here” phenomenon.

For example, the Times published eight articles about last November’s car ramming and stabbing attack at Ohio State University that killed no one, but injured 11 people. That included a profile of the suspected terrorist behind it. Deadlier attacks overseas generally receive far less coverage.

However, that “there versus here” explanation falters in comparison to coverage of vehicular attacks in Israel with others that occurred overseas since Ohio State.

Many people, when they know a subject really well, find newspaper accounts of it misleading or inaccurate, even as to the most elementary facts. And yet the strange thing is that it does not discourage them from continuing to read newspapers and even believe them.

I have always felt some affection for the perpetrators of literary fraud: for William Henry Ireland, for example, a young man of limited accomplishment (in his father’s opinion) who at the end of the eighteenth century forged Shakespearean documents to earn his father’s notice and praise. Amazingly enough the forgery was not immediately exposed as such, and Ireland even went so far as to “discover” the manuscript of a Shakespearean tragedy called Vortigern that was actually staged, albeit only for two performances. He made fools of serious scholars—always a delightful spectacle—until he was thoroughly exposed by Edmond Malone, though even afterwards he found learned defenders. Later he wrote a pathetic but sometimes moving memoir of his malfeasance.

I have asked myself why I feel so strange an affinity to forgers and impostors, and have come to the conclusion that it has something to do with my journalistic career. Journalists who are asked, as I used often to be, to write authoritative analyses of complex events that happened only two hours ago and about which they have no more information than that which is publicly available, to be solemnly read the following morning by millions of readers, are nearly always perilously close, at least if they are honest with themselves, to intellectual fraud. It is fellow-feeling, then, that is at the root of my sympathy for literary forgers and impostors.

A newspaper not universally known or appreciated for its attachment to the literal truth used often to call me in the middle of my medical avocations to ask whether I could write a thousand words by four o’clock on some subject or other, and if I protested that I couldn’t because I knew nothing of the subject it would grant me an extension of half an hour, presumably for research, that is to say until four-thirty. In vain did I argue that I could write a much better article if I were given a day or two to prepare it; for the newspaper, whose time horizons were as limited as those of a mayfly, it was always now or never, even if the subject were one of lasting importance. To have a reasonably coherent thousand words in time was always much more important for the newspaper than such minor qualities as depth or accuracy. Also to be eschewed was any kind of nuance. Nuance, said the editor, only confused readers and drove down sales. Readers needed messages neat.

I quickly discovered how little time it took in the age of the internet to appear authoritative, even on subjects to which I had never previously given a moment’s thought or notice. In the kingdom of the ignorant (that the newspaper believes its readers to be), the man with one fact was king. In those days the newspaper was prosperous and paid very well; and it is not everyone who can sound like an expert by four or four-thirty. I never wrote anything that I believed to be untrue, except under very special circumstances, but I had no illusions about the wholeness of the truths I was relaying. When the next day I saw people reading my article on the bus or train, I felt like snatching the newspaper from their hands and telling them not to bother. As Pudd’nhead Wilson said, it’s better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.

I was even sent abroad sometimes to cover major events in small countries whose language I could not speak and whose history I did not know. Foreign correspondents are social birds and flock together in the bar of the country’s one five-star hotel where they sit and originate or absorb rumours, many of them demonstrably false, by the most minimal effort. The other source of my information was taxi-drivers, who were either well-informed or at least impressively self-assured. Many a taxi-driver’s prejudices have been printed in the august journals of distant lands.

There was a time, a time before cable news, when the network anchorman reigned supreme. Thank goodness those days are long gone, but like the dominant broadcasters of yore, Scott Pelley of CBS News has a voice that could make a wolverine purr. Still, it’s not clear that anyone could make sense of the words that Mr. Pelley was speaking on Thursday.

In a commentary for the “CBS Evening News,” Mr. Pelley began:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Some of the gunshot wounds might have been self-inflicted? If CBS had discovered evidence that those attending the congressional baseball practice had actually been wounded by their own bullets, rather than shots fired by James Hodgkinson, this surely would have been the scoop of the year. But Mr. Pelley quickly made clear that he and his colleagues had no such evidence. Instead, he was suggesting that the victims of the attempted assassinations might bear some blame for motivating Hodgkinson to attack:

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Blaming anyone other than the shooter for attempted assassination is generally a mistake. And the timing could hardly have been worse. Mr. Pelley was intoning his commentary on the same day that victim Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) was undergoing one of the series of surgeries he has required since the Wednesday attack. Last weekend his condition was upgraded to serious from critical. On Thursday, the day of the Pelley commentary, shooting victim Matt Mika was also in critical condition. Capitol Police Officer Crystal Griner was also still in the hospital on Thursday, according to CNN.

