Radicalisation is more fuelled by the nightly news than by shadowy “disinformation”
Why grant your opponent the dignity of his own beliefs? Far better to dismiss him as delusional, “radicalised” and fuelled by disinformation. Rather than a fellow citizen engaged in a political dispute, he is now a wayward and misinformed child, in need of rescuing from his ignorance by benign experts.
Though the idea of combatting fast-proliferating falsehoods online is noble in theory, it is often disingenuous in practice
This politically corrosive approach has been popularised by an entire cottage industry of sanctimonious arbiters of journalistic truth, in the form of the “disinformation reporter”. Though the idea of combatting fast-proliferating falsehoods online is noble in theory, it is often disingenuous in practice. Speculation, scepticism and suspicion may be rooted in intuition rather than fact, but that doesn’t make it untrue, merely as yet proven or disproven. There has been endless journalistic “debunking” of everything from fears about youth gender clinics to outrage about grooming gangs, all of which would later be proven to be valid by serious reporters.
Whilst traditional journalists set out to break stories, disinformation reporters are often in far cloudier terrain, with remits as ambiguous and contestable as setting out to “protect themselves and the public from false narratives”. Whilst reporters are archetypally distrustful of authority and official narratives, the disinformation reporter is a kind of handmaiden of the establishment, often unthinkingly citing evidence they have failed to assess. And unlike other journalists, they do not have a subject specific “beat”, and instead range widely over politics, science, medicine and the environment, even when they lack any special expertise or experience.
Jessie Singal, a leading reporter on youth gender medicine, has spoken about how much he has broken with the official consensus as he realised that much of the evidence for the effectiveness of transition for relieving gender dysphoria is based on faulty date sets. For years, it was “disinformation” to claim that children were being rushed into dangerous treatments without proper assessment. Indeed, so widespread was the activist capture of the argument, that when the NHS published the Cass Review, exposing widespread malpractice, misinformation was proliferated widely, an atmosphere fueled by the BBC itself, which ran anecdote-fuelled pieces claiming that the “positive lived experiences of trans children” had been excluded by the review. Stonewall and MP Dawn Butler spread the entirely false claim that the Cass Review had “excluded one hundred studies” from its consideration of the evidence. Yet none of the BBC’s disinformation reporters have touched this and other numerous falsehoods put out by trans rights activists.
What we choose to write about and report on is necessarily and inevitably political. In print journalism, this presents less of an issue — if one outlet won’t pursue a story, another will. But for an organisation like the BBC, which claims a lofty dedication to apolitical truth, whilst employing a largely left-liberal staff, this presents endless stumbling blocks. Individual shows and reporters have clear lines of accountability, and can be judged on their merits. But the corporation wades into real trouble when it gets in on the misinformation game, because the reporter presents themself as an arbiter of truth, rather than the author of a contestable story.
Whilst there are flat-out untruths, there’s a frequent conflation of political causes and beliefs with false claims deployed in their favour. The most obvious and egregious of these is the way anti-lockdown and vaccine positions were reported on. It’s clear that misinformation was incredibly widespread in these communities, yet there were plenty of principled and practical arguments in favour of these positions that didn’t rest on medical claims, but came down to essentially political questions of individual liberty, balancing risks, and making trade offs. But disinformation reporting continually presented the most extreme and conspiratorial version of these beliefs. By regularly reporting on cranks, they helped create stigma around expressing sceptical beliefs. The result of this wasn’t just to silence the most reasonable voices and elevate the most deranged, but to worsen the reporting on pandemic measures overall.
Journalists, many of them lacking medical or scientific expertise, ran scared of questioning rapidly emerging consensus positions over lockdown, vaccines and masking. This tended to freeze in place policies and assumptions, long after they had been debunked. Surfaces were being disinfected years after it had been conclusively demonstrated that the risks of indirect transmission were extremely low. Governments straightforwardly lied about the effectiveness of masks and different forms of masks in order to prevent supplies being depleted for medical workers. The lack of risk to young people and the low chances of transmission in the open air were known about from an early stage, yet policy did not change or adapt, in large part because these facts were not properly disseminated by reporting the continually overemphasised risks, and actively misleading stories about the deaths of young people and children.
By making it harder to contest official narratives, disinformation reporters have created a worse and less rigorous media environment, and opened up a gap between a complacent mainstream media, and a growing alternative media which employs the same tactics of informational orthodoxy and stigmatisation of disagreement but from the other direction. This more sectarian information space has dominated the tone of much public debate since.
