What's water?

For many journalists, columnists, and commentators, propaganda is so commonplace they can't even see it.

Mar 06, 2023

Previously: Slop will eat itself
The clash between Isabel Oakeshott and Cathy Newman was a real scrap in the British media's professional wrestling antics, but truth was still the loser.

Camilla Tominey: What do you think should happen to Matt Hancock…? 

Allison Pearson: I’m not a lawyer but I would like to look at criminal proceedings against some of these people… 

Tominey: Allison, for what? How can you do that? He’ll be saying I made these policy decisions in good faith; I saw data: hundreds of thousands of people were going to die. You can’t argue with the first lockdown, surely? When we didn’t know the dangers of this virus and we had to protect ourselves…  at the time, we were seeing images from Italy and people were dying; they were in hospital corridors… 

Pearson: These WhatsApps don’t date from that early period. These WhatsApps date from the end of 2020 when we had got a much clearer picture about what was going on. We’ve not only got Hancock saying, ‘Let’s scare the pants off the public’. Camilla, during the Second World War — the worst crisis our country ever faced in modern times — the government didn’t use propaganda against the British public…

— The Camilla Tominey Show, GB News, Sunday 5 March 2023

A fish doesn’t know it’s in water until it’s pulled out gasping into the air or onto the unfamiliar territory of dry land. If you spend long enough within the media, it’s possible to become fish-like, unable to discern the inherent qualities of that environment, and propaganda becomes like water; something to swim through, a habitat to which you contribute.

I can’t say for sure whether Allison Pearson actually believes that propaganda was not used by the state against the British public during World War II or if that was simply a rhetorical point that suited her needs in the midst of that particular rant. Functionally, it makes no difference. After decades as an opinion columnist, Pearson resides in deep water; she is as terrifying as those creatures distorted by the pressure in the darkest part of the ocean, highly and specifically adapted to the inhospitable environment of The Daily Telegraph.

The British state has never been wholly honest about… well… anything really, but the Second World War is one of the high points of dishonesty to the public. The Ministry of Information — conceived during the First World War, first as the more bluntly named Propaganda Bureau, and shut down in 1919 — restarted in 1939 (the planning for it started as early as 1935). Its influence extended to cinema, newsreels, and radio as well as newspapers, books, and posters.

The Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four — the one book so many columnists are obsessed with referencing — is based, in part, on the Ministry of Information. Orwell’s description of its building (“… an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air…”) is based on the Ministry of Information’s wartime HQ, the University of London’s Senate House. Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, worked in its Censorship Department.

In his proposed preface to Animal Farm — ‘Freedom of the Press’ — written in 1945 but first published by the Times Literary Supplement in 1975, Orwell quotes a letter from a publisher who ditched the book after Ministry ‘advice’:

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think... I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.

In his 1943 resignation letter to the BBC — where he had been employed composing and presenting talks broadcast to India — Orwell offered the forties equivalent of “no one tells me what to write”…

On no occasion have I been compelled to say on the air anything that I would not have said as a private individual.

… and the Animal Farm preface showed his attitude to wartime censorship had remained constant:

Any fair-minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian ʻco-ordinationʼ that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

Four years after he wrote that essay, Orwell — by then on his death bed — supplied a list of those who were “in [his] opinion crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way… not to be trusted as propagandists,” to his close friend Celia Kirwan, who had recently started working at the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), a deliberately blandly-named covert propaganda unit focused on anti-communist propaganda. The note contained the names of thirty-eight journalists and writers.

When the Ministry of Information was wound down in 1946, it was replaced by the Central Office of Information (which was shut down in 2011 with its functions subsumed into the Cabinet Office). Propaganda shifted in its form and shape in the years after the Second World War but the British state was still highly active in its creation — particularly from the IRD — while the propaganda myths of the war era (‘Blitz Spirit’, love of queues, ‘Dunkirk Spirit’, make do and mend) live on in national myths and media presentations of that era.

There are many, many examples of domestic propaganda efforts in the 77 years since the Ministry of Information dissolved into its new form. Here are just three:

In the 1970s, the government organised and executed a plan to discredit Amnesty over its investigations into British Army and intelligence service torture campaigns in Northern Ireland.

In November 1995, the Sunday Telegraph carried a claim that Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was connected to currency counterfeiting; the author of the story, Con Coughlin, claimed “a British banking official” was his source; he had, in fact, been briefed by MI6 agents — who were part of a media influence campaign called I/Ops (Information Operations) — and had no other sources. Con Coughlin still appears in the Telegraph on a weekly basis.

In September 2017, David Rose — whose long history of climate change denial, record of losing defamation suits, and employment by the Mail on Sunday should cause you to apply more than a pinch of salt — claimed in The New Statesman that he had disseminated false and distorted information in the run-up to and during the Iraq War, influenced by briefings from the security services.

