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Doomsday dazzle

The smear campaign that just ran and ran, has finally collapsed. In a sane country, it should have fallen at the first hurdle. The claim that Corbyn <a href="https://twitter.com/SunApology/status/964043999798538240" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">unknowingly met a Czech spy</a> wasn't particularly interesting. The claim that he was an asset of Czech intelligence should have been a damp squib when Czech security services calmly refuted it, and when the single source proved to be so unreliable.Yet, our right-wing press have simply interpreted factual rebuttal as a challenge. So, taking up a ludicrous <a href="http://zelo-street.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/guido-fawked-corbyn-stasi-file-isnt.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">story</a> from the smear site, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IGYgzy-3ls&amp;t=225s" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Guido Fawkes</a>, they began to claim that there was a secret Stasi file on Corbyn. It was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/02/19/theresa-may-says-jeremy-corbyn-should-open-transparent-links/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">claimed</a> that Corbyn had the ability to request the publication of this file, and refused to do so. The Sun argued that his "<a href="https://twitter.com/SunApology/status/964408349105078279" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Soviet-spy links</a>" disqualified him from office. The story has turned out to be flatly, unequivocally, and embarrassingly for those behind it, <a href="https://www.bstu.bund.de/EN/PressOffice/Topics/20180221_statement-corbyn.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">false</a>.So, at last, the smear cycle is dying its deserved and overdue death. The Sun's disgraced political editor is keen to <a href="https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/966370144028184576" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">defend his reporter's story</a>, but when Tory ministers are <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/jeremy-corbyn-lawyers-ben-bradley-12062997" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">nervously rowing back on their smears</a>, its all over. When the big beast of Tory broadcasters <a href="https://politicalscrapbook.net/2018/02/andrew-neil-slams-tory-campaign-of-lies-and-disinformation-against-jeremy-corbyn/#more-70731" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">devours a senior Tory minister</a> over the Corbyn claims made by three colleagues, it's finished. And, because each escalation has raised the stakes, it is dying in a far more humiliating way for both the Tories and the right-wing press. Ironically, this would have been a far more effective smear if it had remained low profile.No one has to ask why these smears appeared in the first place. The British press has a remarkable record of falsification, including what must be hundreds of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loony_left#Baa_Baa_White_Sheep" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">famous examples</a> of slanders aimed at the Left. The Corbyn leadership has merely forced them to escalate their output. And this has always been part of a wider industrial system of fake news. What people call 'fake news' is typically some variant or combination of infotainment, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/jun/12/pressandpublishing.mondaymediasection" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">propaganda</a>, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/feb/23/churnalism-pr-media-trust" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">churnalism</a>, categories which tend to bleed into one another. If the category applies to online content, it also applies to the print media.The Murdoch empire has obviously been at the heart of this industry. Murdoch's strategy, since purchasing The News of the World (1968) and The Sun (1969), was to combine labour-saving technologies with a shift in content to light entertainment, sensationalism and sport. By these means, he would build the commercial success with which would come ideological power.At first, his newspapers were not particularly right-wing. The Sun was a Labour-supporting paper, a hangover from the days when it was a popular, social-democratic, trade union-owned newspaper, The Daily Herald. But once Murdoch's consumer base was built, and with Thatcher ascending in the Conservative Party, he switched his newspapers to align with the New Right. From then on, political propaganda appeared as infotainment as, for example, when The Sun attributed its own editorialising to the "page three girls". Smears were offered as jaunty light entertainment, as when Tony Benn was 'diagnosed' in the paper on the basis of opinions falsely attributed to an American psychiatrist. In all likelihood, the origin of many of the smears was a smear sheet set up by an ex-spook, known as Background Briefing on Subversion, and then -- when taken by Tory operative David Hart -- British Briefing. The Briefing was a clandestine publication, circulated among a select list of MPs and journalists, who were asked not to refer to it. It specialised in circulating lies and smears about Labour MPs, the British Council of Churches, charities, moderate Tories, and others disliked by the far right of the intelligence services, many of its claims likely emanating from MI5. Labour MPs and charities like Shelter were listed as having 'communist' affiliations, for example.In developing his alliance with Thatcher, Murdoch also secured the services of the Metropolitan