January 16, 2012
Whose hands are behind those dramatic YouTube pictures?
“Rumor” used to have a bad reputation. In Shakespeare’s plays it
is assumed that “rumors” mean artful lies and the spreading of detailed
but false accounts of victory and defeat. No journalist could credibly
tell of massacre, torture and mass arrests, citing “strong rumors” as
the sole evidence for the story. Editors at whatever newspaper,
television or radio station the reporter worked on would shake their
heads in disbelief at such a vague and dubious source and almost
certainly refuse to run it.
But suppose that our journalist takes out the word “rumor” and
substitutes “YouTube” or “blogger” as the source. Then, going by recent
experience, editors will nod it through, possibly commending their man
or woman for judicious use of the internet. The BBC and other television
stations happily run nightly pictures of mayhem from Syria, grandly
disclaiming responsibility for their authenticity. These disclaimers are
intoned so often that they now have as much impact on viewers as
warnings that a news report may contain flash photography. People
understandably believe that if the BBC and other channels were not
convinced of the truth of YouTube pictures they would not be using them
as their main source of information on Syria.
YouTube pictures may have played a positive role in the uprisings of
the Arab Spring, but the international media is largely mute about how
easy it is to manipulate them. Pictured from the right angle, a small
demonstration can be made to look like a gathering of tens of thousands.
Shootings in one street in one town can be used to manufacture
“evidence” of shooting in a dozen towns. Demonstrations need not be
genuine events luckily captured on mobile phone cameras by concerned
citizens; frequently the only reason for the protest is to provide
material for YouTube. Television companies are not going to reject or
underline the stage management of film that is free, dramatic,
up-to-date – and which they could not match with regular correspondents
and film crews even if they spent a lot of money.
In the print press, bloggers get an equally easy ride, even though
there is no proof that they know anything about what is going on. Hence
the ease with which a male American student in Scotland was able to pretend
to be a persecuted lesbian in Damascus. Since the Iraq war, even the
most intensely partisan bloggers have been presented as sources of
objective information. Tarnished though they may now be, they still have
a certain cachet and credibility.
Governments that exclude foreign journalists at times of crisis such
as Iran and (until the last week) Syria, create a vacuum of information
easily filled by their enemies. These are far better equipped to provide
their own version of events than they used to be before the development
of mobile phones, satellite television and the internet. State
monopolies of information can no longer be maintained. But simply
because the opposition to the Syrian and Iranian governments have taken
over the news agenda does not mean that what they say is true.
Early last year I met some Iranian stringers for Western publications
in Tehran whose press credentials had been temporarily suspended by the
authorities. I said this must be frustrating them, but they replied
that even if they could file stories – saying nothing much was happening
– they would not be believed by their editors. These had been convinced
by exile groups, using blogs and carefully selected YouTube footage,
that Tehran was visibly seething with discontent. If the local reporters
said that this was a gross exaggeration, their employers would suspect
that had been intimidated or bought off by Iranian security.
There is nothing wrong or surprising in revolutionary movements
engaging in black propaganda. They always did so in the past and it
would be amazing if they did not do so today. My father, Claud Cockburn,
fighting on the government side in the Spanish Civil War, once
fabricated an account of a revolt against General Franco’s supporters in
Tetuán in Spanish Morocco. He was bemused when in later years when he
was furiously criticized for what he deemed was a neat propaganda coup,
as if disinformation had not been a weapon used by every political
movement since Pericles.
Such ploys have not been made obsolete by advances in information
technology in the past 20 years. These are usually portrayed as being a
wholly benign and democratic development that inspired the uprisings of
the Arab Spring. And so, to a degree, it was. The iron grip of police
states over the media and all other sources of information was broken
across the whole Middle East. Governments discovered that the crude
repression of the past could be counter-effective. In Hama in central
Syria in 1982, President Hafez al-Assad’s forces killed an estimated
10,000 people and destroyed the Sunni rebellion but there was not one
picture of a corpse. Today scenes from such a massacre would be on every
television screen in the world.
So technical advances have made it more difficult for governments to
hide repression. But these developments have also made the work of the
propagandist easier. Of course, people who run newspapers and radio and
television stations are not fools. They know the dubious nature of much
of the information they are conveying. The political elite in Washington
and Europe was divided for and against the US invasion of Iraq, making
it easier for individual journalists to dissent. But today there is an
overwhelming consensus in the foreign media that the rebels are right
and existing governments wrong. For institutions such as the BBC, highly
unbalanced coverage becomes acceptable.
Sadly, al-Jazeera, which has done so much to shatter state control of
information in the Middle East since it was set up in 1996, has become
the uncritical propaganda arm of the Libyan and Syrian rebels.
The Syrian opposition needs to give the impression that its
insurrection is closer to success than it really is. The Syrian
government has failed to crush the protesters, but the latter, in turn,
are a long way from overthrowing it. The exiled leadership wants Western
military intervention in its favor as happened in Libya, although
conditions are very different.
The purpose of manipulating the media coverage is to persuade the
West and its Arab allies that conditions in Syria are approaching the
point when they can repeat their success in Libya. Hence the fog of
disinformation pumped out through the internet.