Given the timing and the circumstances that Mr. Pelley chose to make his case, one might have expected him to cite some truly damning rhetoric that had been uttered by the victims, if not direct evidence that they had incited Hodgkinson to carry out his bloody attack. One would have been wrong. The CBS voice offered not a shred of evidence that any of the shooting victims had done anything to create an “abyss of violent rhetoric,” or to inspire the actions of the man who tried to assassinate them. Instead, the anchorman mentioned a politician who was not targeted:

Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” And the shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

Mr. Pelley offered no evidence that Hodgkinson suffered from mental illness, nor did he explain how comments by Mr. Sanders could possibly raise the question of whether the victims’ wounds might be “self-inflicted.”

Believe it or not, the segment went downhill from there. The CBS newsman concluded by citing President Trump’s harsh rhetoric about his network and other media outlets, as if Mr. Pelley and his colleagues were the real victims of last week’s violence.

Coincidentally on Friday Mr. Pelley left the CBS nightly anchor chair to focus on his reports for the CBS program, “60 Minutes.” The move had been announced in May and in media terms, Mr Pelley remains kind of a big deal.

One of the more interesting trends of recent years has been the effort to view citizenship through a kind of debauched meritocratic lens. This approach is favored particularly by those who oppose enforcing immigration laws, who argue that somehow immigrants (including illegal immigrants) are more “American” than poor Americans. Like some earlier iterations of Social Darwinism, this worldview combines moral self-righteousness with a crass materialism.

In a recent column for the New York Times, Bret Stephens offers a “Modest Proposal”–style recommendation to deport poor Americans: “Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning.” Stephens says he doesn’t really want to deport struggling Americans; his tongue is firmly in his cheek. His main purpose is to criticize the deportation of illegal immigrants by pointing to the supposed shortcomings of many native-born Americans. However, rather than destroying the case for enforcing immigration laws, this satirical proposal far more effectively skewers efforts to dissolve national fellowship in the name of the pseudo-meritocracy.

Stephens’s proposal cherry-picks evidence to show the supposed degeneracy of native-born Americans. But it does not account for the fact that immigrant households rely on government assistance at a much higher rate than native-born households do. Nor does it account for research finding that the children of many immigrant families sometimes face more challenges than their immigrant parents did. For instance, sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz found that the economic prospects of those descended from Mexican immigrants often stall or even decline after the second generation. To note the struggles of immigrants and their families is not to pile moral blame on them. These difficulties do, though, indicate that immigrants face many obstacles, some of which are greater than those faced by the native-born. In many areas, illegal immigrants are prime competitors to legal immigrants, so widespread illegal immigration almost certainly makes it harder for legal immigrants to climb the ladder of success.

Intellectual shortcomings radically compound the economic deficiencies of the meritocratic denigration of the native-born. The worldview that poor Americans can’t cut it and should therefore be replaced by more “competitive” immigrants might fit comfortably in a corporate boardroom, but it profoundly misunderstands the purpose of citizenship and the enterprise of inclusive politics. Whether or not a poor American “deserves” to be an American is beside the point — what matters is that he is American and that, by virtue of his citizenship, he has an inherent claim to the public square and public concern. While pseudo-meritocratic initiatives to cull the weak are chic on Wall Street, they inject poison when applied to politics. Arguing that the poor and disadvantaged are somehow less worthy citizens exacerbates civic alienation; it cuts the materially unsuccessful out of the body politic and flatters the indifference of the successful, whispering to them that they are justified in sneering at the struggles of the weak. In its high-handed dismissal of the struggles of the poor, the argument that the native-born are degenerate trash-people is almost a recipe for even more populism, a force that has caused Stephens himself no small angst in recent years.

Thursday evening, CBS’s Scott Pelley, who officially ended his tenure as the network’s Evening News anchor the following evening, told viewers that “It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.”

It’s clear from Pelley’s subsequent commentary that his answers to all three elements are “Yes.” It’s equally clear from the examples he supplied as support that he sees (or wants viewers to see) the problem as predominantly about the conduct of those on the right.

Transcript below:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress, yesterday, was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow, have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Yesterday was not the first time.

In December last year, a man with an assault rifle stormed into a Washington-area pizzeria to free child sex slaves whom Hillary Clinton was holding there — or at least that’s what political blog sites had said. He fired into a locked door to discover no children in chains.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” The shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

In February, the president tweeted that the news media were the “enemy of the American people”:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. Then he said, “No, that doesn’t worry me.”