Alternative Editorial: The Age of Meta-Media

Week 32 of The Shift and there seems to be acceleration of an important kind: almost every headline seems to be questioning the truth of official statements on important issues.

Whether that means the truth-wars between the two Presidential candidates that have been waged throughout the US elections, culminating in a stand-off between the incumbent President Trump and the President-elect Joe Biden.

Or the truth-war between Boris Johnson and his own advisors about why the architect of Brexit, Dominic Cummings is now leaving Downing Street in such a dramatic fashion—only weeks before the whole of the UK comes crashing out of the European Union trade deal we have been living with for nearly 50 years.

Or the truth wars between the Royal Family and everyone else: how did Princess Diana become victim to Martin Bashir’s fraudulent evidence which persuaded her to give a life (and possibly history) changing interview on her marriage to the heir to the throne. And in a final twist, how the Royal Family is taking Netflix to task for fantasizing in their – admittedly fictional – drama, The Crown.

We now have obligatory fact-checking reviews of speeches given by major politicians in the UK or US on both sides of the political divide. The cry of “fake news!” has become such a familiar taunt that it is increasingly like water off a duck’s back, exerting very little power to hold anyone to account.

While it is nothing new to question the truth of political authority, the evidence here is that the media itself, the 4th Estate whose job it is to remain independent of politics in order to be able to give us objectivity, are breaking their own truth wall.

They’re causing us to doubt everything we read, including their headlines. Is the public space – the world of headlines and open discourse - moving into some kind of meta-reality? One in which the readers – the voters, the people – are now expected to make up their own minds about everything?

A key test case is warming up to be the status of the Coronavirus vaccine now heading to a GP near you. After a fierce global competition to be the first manufacturer of a vaccine, this is touted to be a game-changer in the pandemic.

Let’s not underestimate what is at stake here. Getting this right would be lifesaving for thousands of people, economy-saving for nations and majority-saving for the governments in charge. 

Yet the news is landing with a dull thud – framed with doubts, resentments and anxieties. In the picture are a variety of questions jostling with each other for attention. At one end, there are very reasonable questions such as “can any vaccine be safe after such a short time for trials?”

We then move into more pointed questions that question the financial rewards at stake such as: “who won the competition and why?” “What is the safety record of that manufacturer?”

Further down the line come bigger political questions: “in whose interest is it that this vaccine works?” And finally, “is this vaccine – and even the pandemic itself - just another way to our control behaviour?”

When seen in a continuum like this you can feel the anxiety rising. The first questions are about personal safety but by the time we get to the end we are considering civilizational issues wherein the construction of truth itself is in the dock.

Interestingly, this is not a partisan debate. In our current political divide, both sides accuse the other of hoodwinking the public. In this sense, the term conspiracy theory itself becomes part of the debate: one person’s new insight into how they have been manipulated by official news is another person’s evidence that they have now joined the ranks of the hysterical. 

During the 1990s – 2000s, one of the A/UK team initiated a group questioning exactly this fulcrum in a project called Peace Journalism. Originated by the “father of peace studies” Johan Galtung it later became a book by Jake Lynch and Annabelle McGoldrick and a discipline taught in universities across the world.

Despite its title this was not conducted within a peace activist bubble to promote familiar values. Instead, it was a gathering of mainstream journalists – including representatives from the BBC and what was then described as the broadsheets and red-tops - to critique the unacknowledged war agenda in our newspapers, or ‘war journalism’.

In the workshops we invited participants – including students of both media studies and international relations – to do an analysis of the media coverage. Not only what was being said, but also – within an international relations perspective – what was not being said. It was easy to spot how conflict is reported in the context of whether or not violence (whether state or non-state sponsored) will break out. But rarely in the context of the many peace initiatives taking place at the same time. 

As we led up to the Iraq war of 2003, we were ourselves receiving daily briefings from Scilla Elworthy’s Oxford Research Institute that was on the ground in Iraq on the multiple options for avoiding war. None of these ever made even the inside pages of the newspapers – let alone the headlines. Their analysis drew attention to the permanent status of the “war cabinet” and the absence of a “peace cabinet”. It also revealed the power of the military industrial complex in our national finances: war is big business.

