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A nasty but inevitable part of war reporting for journalists, if they are doing their job properly, is that they will be abused and lied about by one side or the other in any military conflict.
This is scarcely surprising, since people who are trying to win a war will not hesitate to tell the crudest lies about reporters who are not in full support of their cause, or who question some dubious piece of propaganda they are promoting. Reporters routinely find themselves denounced as being at best the dupes, and at worst the paid lackeys of the likes of Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin.
Personal attacks may include deliberate falsifications and distortions of what the journalist has written or said that are easy enough to refute, yet those targeted are often left with an uneasy feeling that some mud, however undeserved, will stick and damage their credibility.
How should a war correspondent respond to egregious lies? I often used to discuss this with my late friend and colleague, Robert Fisk, who was often subjected to poisonous abuse because his revelations had infuriated some guilty party caught in the act.
We would try to calm each other down, arguing that any response to some mendacious slur, however convincing, would also “give the story legs” and play into the hands of some hostile propagandist. Any refutation of a lie must involve repeating it, so best to stay silent, frustrating though this might be in the belief that it would soon be forgotten, if one did not kick up a fuss.
The silent treatment
The dilemma which Fisk and I would gloomily mull over is by no means a new one. Rudyard Kipling, who knew a lot about attack journalism, wrote that a test of a person’s ability to cope with adversity was “if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”. He counselled not overreacting to provocation, though this is easier said than done.
There was a time when I would have agreed with Kipling’s prescription of restraint. Up to about 15 years ago, Fisk and I were correct in deciding to avoid verbal retaliation, but today I am not so sure about this. People once spoke of a piece of information being “as dead as yesterday’s newspaper”. In other words, the exciting news of today would be largely forgotten or inaccessible tomorrow, but, in the age of Google and the internet, this is no longer the case.
Yesterday’s news remains very much with us, easily reached by pressing a few keys on a laptop. The velocity and quantity of information has vastly increased. A “fake fact”, which once might have been confined to some obscure and partisan publication, can now potentially command an audience of millions. In the case of Elon Musk, his barrage of messages is received by 211 million followers on X.
From the standpoint of a politician and journalist, this means that in deciding between ignoring an attack and retaliating, the tactical advantage today favours a vigorous counter-attack and refutation of what is not true. If a vacuum of true information is allowed to develop in an ocean teeming with falsehoods, then these falsehoods will fill it and soon dominate the news agenda by force of unrefuted repetition.
Pig politics
It is difficult to imagine a more glaring example of “fake facts” than Elon Musk’s accusation that Sir Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions who dealt with child sexual abuse, is complicit in “the rape of Britain”. He goes on to describe Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, as “a rape genocide apologist”. These allegations are false and disgusting, but I fear that the low-key approach of Starmer and the Labour Party in calmly refuting them shows an underestimation of the toxic phenomenon they face.
This “shock jock” approach to news – saying things that are offensive, provocative and untrue in order to grab public attention – is not new. But Donald Trump is the supreme virtuoso in history in exploiting these techniques to ensure that he controls the news agenda, for instance by saying outrageous things such as not ruling out a US invasion of Greenland and Canada.
He may not intend any such thing, but the bizarre idea will inevitably lead the news. By promoting absurd myths about Haitian immigrants eating pet cats, he focuses public attention on some issue, such as immigration, which he knows will play to his political advantage.
Saying something headline-grabbing, however untrue, is an old political ploy, which can be made more lethal to an opponent if they are forced to deny an accusation, usually of a sexual nature, the very mention of which taints them. An old American political fable tells of a sheriff in some southern county, who was standing for re-election and doing badly. He summoned his supporters for an emergency meeting and told them that he was planning to win back support by accusing his opponent of sexual relations with pigs. “But everybody knows that is untrue,” objected a supporter. “Yes, but let’s see him deny it,” replied the sheriff.
A century later, Trump and Musk employ the same – if updated – tactics as the sheriff, but the political punching power of false allegations has been vastly enhanced first by television and then the internet platforms. Trump had an advantage in that in both presidential elections, and during the Biden interregnum, he twice faced stilted and over-rehearsed candidates in Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris who had no effective antidote to his playbook.