Rose wrote:

Every national paper and broadcasting outlet has one – and usually, only one – reporter to whom each agency will speak, provided they observe the niceties. For these favoured few, there will be access likely to grow as the journalist proves his or her “worth”, along with considerable perks…  

… To my everlasting regret, I strongly supported the Iraq invasion, in person and in print. I had become a recipient of what we now know to have been sheer disinformation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his purported “links” with al-Qaeda – claims put out by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. I took these stories seriously because they were corroborated by “off-the-record” intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic. I am certain that those to whom I spoke at MI6 acted then in good faith. I remember one particular conversation I had with an official in the early summer of 2003, not long before Andrew Gilligan’s BBC broadcast about the government having “sexed up” its dossier on Iraqi WMDs in September 2002. Already it was becoming apparent that the threat had probably been a chimera. “Don’t worry,” my source said soothingly. “We’ll find them. We’re certain they’re there. It’s just taking longer than we expected. Keep your nerve.”

Since then, the cloak of plausible deniability has allowed those same spooks to claim they never believed in WMDs at all, and that they were the victims of neocon and Blairite pressure. One source, in particular, I find particularly hard to forgive – a very senior US official who told me time and again that Saddam really did have operational links with al-Qaeda, only to state very publicly much later that the CIA had never properly endorsed this view, and that its dissemination was all the fault of the Bush administration and Chalabi.

MI5 also told me deniable codswallop in the febrile weeks after 9/11. At one lunch, an official insisted that the preachers Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada – now said by the same agency to have been Britain’s most dangerous men throughout the 1990s – were “harmless rent-a-gobs” who might have a high public profile but had no hard links with jihadist terrorism.

The water in which many prominent hacks swim is not merely a product of the state; it is infused with the wants and desires of their proprietors. The old line and old lie — “no one tells me what to write” — is thoroughly believed because what you can and can’t say in any given newspaper is so obvious that it infuses the walls like cigarette smoke in an old pub.

Three comments from the past 24 hours show how real or feigned ignorance of the water in which the political and media classes swim manifests itself:

In an interview with the BBC, Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, said, without irony, in response to another story of government incompetence:

It’s one of many reasons why, actually, it’s time for the Conservatives to have a spell in opposition to pull themselves together, get their act together, and let a serious party do some governing for a while.

He’s accidentally explained the game there: You can have either the blue or the red team and when one gets tired, the other takes possession.

In the same interview, Streeting defended Keir Starmer’s attempted appointment of the senior civil servant, Sue Gray, as his new chief-of-staff, by saying:

… look at serious Conservative politicians — I realise they’re in short supply today — but you look at previous serious Conservative politicians: Francis Maude, who led the Cabinet Office, now a Conservative member of the House of Lords; George Osborne, former Chancellor. All saying very much the same thing that Sue Gray is someone of impeccable integrity…

That’s the professional wrestling-style artifice of British politics and media at work again: 10 years ago, Osborne was the architect of austerity who went on to be booed at the London 2012 Olympics before reinventing himself as the man of many jobs, notably becoming Editor of the Evening Standard.

In the latter form of his poisonous Pokemon evolution, he’s featured as a bit-part character in the Telegraph’s ongoing ‘Lockdown Papers’ series; most notably, he pops up giving his former chief-of-staff Matt Hancock advice on his image and promising an Evening Standard splash on demand to the then-Health Secretary. He only partially delivered.

During his latest appearance on The Andrew Neil Show’s chummy politics-as-sitcom setup — alongside his former ‘foe’ Ed Ball — Osborne talked breezily about how stories end up on the front page:

Andrew Neil: … it seemed quite easy to get onto your front page when you were editor of the Standard… 

George Osborne: (chuckling) As you would know Andrew — having edited a newspaper yourself — it’s not unheard of for newspaper editors to talk to politicians about setting up stories… 

Ed Balls: (chuckling) Former employees! 

Neil: You said, give me a quote and you’ll have the front page. 

Osborne: You might notice, he was quite disappointed because he didn’t get the front page he wanted; Boris Johnson’s baby knocked him off the front page… 

… 

Neil: I’ve never offered a politician a front page. 

Osborne: You never did any exclusives? I mean, they’re pretty stock in trade for the newspaper trade; if you get an exclusive thing most daily newspapers do it every day. 

Neil: This wasn’t much of an exclusive; he was just pushing his testing regime. 

Osborne: That’s why he didn’t get the front page.

Hancock didn’t get the splash but Osborne did give him a front-page story, albeit it stuffed in a strap at the bottom. The chat between Osborne, Neil and Balls — doesn’t that sound like the estate agents from hell? — stank of the kind of establishment cosiness that runs through the WhatsApp messages they were discussing. It’s brash contempt for the public presented without any fear.

