How Broadcasters should handle the Prime Minister lying

This post is about the Brexit Dividend and how broadcasters should treat it. However I want to start with an extreme case: Donald Trump. He is the right place to start because he became POTUS in good part because of how the media treated him and his opponent. He gained publicity by saying outrageous things. That increased his poll rating, so he started getting favourable coverage because his poll ratings were going up. (I explain how this works in more detail here.) Once he was the republican candidate, the media’s obsession with balance meant they spent as much time talking about the trivial issue of Clinton’s emails as Trump’s lies, whether he pays any taxes, bribes officials and assaults women.

One of the most remarkable polls during that campaign was that more people trusted Trump than Hillary Clinton. How can someone who lies all the time, almost every time he says anything, be trusted more than Hillary Clinton, who has had countless Republican inspired investigations into her affairs and has never been convicted of anything. For some time cognitive linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has pioneered the idea that (among many other things - see for example a Guardian article with Gil Duran) lies that are repeated often enough become associations in people’s minds that they find it hard to combat. So the phrase ‘crooked Hillary’ that Trump repeats all the time has a purpose beyond firing up the base. Equally when Republican’s start investigations into her affairs that alone puts an association of guilt in people’s minds. That is a key reason why before the election they trusted Trump more than Clinton.

In the United States Trump played the media big time, and continues to do so. If the media is not careful the same thing could happen here. The phrase ‘Brexit dividend’ is the equivalent of ‘crooked Hillary’. If it is repeated enough, a sufficient number of people will begin to associate Brexit with a ‘dividend’, whether that dividend is real or not. And in case someone reading this does not know by now, the Brexit dividend is a complete fiction.

To see how May’s claim that there is a Brexit dividend should be handled, read this in the FT and this from Sky News. (HT Femi) The FT article does not have ‘Brexit dividend’ in its title, and this is important. As Lakoff argues, the more often people see those two words together the more likely they are to associate them, so do not put it in a headline as many people just read headlines. (Putting it in inverted commas does nothing.) He suggests what he calls the ‘truth sandwich’ approach: begin with a truthful statement, then report the dishonest spin, and then fact check the spin. Leaving out that first stage plays into the hands of whoever promoted the spin.

Who are the heroes and villains in this example of barefaced lying (see my definition of barefaced below). For villains we have to start with Theresa May herself: if this is a sop to the Brexiters in exchange for a soft Brexit that is no mitigation. Boris Johnson of course for suggesting the idea: the court might like to take a large number of previous offences into account. The right wing Brexit press for whom lying is just part of their game.

Heroes include Paul Johnson, who toured the broadcasters on Sunday to emphatically say there was no dividend, and Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston for saying it was complete nonsense, as well as the two references already given in the FT and from Sky News. I hope there were other examples that I did not happen to notice.

What about the BBC? It did have Paul Johnson on, and Laura Kuenssberg did at least ask the existential question, although she felt unable to answer it. (There are not ‘economic’ and ‘political’ truths: arithmetic is arithmetic, lies are lies.) But there are unfortunately other occasions when the Brexit dividend was treated as if it was real and put into headlines (e.g. here), missing out the first layer of the truth sandwich. And of course the Marr interview on Sunday, where he did not even question the concept. All too often (e.g. here) any questioning of the dividend was left to the end of the article and was presented in the standard ‘he said,she said’ format.

Why does this all matter? In terms of Brexit, it is obvious. Another barefaced lie in the Brexit campaign was £350 per week for the NHS. Most Brexiters continue to believe that they will be better off after Brexit, and I suspect most are not aware why this is unlikely to be true. Talk of the Brexit dividend is designed to keep them in their ignorance.

But I think its importance goes well beyond Brexit. Why don’t politicians lie more often to enhance their cause? Some have integrity, but for the others the deterrent is being found out. But being found out depends critically on the media calling out lies when they happen. And when a large section of the media are very selective about how they treat lies depending on who said them or why they were said, or indeed are often the source of these lies, society has a serious problem.

