Foreign-owned propaganda outlet attacks democratic protest: Words are crude weapons for British newspapers
The Sun’s own words can be weaponised against it but they rarely are…
Today, a foreign-owned propaganda rag, bankrolled by an Australian billionaire with US citizenship and a long history of shadowy influence over politicians in the UK, US and Australia, published a ginned up story to stifle the pursuit of democratic protest in Britain. It was headlined 'TERROR' APP USE | COP26: Eco-warriors using secret messaging app adopted by terror groups to plot chaos in Glasgow (crunched down to Protest ‘Terror’ App Use in print).
The way The Sun writes about the world — and especially those it doesn’t like — can easily be turned against it. But ‘rival’ newspapers and the rest of the British media treat the paper and its hacks as though they are serious people acting in good faith. It’s part twisted nostalgia and part self-interest; you never know when you might want a job with News UK and just look at what loyalty has done for nodding dogs like Stig Abell.
The paper — recently written down to zero in the News UK balance sheet — is cruising on the last vapours of cultural capital built up in the 70s and 80s. And, unlike other red tops like The Daily Star or The Daily Express, it has a proprieter in Rupert Murdoch who still endlessly fascinates. The other tabloids are bland evils; The Sun still gets to be the Death Star.
That Death Star still terrifies politicians because they know what happens when it trains its planet-sized ego destroying laser on someone (Matt Hancock is still walking round looking like a Looney Toons character who caught TNT). In March 2020, The Sun was outstripped in print sales by The Daily Mail and, while by some metrics it can claim to be battling it out with The Daily Mirror to be the UK’s largest news site, other measures put MailOnline far ahead of both, but it’s still treated like a force and amplified in news headlines and paper reviews.
Subject its stories to even cursory inspection though and the much-vaunted Sun sub-editor magic and powerful tabloidese immediately loses its power. Take the “terror app” story I referred to above. The “secret messaging app” referred to in the headline is Telegram, an app so secret that its available on most app stores and was recommended by The Sun’s own Deputy Technology & Science Editor as an alternative to WhatsApp during the recent Facebook outage.
But the purpose the story is not proportionality, it’s propagandistic. It’s designed to present protestors as a threatening ‘other’ and hyping up the idea that they’re using the same “secret messaging app” as “terror groups” does that. The Sun reporter, Paul Sims, who wrote the initial copy and the sub-editors who punched it up and stuck a headline on it know that many readers won’t get past the head and perhaps the first paragraph. That opening reads:
It's been revealed that eco-warriors are using a secret messaging app adopted by terror networks to plot chaos at COP26 in Glasgow. Extremists are planning waves of direct action and assembling protesters via Telegram — which provides end-to-end encryption for instant messages, videos and file sharing.
It’s been revealed by whom? Sims doesn’t say — it’s most likely the police or the security services — but for The Sun’s purposes it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about conveying facts to the reader but a paranoid vibe. A mild quote from Extinction Rebellion — the “extremists” — is included at the end of the story1 as a fig leaf to ‘balance’ but it’s placed there in the full knowledge most readers won’t reach it, especially online where it comes under a panel of other ‘top stories’.
Without the ‘mysterious’ sources and the heavy spin on the app being used2, the story would boil down to: People use app to talk to each other. It’s extemely likely that a significant number of Sun hacks use it and its rival Signal for both personal and professional reasons just as many senior politicians do too.
When The Sun reported in May 2020 that Boris Johnson and other figures in his government were using Signal — an app whose self-destructing messages are a real boon to a government that loves to duck FOI requests — the headline read: Boris Johnson joins ultra-secure social network Signal where messages self-destruct and the copy observed:
But while some security services have succeeded in hacking into other messaging services, including WhatsApp groups, Signal has so far proved impenetrable and is preferred by technology experts.
Curiously it opted against the headline Boris Johnson joins secret encrypted messaging app favoured by the far-right and Islamic State. Today’s Telegram story includes the fact that “Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi used [the app] to plan his attack in 2017, which killed 22” but doesn’t mention that it’s also somewhere people talk about football (there’s a seemingly unofficial Sun Football Telegram channel for example).
But is it any surprise that what ended up as little more than a boxout in the print edition is so light on fact and heavy on ideology when Sims’ other stories in the past 24 hours were on daughter’s foot tongueing ex-footballer Paul Scholes visiting a lap dancing club and a dog whose owner claims it can detect ghosts “like Scooby Doo”.3
There are plenty of other bigger and more damaging examples of words being weaponised with no relationship to their actual meaning in the British media’s output today but I focused on this one because it’s so blatant.
I could have talked about Laura Kuenssberg’s ‘accidental’ retweet of a tiny right-wing Twitter account that she also follows4 or The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley — featured on Thought For The Day this morning defending the concept of original sin — praising his once and future colleague Boris Johnson while braning Greta Thunberg “a communist”. Again, oddly, he reserved his ire for the young woman while letting David Attenborough off scot free.
Over the weekend, Press Gazette published a piece by its editor, Dominic Ponsford, in which “Sun insiders” along with executives at Mail Online (imagine those Lord of the Rings’ orcs who were excited about meat being back on the menu but they’re talking about “side-boob” instead) complained that “they are unfairly being downgraded by Google search rankings thus depriving them of audience share.”
Somewhat irritated by Press Gazette’s tweet promoting the story, I quote tweeted it saying…
Here’s some things a bunch of known sociopaths claim that we, their friendly megaphone, will present uncritically.
… to which Press Gazette replied:5
It’s called reporting.
There is no doubt reporting in the piece: Ponsford takes recent examples of Sun scoops — ‘scoop’ being another word that is more debased than Paul Schole’s reputation — and shows that there is evidence that recency bias in the Google search algorithm does mean original stories lose prominence to rewrites. But the problem comes with the willingness to structure the story with the framing of reality preferred by The Sun and Mail at the forefront.
Just like the ‘Telegram’ story, the quotes from Google come in the second half of the piece after the premise put forward by the angry tabloid hacks has been established. Does Google’s algorithm — and its long-standing refusal to offer any real transparency on how the secret sauce is made — make SEO a dark art and baffling art? No doubt. But the Mail’s quotes are hilarious:
… it certainly appears that Google’s bias against MailOnline is much more pronounced when its algorithms are ranking political stories, than for stories of more general interest.
Whether this is a deliberate company policy, or simply the result of unconscious bias on the part of Californian web engineers programming algorithms preferring websites that echo their own ‘woke’ left-liberal views, we cannot know.
Such is the ego of MailOnline and its executives that they believe that a cabal of Google engineers are determined to screw with its search results. That’s Google, a company that ditched its unofficial slogan “don’t be evil” when it realised that evil is delicious seasoning when it comes to the bottom line.
To read Sun and Mail execs — some of the world’s biggest bullies — presenting themselves as victims is vomit-inducing. Almost as hypocritical as Sun hacks pretending the mere act of using Telegram makes you a terrorist sympathiser. Tabloids use words as crude weapons; it doesn’t backfire nearly enough. With its daily diet of fear and paranoia, there’s no bigger terror app than The Sun.
“But Extinction Rebellion said: ‘All our planned actions will be non-violent.’
Something that was exarcerbated by once and future cop Sir Keir Starmer’s tabloid-style scaremongering about encrypted apps during a recent session of PMQs.
“Scooby Boo”.
I will come back to it.
Hi Dom!