And ‘contempt’ brings me to the third example of blatant or blatantly performative ignorance from the last 24 hours: Robert Peston, the media’s most painful example of peek-a-boo analysis, a man who seems to have absolutely zero object permanence, responding to the news that Boris Johnson wants to elevate his father, the accused sexual harasser and domestic abuser, Stanley Johnson, to the House of Lords. Peston wrote on Twitter:

Is it time to reform the honours list?

Hacks have been issuing that plaintive cry since before Harold Wilson’s infamous Lavender List and wrung their hands most recently when David Cameron blew the dust off the ‘resignation honours’ gag in 2016 (finding space to give his wife’s stylist a gong). The Times’ leader column today stretched itself to call Johnson’s corrupt desires “unwise”.

In the water, things that seem unbelievable to those of us on the other side of the aquarium glass provoke little more than a shrug. As Boris Johnson serves himself, the wife of his former hard-right hand man turned main antagonist Dominic Cummings (who identifies as Otto Von Bismarck), Mary Wakefield, pumped out a wild piece of propaganda in The Spectator. In a column headlined Why trans kids are now ‘coming out’ as animals, she wrote:

My progressive friends will tell me I’m taking it all too seriously, that identifying as a cat is just playful fun. They like to cite the widespread reporting of a piece of nonsense clickbait about cat-gender pupils in America requiring litter trays in schools. But just because there’s fake news doesn’t mean there’s not true news too. A friend in the education world has told me he knows of several British schools in which children are identifying as animals. There’s a horse child who’s taken out by staff for gallops; a boy dinosaur who is fed on strips of meat.

It’s BrassEye “security footage of a paedophile dressed as a school” level mad and you might assume that it has to be satire — she’s just describing children engaged in imaginative play and extrapolating that out to imagined extremes — but it does not appear to be. Later in the piece, she writes:

It’s not joie de vivre that leads a teacher to affirm a child’s non-binary identity. None of this is a joke. Most adults playing the gender game are governed by fear. There’s the fear of children becoming suicidal if confronted, and fear of not following official guidance. How can we expect teachers to restore sanity when every authority they turn to advises them to affirm?

My step-daughter’s school makes it difficult to go to the toilet during lessons and issues strict guidelines on uniforms. It’s hardly an outlier among the academies and there definitely aren’t teachers feeding children raw meat (imagine how long the risk assessment would be?) or taking kids out to gallop around the playground when they should be working on their maths.

There are a growing number of protests at schools about harsh rules on uniform and toilets being locked during lessons. But if you read the propaganda in The Daily Mail this week, you’ll be told that it’s TikTok is fuelling “school riots” rather than bad policies by headteachers high on hard-line policies.

Of course, the Mail has reframed protests about locked toilets into rage about “gender-neutral lavatories”. In the report, Chris Stokel-Walker, a tech journalist and author of a book on the social network TikTok Boom, was lured into comparing the protests to “the way Twitter spread the Arab Spring”. If he’d been around in 1968, no doubt he would be focusing on the use of telephone lines during the student protests rather than the underlying issues.

Wakefield’s column is this passage from a recent satirical article by The Onion made real:

“Quentin” is a 14-year-old assigned female at birth who now identifies as male against the wishes of his parents. His transition was supported by one of his unmarried teachers, who is not a virgin. He stole his parents’ car and drove to the hospital, where a doctor immediately began performing top surgery on him. Afterward, driving home drunk from the hospital, Quentin became suicidally depressed, and he wonders now, homeless and ridden with gonorrhea, if transitioning was a mistake.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

It and the Mail’s distortions about the school protests would be funny if they did not contribute to real consequences. The water spills over to drown the rest of us and it’s the most vulnerable people who are engulfed first.

This morning, Ofcom announced that its investigation into the Mark Steyn show on GB News had concluded that the presenter used UK Health Security Agency data to “materially mislead” his audience. On April 21 last year, he claimed that figures proved that the third Covid-19 vaccine booster caused higher infection rates, hospitalisations, and deaths. It was just one of many occasions that Steyn broadcast lies and he resigned from the channel last month after it told him he’d have to pay fines issued if Ofcom found it in breach of the broadcasting code.

In a way, it’s good news but the regulator is using its pinky finger to block a single hole in the dam while a deluge engulfs us all. Pearson’s lies on GB News this weekend and in her weekly Telegraph columns will not face any sanctions and, as I was writing this edition, an episode of The News Agents podcast featuring Boris Johnson’s sister, Rachel Johnson, discussing her brother’s attempt to make their father a Lord just dropped. The News Agents and LBC, the radio station where Rachel Johnson presents a show, share the same parent company, Global.

Earlier today, Emily Maitlis — one of the hosts of The News Agents, who made a heavily-publicised speech about the demise of impartiality as she left the BBC — participated in a cosy little stunt where she was interviewed by Labour leader, Keir Starmer.

What’s water? If you asked them, they could not describe it.

Thanks to DKD for reading the draft.

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