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| Fake news (RT) |
On a recent trip to England, as I waited for an evening flight, I lay channel-surfing on the bed in my hotel room. There was one show about recent immigrants called “Why Don’t You Speak English?” This struck me as topical. There were also many channels full of boring garbage, just like in America.
And then I landed on RT
(formerly known as Russia Today). There was a man with black glasses, unruly
hair, and a goatee shouting in some apparent distress about fake news. I
believe he said something to the effect of, “IT’S FAKE NEWS! THIS FAKE NEWS,
IT’S NOT REAL! IT’S ALL FAKE! IT’S EVERYWHERE! IT’S COMPLETELY MADE UP! IT
ISN’T ANYTHING! IT’S FAKE! IT’S! JUST! FAKE! NEWS! AAAAAAAAA!” Nothing very
substantive. I supposed I could see what he was getting at, but I wondered for
a moment why he was so worked up about it. Then I remembered what RT is.
You see, he wasn’t talking about fake news, as in news that
is deliberately fabricated as part of a disinformation campaign. No, he was
talking about “fake news,” as in real news—you know, the kind authoritarians
hate. How do I know this? Because RT is a propaganda arm of the Russian
government. As Google tells me, it is “the first Russian 24/7 English-language
news channel which brings the Russian view on global news.” In this case, the
Russian view means Vladimir Putin’s view, or at least a view that he approves,
not, say, Vladimir Kara-Murza's view or Grigori Chkhartishvili's. And Vladimir Putin’s “view” is that real news is fake. I say “view” because it isn’t
a view; it’s a deliberate lie.
Why was the Trotsky-looking fellow so emotional? Because Vladimir
Putin wants people to feel upset and confused. Because if people accept that
reality is composed not of facts but of feelings, then they become suggestible
and can be led to all sorts of bad behaviors. It disturbed me to think that
there are people in this world who spend hours a day being riled up by
broadcasts of this and other sorts. Just watching that guy for less than a
minute, I could feel my cortisol levels rising.
States that engage in narrative manipulation can direct
their state-sponsored information inward or outward. Propaganda is something
that people in liberal democracies associate with the past, the bad twentieth
century, fascism, the Cold War. But RT represents a new kind of propaganda, a propaganda apparatus of an authoritarian state playing on the same field as the
free media of a liberal democracy.
One of the foundational premises of liberal democracy is
that a society is strengthened when speech is legally protected. Americans
historically have adhered to the Jeffersonian faith that a well-educated
populace will have the wisdom to distinguish the truth from lies and thus to
take political initiatives which conduce to the common good.
What Leninists (e.g., the Communist Party of China) believe
is that the vanguard party has the right to use lies—any number of lies—in
service of a noble end, just as they believe that any oppressive means will be
justified by the ultimate end of all oppression.
What happens when the two collide?
China’s media environment, as you probably know, is comparatively closed. Since
about 2013, the Communist Party has sought to correct the course of Chinese media,
which had been allowed to move toward greater openness during the Hu Jintao-Wen
Jiabao administration (2003–2013). This appears to be a project of particular
interest to President Xi himself, as he has personally delivered lectures on the appropriate role of the media, saying that journalists should be “disseminators
of the Party's policies and propositions,” whose work is “crucial for the
Party's path, the implementation of Party theories and policies, the
development of various Party and state causes, the unity of the Party, the
country and people of all ethnic groups, as well as the future and fate of the
Party and the country.” In a word, the Chinese media should be absolutely loyal servants of the Communist Party, which is the traditional Marxist-Leninist view of media. I would be
remiss not to mention that there are Chinese journalists who take a more liberal view of journalism, attempting to speak truth to power, sometimes with serious consequences.
Yet despite this media atmosphere, international news
organizations have their China bureaus. Though they are sometimes able to cover stories
which the Chinese domestic media do not, they operate within limits. The
Chinese state seems to want to give the impression that it treats foreign journalists well. After all, they
are allowed into the country, they aren’t jailed, and they aren’t seriously
harassed. Overall, they have much less to fear than Chinese journalists do. Yet
they are sometimes, let us say, mildly harassed,
particularly, it seems, when they seek to cover protests in person. Those journalists who write too
many stories deemed to be excessively negative run the risk of having their visa renewals denied,
and the state's measure of last resort is to deny an organization’s China correspondents
their visas en masse and punt their websites over to the other side of the
Great Firewall, as happened to the New York Times and Bloomberg when they published stories about the
family wealth of China’s top leaders.
What about Chinese media operating in the US? I'm guessing you haven’t heard of or watched CGTN (China Global Television Network) America. It’s
a Chinese state-owned news channel which broadcasts in the US. It is
propaganda; that is, like RT, it presents “the Chinese side of the story.” It’s
owned by China Central Television (CCTV), which is administered by the State
Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television (SAPPRFT), which
is the media organ of the Chinese government. Ultimately, SAPPRFT answers to
the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China. Thus, CGTN is a
Chinese state media company freely operating in the US, subject to the same
restrictions as any other media organization in the US, that is, rather few.
Some in the US have lately questioned the wisdom of giving foreign governments’
propaganda organs free reign to operate in the US while US news organizations
operate under worsening restrictions in China. Specifically, some have argued that if the Chinese government cancels US journalists’ visas in retaliation for
coverage it doesn’t like, then the US government should respond with
tit-for-tat cancellations of the visas of employees of Chinese state media like CGTN.
Should the government of a liberal democracy limit the
access of foreign media to its domestic market? I think most of us would regard
that as an absurd proposition on the face of it. But what if the foreign media are not news organizations but propaganda organizations? What if
the states which own them regard the US as a rival or even enemy state? Aren’t
they just weapons? Or are they just presenting another point of view,
broadening the minds of the US audience? Even if they are weapons, does that mean
we should regulate or ban them? Don’t we trust the wisdom of American media
consumers (haha)? I don’t doubt that CGTN actually has abysmal ratings,
supposing that what they produce is just as anodyne as CCTV. So who cares? A democracy needn’t fear anyone’s views, right?
The reason we protect free speech is not because all speech
is potentially valuable for our society. It’s because we don’t believe that any
one person or party or organization should have a monopoly over information. In
other words, the legal guarantee of freedom of speech preserves the balance of
power, and checks the ambitions of those who would seek to amass power through
a monopoly over information. Knowledge being power, the aim of propaganda is to increase
the power of the disseminator of the propaganda vis-à-vis the audience. Insofar
as power in a democracy flows from the people, influence over the people’s
perception of reality is a meaningful lever of power.
If I were the US government, I might ask myself: does the
freedom of the propaganda arms of hostile foreign states to operate in our
country represent a useful check on the power of some actor within the American
system? Whose power is checked by this? Surely it is either the US government’s
power, the power of American news organizations, or the power of American
citizens, or some combination of the three. Again, propaganda is a tool for
gaining leverage over a society, not a tool for making an earnest contribution to
its discourse. In a world in which certain actors wish democracy ill, does allowing
this to occur speak to our democracy’s self-confidence, or its naivety?
By the way, this same debate has been taking place in
Australia. China has been buying up shares in Australian media corporations and making sizable donations to Australian politicians.
Australia is a traditional ally of the United States, with a shared political
culture as a liberal democracy and a history of military cooperation. Yet in
recent years, China has grown to be Australia’s largest trading partner, and
China seems to prodding Australia toward a long-term realignment. The Little
Red Podcast has a fantastic episode about this, which you should listen to immediately.
