In the old days, the agents of the apartheid regime were fond of referring to the University of Cape Town as “Moscow on the Hill”. The reds-under-the-bed trope was a classic bit of propaganda, and identifying UCT’s anti-apartheid, left-wing activism with communism gave the authorities a justification for cracking down on protesters.
Scroll forward to this week. Imagine my surprise to find that Moscow had made it back to UCT, in the guise of one of the annual summer school lectures. “Clickbait, chaos and credibility: how to spot fake news” was presented by ex-Russia Today journalist Paula Slier.
This title — no serious person uses the term “fake news” any more — along with a reading list that featured Noam Chomsky’s flawed and thoroughly out-of-date 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, made clear this was going to be an experience more folksy than factual.
What I hadn’t expected, though, was a lecture straight out of the playbook of those who benefit most from sowing distrust and disinformation. People such as Vladimir Putin and his disinfo doppelgänger Donald Trump.
In my actual job, I’m part of a team of data analysts, journalists and strategists who monitor foreign state information manipulation and interference in African and global information systems. This is largely in the digital realm, parsing and analysing huge amounts of data to uncover networks of propaganda, criminality and avarice that drive disinformation. But it’s not often I get to see disinformation actors strut their stuff in the flesh.
I’m not sure if Slier is still an actual mouthpiece of the Russian state (she says not), paid or pro bono, or whether she herself is a victim of the narrative she pushed in her lecture. On one level, she seemed clear about some of the tactics, techniques and procedures that threat actors use to spread disinformation and manipulate information environments. One of the classic ways that bad actors enable their agendas and shield themselves from accountability is by pushing the narrative that truth in the media is unknowable. By making people believe that they can’t tell what is true any more, they make it easier to manipulate them and create polarising environments.
Slier apparently gives these lectures on cruise ships, which conjures up almost as absurd a picture as Putin doing stand-up comedy. “I gave this presentation,” she says in one of her jolly, high-seas anecdotes. “And one of the men stood up at the end of the talk and said: ‘You know, I don’t know what to believe. There is so much information out there. Everybody says something different. I’m actually just not going to believe anything.’ … If you feel that way, you’re not alone. I feel exactly the same, and it’s not coincidence that you feel that way. It’s by design.”
So far, so good. Yes, the attack on your ability to decide what’s true is by design, and it’s a very successful weapon in the war on truth. But Slier’s lecture becomes, consciously or not, one of the pieces of information manipulation that places her decidedly on the side of the bad actors. Because according to her, it’s “we journalists” who are responsible for this.
“If you’re feeling confused, if you’re feeling exhausted, that’s how they want you to feel … You might think that you’ve reached your own conclusions, but I think by the end of today we’ll realise, and this is going to sound quite dramatic, but we’re fighting your body, we’re fighting your heart, and fighting your mind.
“Who are the soldiers [in this information war]? Well, I’m a soldier for starters, and the other soldiers are the government, terrorist organisations, digital platforms, advertisers, political leaders. And why are we all fighting? We are fighting for you. We are fighting for your attention. And the moment we have your attention, we can make you believe what we want you to believe … and we can make you do what we want you to do.”
If you’re trying to convince people that they can’t trust any journalism at all, then you’re one of the ones to distrust
I’m not sure why Slier feels she can speak for other journalists when her descriptions of unethical journalists trying to manipulate truth so as to benefit authoritarian states or conscience-free corporations are either from truly biased media houses or, in moments of lukewarm mea culpa, her own reporting for Russia Today. She is quite clear about her message. “I was told many years ago that the No 1 person you can’t trust in the world is a second-hand car dealer, and No 2 is a journalist.”
Speak for yourself, Paula.
She does show some fancy footwork when it comes to avoiding facts. For her, Russia Today was formed “to tell stories and share the news from a Russian perspective with people like you and me who speak English but aren’t maybe interested in the Russian world … Yes, we were told what to say, but we were called Russia Today. So, whether I was fooling myself or not fooling myself, we didn’t hide away from the fact that it was a Russian point of view. My problem is when media call themselves independent, and they’re not. I think that’s a lot more misleading.”
Frankly, the idea that Russia Today is just a more honest version of propaganda is insulting and just plain duplicitous. And it also reveals rather more about the person spouting this sophomoric nonsense than it does about the state of journalism today.
Since Putin came to power in 2000, independent journalists have been threatened, locked up, attacked and killed. As we are told by Reporters Without Borders: “Russia forces many independent media and journalists to register as foreign agents, forcing them to publicly declare all finances and subjecting them to heavy legal burdens — and criminalises co-operation with them. Hundreds of journalists/media outlets are on this register, and failure to comply can be punished with fines or prison.”
According to Radio Free Europe, since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, 16 media professionals have been killed by the Russian army. Forty-eight remain behind bars. Many reporters in Russia have been imprisoned on charges ranging from extremism to allegedly spreading false information about the Ukraine war. The worsening media situation in Russia has also forced many journalists into exile, and nearly 70 of these have been targeted by arrests or convictions in absentia in the past three years.
“Everything in the media is about emotion,” Slier says. “I’m not saying that facts don’t matter, but facts matter a lot less than how we make you feel … It doesn’t have to be true or false for you to stop and think about it. It just has to make you feel something. And the more we can make you feel, the more we’re winning the fight … The question is, ‘Who wants you to believe this?’
“And we’ve persuaded you. We take over your ... well, we don’t take over your mind, but we have little tricks that I’ll share with you.”
Who is this “we”, Paula? It’s certainly not the thousands of ethical investigative journalists around the world who risk their lives to write about the authoritarian and anti-democratic depredations of people like your recent Russian masters.
Slier ended her lecture by saying: “Don’t give up on the information. That’s what Trump wants you to do. That’s what Putin wants you to do. Come back to yourself, taking control of your emotions, taking control of your thoughts, and in that way, you will never lose the information also.”
This is a sentiment I can agree with, but what I can’t agree with is the countervailing buildup to this, the idea that you can’t trust ethical news organisations. When I said that to Slier, she asked: “But how do you define what is ethical journalism?”
That a journalist needs to ask that question is horrifying. There are tried and tested structures in place to determine what is ethical journalism, and South Africans know, by and large, which news organisations to trust and which ones to distrust. If you’re trying to convince people that they can’t trust any journalism at all, then you’re one of the ones to distrust. Treating all journalism with suspicion isn’t media literacy, it’s analytical impotence.
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