That is the situation in the US with Fox and Trump and in the UK with the right wing press and Brexit or the Conservatives more generally. How the print media in the US and the broadcast media in the UK treats lies has therefore become critical. With lies ‘she said, he said’ type reporting is just not sufficient to defend democracy. Now often it is quite difficult to prove someone is lying, but if I could delineate a barefaced lie as one where it is very easy to establish the truth, then the Brexit dividend is a barefaced lie. OBR documents, accepted by the government as the basis for their tax and spend decisions, show quite clearly that the money has already been spent. You cannot spend the same money twice.

The right wing Brexit press have already supported this lie. As most of their readers also watch broadcasters, it is imperative that these broadcasters inflict some political damage on those who tell the lie. If they do not, the lesson certain politicians will draw is that they too can get away with barefaced lies, encouraging the kind of behaviour we see with Trump. For that reason broadcasters have to speak truth to power, otherwise the non-partisan media becomes complicit in propaganda or just a mouthpiece for politicians.

Post-truth and propaganda

A long read on why it is time the rest of the media stopped treating Fox as TV news, and some UK tabloids as newspapers.

George Osborne becomes editor of the London Evening Standard. Donald Trump blames GCHC for bugging him because of something he saw on Fox News. The lines between right wing media and right wing politicians seem very blurred nowadays. This should not come as a surprise, because right wing media have been becoming much more like propaganda outlets than normal media organisations for some time. The conventions of journalism may have pretended otherwise, but it time we recognised reality.

Let me define two archetypes. The first, which could be called the truth purveyor, is the one we are familiar with, and which much of the mainstream media (MSM) like to imagine they correspond to. The aim is provide the best information to readers or viewers. The second is propaganda. One way of characterising the two archetypes is as follows. Readers have certain interests: objectives, goals, utilities etc. The truth purveyor will provide readers with the information they need to pursue those interests. (As exemplified here, for example.) Propaganda on the other hand, to borrow from Jacob Stanley, aims to provide information that will deceive people from seeing what is in their best interest. Propaganda provides information that supports a particular political goal or point of view.

Take, for example, the issue of welfare benefits. Media as the truth-purveyor type will try and present a rounded and accurate picture of those claiming welfare benefits. Right wing propaganda on the other hand will focus on examples of benefit fraud, or cases where the benefit recipient will be perceived by the reader as taking advantage of the system, with little or no attempt to put the example in any kind of context. This slanted coverage is designed to give the impression that benefit recipients are often scroungers and skivers. The political goal is to make it easier for governments to cut welfare payments, which in turn may allows taxes to be cut.

These are archetypes, and any media organisation will mix the two to some extent. Many would argue that even the most truth-purveyor type organisation may still embody certain assumptions or points of view that distort their readers view of what should be in their best interest. (As argued in Manufacturing Consent, for example.) Mediamacro is an example of this. But that should not blind us to what is happening elsewhere. Lines like “liberals’ nostalgia for factual politics seems designed to mask their own fraught relationship with the truth” [1] suggest nothing new is happening, let’s move on. That would be a huge mistake. It is like saying all news is propaganda, who cares. But because there are two archetypes, organisations can gradually move from one to another, and that movement is important. It played a crucial role in the success of Brexit and Trump.

In both in the UK and US there is a large part of the media which is becoming more and more like a pure propaganda outlet. We are used to thinking about propaganda as being associated with the state, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. In the UK and US, we now have propaganda machines that support political ideas that are associated with the far right, and political interests associated with the very wealthy. Their output is governed more and more by whether it assists those two goals.

Apologists for this right wing propaganda say that most media organisations have their particular political bias, and that will be reflected in the opinions you see in that media outlet. But I’m not talking about opinion pieces or leaders, but about the selection of stories and increasingly about making up stories. I cannot see either the Guardian, Mirror or MSNBC only reporting terrorist incidents by white supremacists, and ignoring those by Muslims. Nor would these organisations make up claims about foreign cities being ‘no go areas’. Suggesting an equivalence between The Mail and The Mirror, or between Fox and MSNBC, is a trap that many fall into.

Now it is natural, in a liberal democracy, that the part of the media that conveys propaganda should pretend it is just a purveyor of truth. When its propaganda becomes self-evident, it is also natural for it to claim that this is because it is others who are distorting the facts. In this sense, the fact that Trump and his supporters talk about the dominant liberal media producing fake news, and the right wing tabloids talk about bias at the BBC should not worry us at all. It is merely indicative that those making the allegations are in the business of, or supporting those, supplying propaganda. [2] More importantly, if we allow this attempt at deflection to move us away from examining what different parts of the media are doing, then the propagandists have won.