Carrying the fight
A problem is that, as with Clinton and Harris, decent people such as Starmer and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, are at a disadvantage in this sort of political knife fight. They genuinely want to explain and justify their policies, but doing so is often complicated and dull. They fail to understand that they are simultaneously in the entertainment and advertising businesses when seeking to sell their political wares. Trump and Nigel Farage, like other ethno-populist leaders, have a certain grisly charm. Their press conferences are fun.
Their way of operating is not entirely new. The one UK politician I have seen in action who most resembled Farage and Trump was Rev Ian Paisley, who knew exactly how to command the attention of a hostile media. What news editor could resist reporting his “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign against the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland in 1977?
What Starmer and Labour leaders need to do is carry the fight to the enemy, to denounce Musk’s interventions as outrageous foreign interventions in British politics, and demonise as unpatriotic the Conservative and Reform leaders who follow in Musk’s footsteps.
I doubt if Starmer and his senior ministers are up for this sort of fight. They are surprisingly poor as professional politicians at blowing their own trumpets and drowning out the trumpets of others. They are curiously averse to appealing to patriotism in the face of Musk’s grotesque interference, and making a full scale assault on Tory and Reform politicians who echo Musk and Trump attack lines.
Yet a counter-attack is essential if the political agenda in the UK is not going to be determined by the most crazed administration in US history.
Further Thoughts
President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan bequeath a world in flames to the incoming Donald Trump administration. But such is the fear of Western governments and media of the “chaos” likely to be provoked by the return of Trump to the White House, that far too little attention has been given to the appalling chaos created or tolerated by the outgoing Democrats.
Part of the damage that Trump has done to the US and the world is that his relentless toxicity makes other leaders and policies, however destructive, appear good by comparison. With too little pushback from other Western states, terror of Trump has enabled Biden and his lieutenants to get away with murder by continuing to supply arms to Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. This is not to defend Trump and his appointees as an improvement on Biden – they may well be worse – though I suspect that they will be much the same.
Biden was clearly suffering from impaired mental capabilities and judgement from the beginning of his administration four years ago. This cognitive deterioration began early, as the Wall Street Journal revealed on 19 December in a devastating expose that quotes a senior security official as saying, as early as the spring of 2021, a few months after Biden had taken office, that on certain days all meetings had to be postponed. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” said the official.
Later it got much worse. Senior cabinet secretaries practically never met the president alone, and dealt instead with a cabal of senior officials, notably Blinken and Sullivan, when it came to foreign policy issues of war and peace. The White House press corps, overwhelmingly pro-Democrat, was silent about this extraordinary and unprecedented transfer of power, and commentators are only now timidly beginning to refer to it.
Bret Stephens did so recently in the New York Times, saying that Biden himself may have been unaware of his failing mental awareness (this is often the case with people with mental health problems), though it would have been obvious to others. “But his entire senior staff must have noticed, and… they took advantage of it to enhance their own power,” writes Stephens. “It’s a national scandal that deserves a congressional inquiry.”
Just what a poor job Biden’s likely manipulators did comes across in an interview that Blinken gave recently to the New York Times. In it he shows a lack of self-awareness of his failures which is similar to Biden’s, but without the presidential excuse of mental decline. He says that the main objectives of the US in the Middle East were to prevent another 7 October happening, stop a wider regional war, and protect Palestinian civilians.
It appears to me that Blinken and Sullivan failed on all counts: the obliteration of Gaza by Israel is all too likely to lead to retaliatory action against it, regional war is already underway, and at least 45,000 Palestinians are already dead – with no sign of the slaughter ending.
Beneath the Radar
In November 2022, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, horrified the Biden administration by saying that it was the right moment for ceasefire negotiations between Ukraine and Russia because Ukraine was at its strongest and Russia at its weakest. His common sense analysis, entirely borne out by subsequent events, called for a diplomatic solution to the war and was denounced everywhere, compelling him to somewhat modify his stand.
But had Washington followed his advice two and a half years ago, Ukraine might have got better terms than are now likely – and upwards of a million Ukrainians and Russians would still be alive and uninjured. Here is a somewhat negative CNN report on what Milley said. But it seems to me that events have confirmed that he was right.
Cockburn’s Picks
I have been reading We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole, subtitled “A Personal History of Ireland since 1958”, which is the best book I have read about modern Ireland for years – it is also superbly well written.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
