How American ‘disinformation’ experts distort the truth
A new US government report has accused RT of spreading false narratives. However, in the process, Washington officials have exposed some untruths of their own. Far from being an isolated case, it’s typical of the West’s burgeoning disinformation industry.
Whenever a new ‘threat’ appears, be it ethnic conflict, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism or anything else, the coffers of government open up, and funds pour into state organizations, think tanks and private ‘experts’ in an effort to dissect the problem in question. That process rests on the assumption there is a problem. Consequently, the industry dedicated to it invariably favours the idea that it exists. Furthermore, an element of self-selection means that people who believe the problem is serious predominate over sceptics. The result is a tendency towards threat inflation.
This dynamic is clearly visible in the ‘disinformation industry’ that has grown up in the past few years to counter ‘Russian propaganda’. It has issued report after report illuminating what its members believe is the dire threat that RT, Sputnik and Russian ‘fellow travellers’ and ‘useful idiots’ pose to Western democracy.
Unfortunately, the quality of the output is often extremely poor. The information warriors imagine themselves as guardians of the truth. In their eyes, their interpretations of reality are objective and true, whereas alternative interpretations are biased and false. But what they fail to realise is that they are just as biased as those they criticise. The results are egregious errors of analysis and, on occasion, outright falsehoods. In this way, an industry dedicated to fighting disinformation itself becomes a source of it.