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I think it was Charlie Bean who first told me about the stupidity of a firm announcing that it was going to have to make redundancies, without specifying where those redundancies would be. It is foolish because the atmosphere of uncertainty created means that those most able to leave, who are almost certainly the brightest and best and therefore those that the firm would like to keep, end up leaving the firm because they can. Voluntary quits mean the firm no longer needs to create redundancies, but its loses its best quality staff to other firms.

I thought about this when reading about yet more examples of how EU citizens are currently being treated by this government. Colin Talbot has documented what is going on here, but there are literally thousands of similar stories. People who have lived and worked in the UK for years are told by the home office, when their application for permanent residence is turned down, to prepare to leave the UK. Applications which ask for a ridiculous amount of information and are turned down for often mindless reasons. It is a system designed to increase the chances that applicants will fail.

The effect this has, of course, is that those most able to leave the UK, who will often be the most able in terms of the importance of the work they do, will go. Refusing to confirm the rights of EU residents and sending them scary letters is how the UK government is making the same mistake as the firm that announces future unspecified redundancies. I am sometimes told that Brexit will allow the UK to choose the ‘best immigrants’, the ones that will contribute most to UK output and the public purse. Here we see Brexit achieving exactly the opposite: a system designed to encourage the best to leave.

But this is not a new Brexit phenomenon. As I described here, students wanting to come and study in the UK have faced a similar brutal regime, where a mistake by the UK bureaucracy - even when it is acknowledged as such - can lead to additional expense for the student and a period of uncertainty which can only set back their learning. Students midway through their course are told they have 60 days to find an alternative institution to sponsor them or face deportation. The UK Border Agency has no reason to believe that these are not perfectly genuine students who have paid good money to study in the UK, but it chooses to punish them because of alleged failings by a university.

There is an obvious pattern here. It is to treat those who are not UK nationals with a complete lack of humanity. It is, quite simply, very cruel. I talked above about how counterproductive it is, but even if it was not it remains very wrong. It is not something that any democratic government should do. Similar things are happening in the US as a result of Trump’s victory. This lack of humanity comes from a government that begins treating foreigners as a problem, as something to be discouraged, rather than as the people that they are. And it persists because a large part of the press deliberately ignores what is going on. That in turn reduces coverage in the broadcast media.

Contrast this with Germany, which has admitted around 1 million refugees over the last two years. Whatever the motives of the German government, German society adopted a ‘welcome culture’ to these refugees. There have been problems of course, but it is significant that the most serious you may have read about have been made up by certain US media organisations. Contrast this with the UK government shutting down the ‘Dubs amendment’ programme after only a few hundred refugee children had been admitted to the UK. For Germans it seems that refugees are people who have suffered and need help, but for the British they are something to fear and should be kept away at all costs.

Why is Germany welcoming a million refugees and the UK appears to do what they can to keep them out? Is the difference between the two countries something to do with an innate difference in national character? Do we in the UK allow our government to continue their inhuman treatment of foreign nationals because there is

“a special kind of British suggestibility – willingness to obey orders, thinking in generalisations, the search for panaceas, faith in power, which made many British capable of falling to deeper depths than many people of other nations”

Of course not. The above is a quote from Stephen Spender, visiting Germany in 1945, where I have changed German to British. After WWII it was common to believe that what happened in Germany under Hitler could only have happened if there had been some common abnormality in the German character. It was as mistaken then just as it is mistaken now to believe the British are particularly hostile to foreigners. But we should not be surprised when those outside the UK begin to think that way.

There is a much simpler explanation in both cases. The state propaganda machine of Nazi Germany was a critical ingredient in their rise to power and maintaining power. Hitler devoted chapters of Mein Kampf to the study and practice of propaganda. It is perhaps the best real world example of the propaganda archetype I described before. In the UK and US it is very different. Critically propaganda outlets do not have a monopoly of information, and they need to appear much like the rest of the media to retain their readers and their influence on the national stage. But a large part of the UK and US media is nevertheless increasingly acting as a propaganda vehicle, particularly in the area of immigration.

