Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News

There is an enormous difference in you and me Mark. I did not enter this to taunt you nor harass you nor act petulant when one turned a phrase not in my direction. Sadly I met the person that does that. I aim to find out where is that fire.

 

That is why the paper set aside a section of the paper so the media could give opinions.

But the news should be accurate. And one can't present accurate news when one keeps saying sources claim this or that.

 

There was a time when anonymous sources weren't published.

What would have been the reactions of Americans if they knew who the anonymous source "Deep Throat" was during Watergate ?

Mark Felt, the Associate Director if the FBI who was butt hurt that President Nixon picked someone else to replace J. Edgar Hoover as the Director of the FBI.

Lessons learned and soon forgotten, don't hurt the feelings of the leadership of the FBI. A sitting President could find a special council being appointed conducting a witch hunt looking for a crime.

 

In 2013 it became legal for our intelligence agencies to create and disseminate propaganda and disinformation on US citizens ... and yes it has become more difficult - especially for average Joe - to disseminate between what is real and what is not.

Thank you Obama

 

Or it gives them another lame excuse to rationalize the melodramatic tantrum. Maybe both.

 

I think that’s been true for decades, by operatives I assume you mean political commentators in an elitist sense. Yes I agree but does that make their journalism “fake”? Opinion is just that. You can choose to take it or not but just because they don’t fit into one’s pre-defined bias or a political narrative does not necessarily define it as “fake”. I think the gatekeepers of journalistic fact are no longer the MSM as you say but they still have a role and are part of the whole. I think that the MSM has an issue in that they are still in that elitist mode of reguarding themselves as the gatekeepers of journalistic fact; which I think has brought about a credibility issue with the wider public in that there is a feeling of being excluded from the agenda, but I don’t think that you can define an organisation such as CNN as a purveyor of fake news, that just seems naive especially in terms of how a large proportion of Americans and indeed most people in the western world consume their news.
One could also ask in response to your thoughts do you think all politicians tell the truth? To which the answer must be no, so are all the players in the theatre of news on the same script? Who are the gatekeepers of credibility and fact?

 

No, in direct collusion with the Democratic National Committee and certain Democrat politicians and their campaigns.

It was CNN who gave candidate Hillary Clinton the questions in advance that were going to be asked at a CNN Presidential debate.

 

Fake news is propaganda and it precedes the KGB.

For me, it is one thing for russia, or any other nation, to use propaganda on another nation, with motives and quite another for a nation to use propaganda upon its own people in order to do something the people would normally not agree to.

When obama signed one of the national security acts, he threw away a law written in 1947 that made it illegal for america to use propaganda upon its own people. So now, it is legal to propagandize us, instead of being illegal. So, we can now legally lie to our own citizens....for...their...own...good. ha ha ha

But blame all of the lies and propaganda on russia! This is great propaganda, to do that. ha ha ha

 

No, just an astute intellect which allows for a connection to reality.

Propaganda doesn't work on the more astute intellects. For they understand what it is, and why it is used. Especially here in america, where it is now legal to use it, against americans, thanks to obama to trashed that 1947 law in one of these fear based national security acts. Of course, congress wrote it, so....

 

Whereas you're more objective?

A simple test to know whether you're the victim of propaganda is to ask yourself whether or not you've ever supported Communism, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, or any left wing dictatorship. If the answer is yes then you've been the victim of propaganda, and are likely a damned fool.

 

Propaganda is nothing new. Countries have been using it to control populations for centuries. What is new is the way propaganda is disseminated in the modern world. Trump and his Administration have just repackaged "fake News" to try to deflect from the almost constant lying and misinformation they project.

We largely live in a manufactured social environment. A great book to read for this is Chomsky's, "Manufacturing Consent." Basically the idea is that everything we receive from not only media but from family, peers, schools and social constructs at large, is a manufactured narrative that uses all kinds of patriotic and consumer messaging to manipulate how we see the world and our place in it.

With the media, Chomsky describes that all the information that comes to us about the outside world comes through a series of filters the condense the message into one that is in in-line with the dominant narrative. These filters start with who owns the media. Ownership always implies an editorial stance on issues. One only has to look at Fox owned by Robert Murdoch to understand this. Since the Telecommunications act in 1996 there has been a steady deregulation of ownership of Media so that today, only a handful of companies such as Comcast, Walt Disney or TimeWarner own the vast majority of media. So the view of those owners, who are corporations and espouse corporate values are going to naturally have a greater say in editorial opinion of the outlet. Really there is no liberal mainstream media anymore though some may perceive that bias it is not really true liberal media in any sense. What it is is corporate media that in the bottom line promotes corporate interests.

Another filter in the corporate landscape is advertisers who have the option in a commercial market to boycott messages they do not like. In this way voices that do not reflect the dominant views or anything considered subversive or offensive can be silenced from the public sphere. There are all kinds of examples but the glaring one is that networks dare not criticize certain controversial foreign or domestic policy decisions both in the US or even certain of it's international partners for fear of backlash from lobby groups and media watchdog outlets with a strong political bias and lots of pull to withdraw advertising dollars.

Other examples of filters are pressure from government officials to kill certain stories and careerism in journalists who in the modern context cannot operate without access to leaders and political influence makers.

Really the first truly modern propaganda that incorporated elements of Freudian scientific understanding of the human psyche began with Edward Bernays and the Committee on Public Information (how Orwellian is that) commissioned to manufacture the consent of public opinion for the entry of the US into WW1. The US was actually very isolationist in those days and the vast majority had no taste for entering a European war.