Police in busting up print unions so that he could restructure the production process. And, in that same moment, formed a series of alliances with senior police officials -- with results that <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-09/seymour-rupert-murdoch-and-the-conspiracy-machine/3880030" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Hackgate</a> cast a dismal light on. Some of its <a href="http://nicholasjones.org.uk/articles/categories/leveson-inquiry/231-a-failed-attempt-to-expose-the-suns-trashing-of-neil-kinnock-rattled-defences-at-fortress-wapping-but-left-the-murdoch-press-unchallenged" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">smears</a> against Labour came directly from those associations. This is not by itself a peculiar set of relationships: newspapers and broadcasters tend to work within the orbit of the state, as de facto apparatuses of state power, and Murdoch stable simply became the voice of the most right-wing factions of the British state.The same strategy was later deployed with his broadcasting media, first with BSkyB and its 24 hour news channel, Sky, and then with Fox. By building a consumer base with popular content such as The Simpsons, and then creating a new outlet for the proprietor’s ideology and building links to the political Right. Fox News ultimately succeeded in turning the angry, right-wing talk radio circuit into a broadcasting arm of the Bush administration, linked to the right-wing of the state apparatuses. Currently, Fox &amp; Friends is the Trump administration's biggest television cheerleader.An interesting recent development is the fusion between The Sun and the Guido Fawkes website. Declining sales, the Hackgate scandals, and a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/05/the-sun-losses-advertising-hacking-charges-profits-revenues" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">collapse in advertising revenue</a> deriving from the rise of the platforms, have all hit the Murdoch press hard. The Fawkes website, however, has been relatively successful as an online tabloid version of a certain defunct smear sheet which proprietor Paul Staines used to edit when he worked for David Hart. The secrets of its success are various -- a pot pourri of smears, recycled content, lite porn, the odd frisson of racism or misogyny. But what it has managed to do is combine some of the repertoires of the Briefing with a Sun-like jauntiness. Indeed, that chipperness is an ideological alibi -- you can throw mud, and claim that it's just a laff if it doesn't hit the mark. The only thing that's missing is the one pound day trips to Calais (but soon!). So, it is logical enough that The Sun hired Staines and crew to write a 'Guido' political gossip column over three years, then hired Staines' colleague Harry Cole as its Westminster correspondent, and has preserved a close relationship to the website.And so, it was the Guido Fawkes website that 'broke' the non-story about the secret Stasi file on Corbyn, and The Sun which recycled the story and ensured it would be picked up by the Telegraph and the Times. There is no need to speculate on what wasted ex-spy, retired politician or signal from outer space fed the original non-story to the website. It wouldn't matter, if there weren't parts of our established media that operate as a well-funded fake news farm. This is, in its way, a very old ecology of right-wing misinformation. What is relatively new is that the smears didn't stick. And brazening it out hasn't helped. There are contingent reasons for this. The prosecution of the smear, from the press to Tory cabinet ministers, appears to have been amateurish. The theme of Corbyn being a deadly menace has never stuck. If it didn't work during the election, why the hell do they think it would work now? Do any of them ever learn? Moreover, going big with a non-story that insinuated treason, and then escalating, to the point where the leader of the opposition was being outright accused by cabinet members of treason, was a desperado move.  It invited attention to an easily refutable, and refuted, claim.Long-term, the eye-catching headline just isn't authoritative in the way it may once have been. The collapse in readership and trust in 'old media', and the ease and speed with which counter-narratives can spread, means that the kinds of suggestibility that mass media used to rely on to distract, muddy the waters, intimidate and undermine conviction, is no longer as potent as it was. Apart from anything else, the mere fact of having to wade through oceans of shit on the internet means we have to be well-attuned to tactics of manipulation.Increasingly, with the rise of the platforms, this old school smear machine is losing ground. It is a product of Cold War era print monopolies and the relationships with states and para-state operators developed in that time. This isn't the basis for triumphalism. As the story of dark money, Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart, and the role of sock puppets and trolls involved in online propaganda demonstrates, a new rightist machinery is gradually emerging. It is less powerful for now, but also nastier and less restrained. And since it may be losing a wider cultural battle over the long term, it is apt to become rather desperate. Still, we are where we are. These smears might have worked once. They might have finished off political careers. Now the only careers that look weaker as a result are on the front-bench. In other words, the moral panic about 'fake news' has come at a time of unique crisis -- of both profitability and authority -- for the fake news industry. That's what the discourse is concealing.

Richard Seymour

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