Nobody Sets Out To Become A War
Propagandist. It Just Sort Of Happens
By Caitlin Johnstone
February 01, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Senior Huffington Post UK editor
Chris York has published what is
by my count his twelfth smear
piece against a small group of academics and
independent journalists who’ve expressed skepticism
of establishment Syria narratives.
York’s twelfth such hit piece is much like the
preceding eleven: it
omits fundamentally
crucial facts, it
hides the
shady nature of its sourcing, it makes
outright false claims, and will only be believed
by individuals who either don’t research this
subject very deeply or whose paychecks depend on
their not thinking about it too hard. But, more
importantly, it’s his twelfth such hit
piece.
A dozen smear articles. A dozen. Not against
politicians. Not against powerful government leaders
or massive celebrities. York’s smears focus on two
professors with some 22,000 Twitter followers
between them both, and Beeley, whom York himself
refers to as an “obscure blogger” while
authoring
smear piece after
smear piece after
smear piece about her.
The 'useful idiots': How these British academics helped Russia deny war crimes at the UN https://t.co/UGvquum1nm
Now Beeley, Hayward and Robinson all do great
work asking the important questions that no one else
is asking about the
many,
many glaring
plot holes in the narratives we’re being fed
about what’s happening in Syria by the western
political/media class. I am a fan. But only a
relatively tiny number of people have ever heard of
them. I don’t want to minimize the importance of
what they do, but they are generally unheard of
outside of small esoteric internet circles which
focus on deep dives into questionable government
narratives about Syria.
We can take it as a given, then, that
Huffington Post UK‘s goal with these relentless
smear pieces is not to generate clicks or organic
virality. No normal person is scrolling through
their social media feed and going “Oh I do hope
there’s some fresh gossip about Piers Robinson
today!”
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
Nor is the goal to educate the public with
important pertinent information. Even if York’s hit
pieces contained lots of accurate information (and
they don’t), you wouldn’t need twelve articles to
say “Hey the ideas these people are sharing are
harmful in the following ways.” You could say it
once and move on to reporting on the many, many,
many important stories that are unfolding around the
world as we speak. The goal is not to inform.
So what is the goal?
The goal is narrative management.
Chris York pestered me for months by DMs, and I even agreed to meet him, as he 'wanted to understand' why people have critical questions about the White Helmets; then he just smears us all, repeatedly. This thread documents a dozen of his smear pieces:https://t.co/yldwNlcvbZ
If you
look through York’s smear jobs, you’ll notice
many of them aren’t even actually addressed to the
public. The ones about Robinson and Hayward are
really addressed to the academic institutions which
employ them, designed to pressure them into ceasing
to do so (and
proclaiming victory when that campaign is
perceived to have succeeded).
This smear piece here was clearly designed to
help generate pressure for the Leeds Museum to
cancel an event where all three of York’s targets
were scheduled to speak, and
this one celebrates the Leeds City Council
cancelling the event.
If you
look at who’s sharing York’s latest smear piece
on Twitter, you’ll notice that a weirdly large
percentage of them are blue-checkmarked accounts
which pour a lot of time and energy into managing
the dominant narrative about Syria. I don’t know
what chat groups or private message boards this
article appeared in, but it generated a lot of
social media firepower very quickly.
The purpose of these smear pieces is not to
generate clicks, and it is not to inform the public.
It’s to manipulate public thought. It’s to
deplatform voices which are skeptical of what we’re
being told to believe about a nation
long targeted by the western empire for regime
change, it’s to provide a resource that other
narrative managers can circulate and
cite in their own spin jobs, and it’s to
inoculate the mainstream herd from any potential
outbreak of wrongthink.
Nobody sets out to become a propagandist. No
eight year-old kid is sitting around dreaming of one
day selling her integrity to help the western empire
manufacture consent for the deployment of more
highly profitable military equipment to yet another
resource-rich geostrategic region.
It just kind of happens. You go to journalism
school, you get a job, if you’re clever you learn
that there’s some coverage which gets rewarded and
some which gets you marginalized, and before you
know it you’re sitting at your desk typing up your
twelfth smear piece about some small time teachers
and bloggers and wondering what the hell happened to
your life.
Rising‘s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjati
did a great segment a few months ago where they
laid out all the various kinds of pressure to defend
the establishment line that you’ll experience when
you get a job with a mainstream media outlet,
speaking from their own experience in such outlets.
“There are certain pressures to stay in good with
the establishment to maintain the access that is the
life blood of political journalism,” Ball said in
the segment. “So what do I mean? Let me give an
example from my own career since everything I’m
saying here really frankly applies to me too. Back
in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some
of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary
Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out
of step with the party and the country, that if she
ran she would likely be the nominee and would then
go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to
say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and
complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not
to provide any access during the upcoming campaign.
I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I
would have to get any Clinton-related commentary
cleared with the president of the network. Now being
a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m
certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after
that than I maybe otherwise would have.”
“This is something that a lot of people don’t
understand,” Enjati said. “It’s not necessarily that
somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s
that if you were to do your coverage that way, you
would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like
if you do not already fit within this framework,
then the system is designed to not give you a voice.
And if you necessarily did do that, all of the
incentive structures around your pay, around your
promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping
you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a
system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you
wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”
“Right, and again, it’s not
necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that
those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so
there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware
of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what
you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded
for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether
you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
We are leading on this fascinating and important story from @ChrisDYork today about how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN. It’s quite a tale - please give it a read. https://t.co/HzJf9oUdOq
York’s boss, HuffPo UK‘s executive
editor Jess Brammar,
shared York’s latest smear piece on Twitter with
a gushing thread about what a “fascinating and
important story” it is and
whining that his is “subject to abuse online”
whenever he publishes one of his many hit jobs
against people who remember Iraq.
That’s one hell of a pat on the back if I ever
saw one, and it’s coming from an executive editor
who happens to
currently
serve on the UK government’s Defence and Security
Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee. The
DSMA Committee is a British advisory body which
functions as an overlap between British journalism
and the British government in its responsibility for
issuing DSMA Notices (formerly known as
“D-notices”), which advise British news outlets not
to report on certain matters deemed sensitive to
national security. This system
has previously been used to ask that editors
consult with the UK government before reporting on
revelations in a 2010 WikiLeaks publication.
I am sure that Chris York didn’t set out to
become a war propagandist. He just found himself
funneled through the same system of positive and
negative reinforcement as so many other young,
bright-eyed journalists have before him, and now
here he is with a job his family is proud of because
journalism is a noble profession, surrounded by
people telling him he’s doing the right thing. He’s
got every incentive to stay and keep doing what he’s
doing, and that little nagging he feels in his heart
in those quiet moments alone is nothing a little
alcohol or other form of escapism can’t numb.
But a propagandist he has indeed become, like
everyone else who is successfully making their way
up the mainstream media ladder. Keep smearing the
dissident voices, keep proving yourself a loyal
empire lackey, and the rewards will keep on coming.
I’m sure that little nagging voice inside that you
can’t kill no matter how hard you try is totally
worth it.
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