The argument in Peace Journalism is not that media outlets should always move towards peace (although that would be fair enough for most of us) but that every media outlet should firstly be aware of its agenda, also making it clear for the reader. However, in our discussions, it became clear that many journalists were not themselves sure what their agenda was.

BBC news reporters for example, had never questioned the neutrality of “war reporting” occurring without a complementary “peace reporting”. They stood by their own conviction that they were “just reporting the facts” until a long time after the Iraq war was shown to be launched through the manufacturing of consent.

In a report from the science journal Nature (blogged here this week) we hear about the relationship between conspiracy theory and well being: how insecurity makes us more vulnerable to simplistic explanations in the vacuum where the real truth is hard to come by. It’s tempting to register the louder and more energetic accusations – such as those coming from QAnon – as hysteria that needs to be condemned. At the same time, we might listen to widespread hysteria as something that needs addressing through more and different forms of social security. 

At the same time, we would be the first to say that not all alternatives to the mainstream are conspiracy theories! Even if we stick to the easily observable crises we face – social division, loss of well-being, inequality, environmental degradation – we should be open to sharp analyses of the causes.

What - as we questioned in an earlier editorial - is the difference between a conspiracy and an inspiracy? Where do we draw the line between something that is essentially false and something essentially true—when our collective social development depends upon us being able to call out the establishment?

Back to the Covid dilemma: while some part of the UK government does its best to promote the idea that we have a miracle breakthrough and all will soon be back to normal, other parts suggest caution. The media has had a variable response to this topic. Some outlets are keen to provide hope to a nation it sees as ‘long suffering’. Others raise the alert to the dangers of offering the vaccine to the most vulnerable first. 

In the discussions we have witnessed, far more people are wary of being amongst the first to trial the vaccine in the UK than expected, given the popular narrative about getting back to normal. Amongst those we’ve heard both the rationale that the vaccine has been approved too quickly and that the vaccine is just a form of social control – with every argument in between.

The BBC, itself a campaigner against fake news, is surprisingly intolerant of this ambivalence. It does a great disservice by connecting the anti-vaxxer movement, which is against vaccinations in principle, to the more reasonable fear of an untested vaccine. 

However, when we overlay the shenanigans in Downing Street around the role of the advisor Dominic Cummins in setting policy onto the urgent need to have mass compliance around Covid, we have a truth crisis. To simply buy the line that the person who was responsible for Brexit is now leaving the building and taking every difficulty with him, as the government goes for a “reset” is a lot to ask. Just when we need to be able to trust someone, we are being flung into the wilderness.

It is precisely this absence of any clear alternative to the old ways of hearing the truth that creates the market for conspiracy. At the same time, when clear authority breaks down, there are a variety of responses possible. Some will look for a clear authority, only this time it will be in the form of a culprit: the person or group responsible for everything that has been secretly masterminding the debacle. 

Others will experience the same loss of authority as a wake-up call to their own overly trusting relationship to power and start to doubt everything they read.

But aren’t we all in the position of gradually waking up to the deeper causes for the problems we are now finding ourselves in? If the BBC itself is only now becoming more explicit about the nature and status of facts in news reporting, what then?

When Donald Trump saw that his favourite TV channel Fox News was not prepared to repeat his unsubstantiated claims that the US election had been stolen, his immediate response was that he would build his own rival channel. He never questions the dangers of building his own bubble in a land so deeply divided.

Our own response here at the Daily Alternative is that increasingly people need access to news in forms that give them agency rather than harness and trigger them into increased uncertainty. For that reason, we are thinking more about how to offer the Daily Alternative locally too, with more information about innovation in each city or region alongside the national and global report. A mix we call cosmo-local.

But even cheaper and faster is for more people to take it upon themselves to develop their own personal antennae for news agendas that might not be in their interest. And to have reliable ways to make up their own mind about how to act in the face of crisis or emergency.

Where there is doubt, we should not rely on the internet entirely, but find time and space to deliberate with others, ideally always having a variety of opinions in the room – and if possible, some experts and some who are prepared to ask difficult questions. 

We are all feeling our way along, but in these moments of deep challenge, and in order to be resilient, we need to feel we can stand by our own decisions