According to a recent survey, only 21% of Belgian citizens trust the press and journalists – 21% less than in 1997 (Le Soir, 9 January). Is it serious, doctor? Certainly, because the complaint is not limited to Belgium alone. According to a 2015 Eurobarometer survey, highlighted recently by Gareth Harding of the Ethical Journalism Network, 73% of UK citizens admit to not trusting their newspapers. This UK figure may be the highest of the countries of the EU but the malady is everywhere. Why is this so?
To try to answer this question, we have to look at a set of problems. The first is the need to admit that, in much of the media, journalists are no longer what they were 50 years ago. There was a time when journalists were allowed to take three days to research and write a paper; today, because of costs, it is more the case that they are asked to produce three papers in a day. One does not need to be an eminent press expert to realise that the quality of the information conveyed cannot not have improved as a result. In a vicious circle, as the quality of the information has declined, so the circulation of the newspaper has tumbled. A good number of journalists have fallen into the temptation, too, of constructing their papers around agency dispatches or, worse still, the communications material obligingly provided by the communications people of wherever the information came from, whether institutions, economic interests or the inner sanctums of national political power. Because they had to eat and to feed their families, many other journalists have also been constrained, to a greater or lesser extent against their will, to take liberties with the ethics of their profession that require them only to report hard facts and substantiated truths simply to please media owners more concerned with their own economic interests or ideological whims.
Here, the British tabloids have been the in a class of their own when it comes to disinformation. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s illustrious spin doctor, said in 2011: “At various times, readers of UK papers may have read that ‘Europe’ or ‘Brussels’ or the ‘EU super state’ has banned, or is intending to ban kilts, curries, mushy peas, paper rounds, Caerphilly cheese, charity shops, bulldogs, bent sausages and cucumbers, the British Army, lollipop ladies, British loaves, British-made lavatories, the passport crest, lorry drivers who wear glasses and many more”. Nothing but hogwash and lies that the European Commission’s Representation in London worked tirelessly, but in vain, to refute. In this world of the instant in which we live, claptrap will always win because, willingly peddled, it remains imprinted on our memories whereas corrections pass unnoticed. The British may have less trust in their newspapers than anyone else but they have demonstrated that the increasing volume of untruths always leaves a mark on public opinion: that can, for example, lead to a vote for Brexit.
Nonetheless, Rupert Murdoch and his peers, along with the journalists who were their minions (what better description can be given of them?), were only supporting players (with the exception of Boris Johnson, erstwhile journalist with a penchant for insults and now Foreign Secretary) in this campaign of disinformation, merely those who cleared the path which ultimately took Donald Trump to the White House. And coinciding with – perhaps, indeed, aided and abetted by – the subversive media offensive over which floats the shadow of the long-time resident of the Kremlin, who has forgotten nothing from his time in the KGB.
We have, then, entered a world in which information has become a weapon of mass disinformation, with the enthusiastic consent of those who let themselves be taken in! Hence the disillusionment of the observation by British analyst Ella Minty that political communication has now given way to: “lies, headline-grabbing negative actions, unsubstantiated claims, scaremongering and emotional rhetoric” (Le Soir, 16 January). Clearly, all who governed in the past lied at times, or lied by omission, to serve the cause they stood for; nowadays, the truth no longer matters: all that counts is the way the lies are put so that they resonate with the anger and bitterness of the disenchanted citizenry. Trump, Brexit and the rise of nationalists everywhere are the consequences.
At the same time, in Russia, Putin appears to have engaged in cyberwar to destabilise the United States and, more so, the Europe that is slipping from his grasp, the democratic European Union that he would love to dismantle, with the assistance of nationalists and other sovereignists.
At the congress of the Association of European Journalists in Ireland at the start of November, Giles Portman, Head of East Stratcom Task Force at the European External Action Service, said that the Russian campaign has become one of “mass” disinformation, using “false news and propaganda as an active tool of policy and of military strategy”. He stated that Moscow is financing sources of disinformation through state-controlled media, is telling “journalists” every week what they should report on to be loyal to their country, is employing networks of trolls on social media to destabilise the EU and its near neighbourhood to the east. Should we be worried by this? Quite clearly, yes – but neither must we forget the weapons of mass destruction that allowed George W. Bush to declare war on Iraq without a single American news organisation raising any objections or questions. It is crucial to bear this in mind at a time when the unpredictable Donald Trump is preparing to take over the Oval Office in the White House lest we once again allow ourselves to be duped.
The European Union is, then, the main target in an information war. In the meantime, the foot soldier that is the European Commission stands full of naïve innocence... Michel Theys