I am stealing a bit of Chris Hedges's material here but basically, Bernays and his colleagues on the Committee understood that we are not fully rational creatures and that we are very easily manipulated by emotion and appeals from constantly repeated high-impact slogans and messages. Bernays later went on a brilliant career in advertising and produced many of the iconic ads for tobacco and other industries. He literally wrote the book on propaganda and Goebbels was apparently a huge fan and heavily influenced by his writing despite the fact Bernays was a Jew.

What we are perceiving as this vitriolic divide between left and right and the heated tribalism of the current political atmosphere may be what a friend of mine calls the effect of the two-headed beast that serves none of us but is just a tool to confuse important issues and to divide people into self-defeating camps.

We all think we can tell fact from fiction and see through propaganda but I can tell you from observation and experience, even very intelligent people can be swayed by emotion and propaganda to believe things that are illusion.

You have to ask yourself whose interests all this animosity and allegations of "fake news" and "enemy of the people" really serves. Does it serve your interests or is there something more powerful going on beneath all the name-calling and sloganeering?

 

If that's the metric, I've definitely not been a victim of propaganda. But, of course, that is propaganda that you are spewing right now.

Yes, I am more objective.

 

Now that is a scary thought, people being manipulated by undetectable artificial intelligences online.

 

One conclusion we might draw from this, it would seem, is that the kind of fake news we have had come from abroad is a competing narrative to our domestic narratives. The Russians want us to have leaders who are pro-Russian rather than Russia hawks, for instance, so they have chosen to interfere in such a way that we might prefer pro-Russian leaders, even if the means by which they accomplish this are very underhanded and socially disruptive. From the Russian (particularly pro-Putin) perspective, however, by these means they are combating US policies that are disruptive to them. It's a war of narratives as they step in to compete with our own narrative writers.

Of course, there is still the problem of how they are going about it and the problems it is creating. For them to stir up radical elements in our society with absurd stories and even go so far as to use social media to arrange protests by domestic groups in a clear effort to sow discord in the form of potential violence on the streets, is dastardly. They already have RT broadcasting their narrative and mixing these fake news/active measure elements with otherwise good reporting, and that is not all that objectionable. As you point out, every news outlet has its own biases and narratives. But to try and stir up hatred and violence, as mentioned above, and to go hacking and dumping political correspondence during a campaign and to employ these bots and ads to try and influence people in very targeted and at times undetectable ways is just another level of wrong. It is turning an apparatus against us in order to turn us against one another for their benefit. It is an effort to destroy our country from the inside. If propaganda is a flame, disinformation is a microwave.

 

That's interesting but still I'm not sure that that actually constitutes an act of fake news? Everyone knows that certain news outlets have an editorial bias in one way and another and I am sure that there are people that would point to Breitbart for example in the same way you point to CNN. Is the concept of "fake news" for you purely defined by an organisation's political affiliation?

 

You're making this more complicated than it really is.

Fake news, and 'scare stories', really do exist and if you research the news starting just a couple years ago, you'll spot it right away. But most have no idea that they're the victim of fake news, or concerns, while it's going on.

 

An example of fake news was given yet you show none. Guessing doesn't count.

Fake news is real and it's international.

 

is it that obvious?

 

What propaganda was spewed?

 

But this is hardly unique to Russia. Think of Radio Free America or any of the other media outlets that seek to influence people to the wonders of western democracy. All countries with interests including America are engaging in cyber-warfare and propaganda mixed with new technologies. This is the new face of warfare and the US is just as complicit .

The thing that worries me is that while truth has always been subjective there is so much disinformation out there and so few media outlets left who do legitimate investigative journalism that I fear we are becoming a society that really is subject to mass delusion and left without the understanding or even the language to describe what is really happening to us.

It is really the triumph of a post-truth world where populations are so confused by events that my fear is whole societies are more easily manipulated by demagogues and madmen then they ever have been before. And all this is happening in the internet age when we can communicate instantly around the world yet we are as divided and full of strife, anger and hate than we ever have been since the 30's.

It is a strange world but you can feel that the disinformation is only going to get worse. Consider that algorithms put into place by service providers at the behest of governments everywhere are filtering for content the types of websites that search engines will display based on political content which effectively shuts out certain "undesirable" voices - and that this supposedly is in our our best interest to protect us from harmful information. Orwell would have shuddered.

 

Best response would seem to be education. Science cuts through narratives and biases by applying a set method and training every scientist to be objective and critical. This kind of thinking should be emphasized more in school and beyond to counter the narratives. People should be so inoculated against these "viruses."

 

Exactly! I just spent a whole post describing that all of us are susceptible to propaganda because, no matter how smart we think we are we are human and emotional beings with perceptions that can be manipulated. How do you discern fake news from real news and scare stories with things you really should be scared of? It is not as cut and dried as we think.

You really should read Bernays's Propaganda. I think you would find it interesting reading.

https://www.amazon.ca/Propaganda-Edward-Bernays/dp/0970312598

 

I doubt there can be such comparison between the USSR and the western democracies regarding propaganda. In one case the people were risking their lives to leave, which was true of every communist country, while people are still trying to enter the USA. While leftists knew this to be true most still took the side of the Communist countries.

Right, but as in the above example we must also use our common sense.

When that 'strife, anger and hate' is directed against the freely elected people of a democracy then it's time for some self reflection. If all is as some people claim then the matter can be changed at the next election.

Yep. We must be ever suspicious of all stories which try to turn Americans against each other.