(Easter) Monday bees: Lies, assholes and strongmen

My weekly release of bees from my bonnet

Fake news about fake news

A few weeks ago my friend Tobby Simon, who runs an excellent think-tank in Bangalore called the Synergia Foundation, kindly invited me to take part in an online discussion called Journalism in a Disinformation Pandemic. My fellow discussant was Shekhar Gupta, founder and editor-in-chief of The Print, the name of which of course indicates, these days, that it is an online publication. Shekhar is one of India’s most reputable and experienced journalists, having for many years run the Indian Express with great distinction. It was a terrific discussion for Shekhar and me, but perhaps less so for the audience since we agreed about virtually everything. In particular, perhaps befitting a pair of veteran hacks, we agreed that the so-called disinformation pandemic is really nothing new.

In fact, the implications of the discussion were, to me at least, this: that all the talk of a disinformation pandemic, focusing as it tends to on the relative novelty that is social media, actually risks becoming something of a diversion or distraction, even a cover-up, from the real issues. Our point was that really, there is nothing new under the sun. There is no change in humanity’s tendency to tell lies, nor in humanity’s willingness to believe them. As I said in a part that gets a bit garbled on the video, it is no coincidence that when writing about disinformation journalists have a tendency to cite the same old quote, one that is variously attributed to Winston Churchill and to Mark Twain, and was probably really coined by someone else entirely: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on”. This is an eternal issue.

As a Brit, what bugs me about it especially is the current obsessive association of lies and its lengthier descriptor, disinformation, with new and mainly social media. In reality, it is so-called legacy media, by which we mean newspapers, that really turned disinformation into an art form. For decades, papers such as the Mail, the Telegraph, the Sun, the Express and others vied with one another to invent a narrative against the European Union that was based largely on fictional stories. Indeed, one of the most imaginative creators of this pre-Brexit disinformation was Boris Johnson, as Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph in the early 1990s, and we can see where the lies got him. The detachment from truth, shared with mass readerships, was spread across a wide range of subjects by large parts of the British press.

Of course, we all know that Twitter, Facebook and the others do act as turbo-chargers for the creation and transmission of lies, helped by the way their algorithms tend to reinforce readers’ beliefs and tight circles of information rather than providing diversity. We also know that where his precursor Silvio Berlusconi used his own TV channels as his way to communicate directly to the public, Donald Trump used Twitter — until January 6th this year. But what we surely also know is that the most powerful and most crucial channel for political lies in the United States has not been Facebook and Twitter but rather Fox News, a conventional cable TV channel, and the radio and TV outlets of Newsmax. And it was through those conventional channels that Trump and his supporters chiefly propagated their biggest lie of all, that the presidential election had been fraudulent.

By the way, let’s not forget great political lies of the fairly recent past. One of the most celebrated newspaper scoops in modern US history, the Pentagon Papers, consisted of the 1971 revelation that the US Department of Defense had been lying for years about the true course — and casualties — of the Vietnam War. And that in both Britain and America a key line of attack against Tony Blair and George W. Bush was the notion that they lied about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction when making the case for the 2003 invasion. (I later described them on The Economist’s cover on July 7th 2004 as “Sincere Deceivers”, arguing that they believed what they claimed but had not been honest about how little they really knew.)

Back to the main topic. My biggest worry about the focusing of the disinformation discussion on social media is that it can act as a cop-out: oh, it’s all impersonal forces, driven by technology, way beyond our control. Certainly, the professional disseminators of disinformation who work for the Russian and Chinese governments do exploit the ability of social media to target messages and disguise their origins. But really, this isn’t the main story either about the social media platforms or about lies. To me, the main stories about the social media platforms are commercial ones about monopoly power and legal ones about their liability and responsibility for what they publish. Commercially, the issue for other media is not one of lies or disinformation but the fact that the social media platforms took away their main source of revenue, namely advertising. To regulators, that is not in itself a sin, but monopolistic abuse of dominant position should be, and it is good news that antitrust authorities are increasingly homing in on Big Tech. From a legal point of view, too, it is clear that everything, in every jurisdiction, that can be done to give Facebook and others equivalent legal responsibilities to those of old-fashioned media (broadcast and print) over such areas as defamation, hate speech and political advertising, should be done. It makes no sense at all to impose such liabilities and responsibilities on old media but not on social platforms, which are doing the same thing only on a much larger scale and so with great ability to do harm.

All this needs to be addressed. But it will still leave us with the core problem: the politics of lying.

The Assholes theory of political liars

Which brings me back to Britain’s prime minister and, of course, to Trump, but also allows me to plug a Canadian documentary film called “Assholes: A Theory”. The director was kind enough to interview me for the film, mainly in my case about Silvio Berlusconi and Italian politics. At the time I had a visiting fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford and John Walker and his crew came to film me there. When someone from the college asked me at lunch what the film was about, and I told them the title, they looked confused: I’m not sure whether it was because they thought I said the film was about All Souls or because they didn’t know what to say about my being in such a vulgar project. Here’s the film website and if you’re curious I suggest scrolling down to watch the trailer.

Anyway, apart from being able to mention that John Walker and the film have been nominated for Canadian Screen Awards for the doc, the point of bringing the film up is that I think Walker had his finger on the real issue. This is that in several western democracies we have come to elect assholes as our presidents and prime ministers: Berlusconi, Trump, Johnson, to name but three. As the film argued, such people have charisma and are admired for what, when we are being kind, is called “chutzpah”, but is often outright lying. In that, they are not even all that exceptional in historical terms: as the British historian Dominic Sandbrook argued in this interesting article in Unherd, Johnson is but the latest in a long line of charlatans and idlers who have occupied Number 10 Downing Street.

To say that is not to shrug my shoulders and say we shouldn’t worry about the fact that Johnson is a serial, barefaced liar. Of course we should. We should therefore also worry about why it is in Britain we hand so much power, un-constrained except by the law (slowly) and elections (also slowly, it currently feels), to a government which wins office with a minority of the vote. The real questions are less about Johnson’s lies as such than about whether in our unchecked system he might be able to use them to undermine the institutions of democracy and to abuse power. With the Brexit referendum in 2016, the use of lies by Johnson and others surely did play an important part in swinging what was a narrow result.

What Trump attempted in the US was a full subversion of both the judiciary and the democratic system, and thank goodness he failed (for now). Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary has shown that lies on their own are not enough for authoritarians like these: they are but a tool then to get control of national institutions and of the media itself so as to try to perpetuate their power, just as Trump wanted. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University, has produced an excellent recent book about this very issue: "Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall". Assholes, in other words, but unfortunately successful ones. That is the big reason to worry about disinformation and lies.