This change is measurable, as this report of a study shows. To quote “over the last 10 years [the UK press] appears to have been complicit in the narrowing of a discussion that is now characterised by an increasingly negative tone.” The anti-immigration propaganda in the Mail and Express reached a peak just before the referendum. As Liz Gerard describes here, these two papers printed on average two or three hostile immigration stories in each issue in 2016. The day before polling, the Mail printed six whole pages devoted to immigration. You would have to be a fool to believe these were ‘reflecting the interest of readers’: it was designed to push the referendum vote the way these papers wanted. It was pure propaganda.

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The are lots of stories around about a post-truth world created by social media. It is usually written up as if it is a new phenomenon created by new technology, but as Timothy Garton Ash notes ‘post-truth’ is nothing new. Equally the hype over Cambridge Analytica (here or here), whether it is accurate or not, is just the technological extension of something that is already happening, and has happened in the past. Most people still rely on the MSM for their news. Post-truth mainly comes from the part of the MSM whose business is propaganda, and the inability of others to treat it as such. Fake news stories on social media did not win the election for Trump. Fox News almost certainly did.

As Tim Harford notes, successful attempts to divert those in a democracy from the truth have a long history. Scientists published evidence that smoking caused lung cancer in the early 1950s. It took decades for that information to lead to campaigns to discourage smoking and for smokers to acknowledge there was a problem, and the reason it took decades was that the tobacco companies conducted a PR plan with that aim in mind. Exactly the same happened with climate change, with considerable success in the US as we are now witnessing with Trump’s election. As a tobacco firm wrote “doubt is our product”.

As Tim and George Lakoff explain, simply rebutting lies with facts can often be counterproductive. The Leave campaign's £350 million a week was a classic example. The more it was talked about, the more it became fixed in the mind of voters. The regrettable truth is that most people do not read the detail, but instead just absorb the headline. In many ways the EU referendum is a classic example of how facts can lose out to propaganda.

All this can just seem depressing, but it is not if we learn some obvious lessons. The first, which Ben Chu explains, is for policy makers not to fall into the trap of appeasement.

“Christina Boswell and James Hampshire have highlighted how the public discourse on immigration in Germany was transformed between 2000 and 2008. Social Democratic politicians used familiar arguments about the economic benefits of immigration. But they did this alongside a campaign to promote positive narratives about immigration and its place in the country’s history to counter entrenched perceptions of Germany being kein Einwanderunglsand (“not a country of immigration”). This twin approach largely succeeded in changing attitudes, flowering in the generous position taken by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat government towards Syrian refugees in the summer of 2015.

By contrast in the UK, at the same time, Labour began to talk up “British jobs for British workers” and never seriously rebutted the dominant and dismal narrative of the tabloid press about immigration being an economic burden and culturally corrosive, arguably helping to set the scene for the current bout of self-harming Brexit-related xenophobia.”

Now politicians here may respond that the German example is impossible given the strength of the propaganda coming from UK tabloids (compared to its relative absence in Germany), but that just strengthens my point that we should start recognising that propaganda for what it is. That recognition needs to start in the rest of the mainstream media. According to a study outlined here, “a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system ... This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.”

But the authors also note that “Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.” What this traditional media needs to do, in both the UK and US, is to recognise propaganda for what it is, and treat it with the disdain that it deserves.

In the US that is quite a challenge because a lot of that propaganda is now created or recycled by the President himself. In the UK it is a challenge because the right wing tabloids have the government’s support, and the government holds the purse strings of the BBC. [4] It is very easy just to ignore what is happening, and carry on as usual. But this inability or unwillingness to recognise the danger posed by propaganda is part of the reason 2016 happened. Liberal democracy’s survival in the UK and US may depend on recognising and resisting what is in the process of destroying it.

[1] Taken from Stahl and Hansen. The implication that they draw, that propaganda as news or post-truth or whatever you want to call it can be combatted by a “democratic revival” seems simply naive. To see the profound difference between, say, the Blair government compared to what came before and after them, you only have to look at how they regarded academics.

[2] For those who say how do we know who is telling the truth, then you are part of the problem.

[3] And among academics, UK nationals as well. 

[4] And, it seems, increasingly supplies its journalists.