Just this week I read a piece by Zoe Williams in the Guardian, arguing that “Islamophobia” was driven by a sophisticated campaign to manipulate political opinion, originating in America:
First, it revealed the amount of money pouring in to the creation of this narrative and from what sources (most of it was quite easily traceable back to billionaires and banking interests, which were simultaneously hosing cash at climate crisis counter-narratives among other conservative agendas). Second, it showed how coordinated and organised so many incredibly well-financed thinktanks were, amplifying one another’s messages and keeping a stable of ready commenters for broadcasters hungry for a hot-button issue. Third, the report laid bare how incredibly effective this network was in turning what were once “fringe, extremist views” (in Ali’s words) into mainstream talking points and wedge issues.
The UK, however, seemed to lack a few core components of this campaign. There weren’t any obvious funders with deep pockets; evangelical Christians weren’t a strong voice in politics; and it had stronger regulation of hate speech in broadcasting (though weaker regulation in print). As it turned out, it didn’t matter. The US lab created this virus, and we caught it.
Here is one lab leak theory the Left can’t get enough of. Yet the very term “Islamophobia” was popularised by a Runnymede Trust report with the whole weight of Britain’s extensive and increasingly progressive NGO sector behind it. In the UK, as Zoe can’t really evade, there is no well-funded conservative machine pushing back against progressive causes. Instead the money, power and institutional control are monopolised by left liberals. In that Runnymede report, entitled “Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All”, we see the early form of the lid that would be firmly shoved onto the building pot that is British popular opinion about Islam and migration. The uncontestable reality of Islam’s repressive cultural practices around women were dismissed and waved away. Arranged marriages were presented as no worse or better than Western love matches. Islam’s views on gambling and alcohol were, according to the report, salutary virtues that we should be learning from, rather than barriers to integration into British culture. Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses were described, uncritically, as an “insulting vilification of Islam”.
Problems were to be ignored, dismissed, or incredibly, embraced as exciting challenges to stale old English culture
This set the tone for how Islam was to be engaged with by the British establishment for the next 30 years. Problems were to be ignored, dismissed, or incredibly, embraced as exciting challenges to stale old English culture. “Islamophobia”, as we can see, never simply meant hatred of Islam or Muslims. We can all agree that Islam, a centuries year old faith which has nurtured great literature, philosophy and architecture, is not worthy of unthinking loathing and contempt. Yet from the outset, “Islamophobia” has been defined as including any criticism, satire or scepticism toward Islam, or any predominantly Muslim culture or group. The Runnymede report continually referenced sober, critical reporting and commentary about the challenge of Islam and integration as driving hatred and prejudice towards Muslims.
All this provides vital context for pieces like Zoe’s. Public negativity towards Islam must be driven by insidious, untrue narratives. The argument is entirely circular — negative views of Islam are by definition Islamophobic, and Islamophobia is an irrational hatred or prejudice against Islam and Muslims, thus if “41% of the British public believe that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the UK” then this must be the result of some sinister outside force manipulating public opinion.
The new political atmosphere has left liberal journalists terminally incapable of applying Ockham’s razor, or perceiving anything lying immediately under their noses. We do not need any grand theory to explain the latest polling numbers. The last 20 years have seen multiple horrific Islamic terrorist attacks on British soil, the revelation that Pakistani rape gangs not only existed but were covered up by the authorities, and large sections of the Muslim community that appear stubbornly unwilling to integrate into British society. Globally, we have seen cartoonists and authors hunted and murdered by death squads for daring to mock or critique Islam, and we’ve witnessed the rise of ever more vile and extreme Islamist organisations like ISIS and Boko Haram. Thousands of Muslims from Western nations, including hundreds from the UK, took the journey to Iraq and Syria to join the new “Islamic State” at the height of the struggle in Syria. All these facts, alongside vast and uncontrolled mass migration, have produced fully rational concerns across the country.
On this, like so many issues, we cannot even begin to have a rational public debate, because language has been weaponised against one side of the argument, who have been squarely shoved out of the Overton window. Unfortunately for British progressives, people don’t disappear, or stop voting, just because you’ve declared them hate-filled ignorant bigots. In fact, they tend to go and vote for whoever else you’re labelling as too extreme to be tolerated. Neither infantilisation nor demonisation are persuasive tactics, and they serve only to heighten divisions and fuel tribalistic group think.
Many journalists, to be frank, are more comfortable writing process stories than they are grappling with underlying issues. It’s easy to report on the existence of a controversy, and far riskier to dig deeply into a contentious area where your neutrality and good intentions will be continually questioned. But journalists will have to become comfortable with being uncomfortable and rediscover their adversarial origins if they are to rebuild public trust, and close the partisan media rift.
