Media and Politics in Europe

The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965 that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

“The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across.”

“reports” sent to warn other governments, selected journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.The reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.

Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.

The Information Research Department (IRD) was set up by the post-second world war Labour government to counter Soviet propaganda attacks on Britain. Its activities mirrored the CIA’s cold war propaganda operations and the extensive efforts of the USSR and its satellites.

The IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to be believers”.

Other material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between the two communist powers.

One major initiative focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an attempt to maintain white minority rule.The IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we can still save our country,”

In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many newspapers reacting intemperately.

A similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti, blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.

As with most such efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge. On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict. Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.

Though the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.“The [new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.“Liz Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used far more devious means,” Cormac said.

The far right has recoded freedom as “doing whatever you want, no matter how hurtful or damaging to anyone else.” Not a “net gain in human liberation for all of us, including you.” What’s the difference? Everything.

the far right has recoded freedom as “the right to hurt others”

Of course freedom isn’t the right to hurt others. That’s not a right at all. it’s where rights, all of them, end. We teach literal second graders this. No, we don’t hurt others. That isn’t what freedom is.

the far right has completely recoded all of that. “Democracy” means me dominating you against your will, without your consent, and hurting you, because that is what freedom is. If a few lies are told along the way, so be it, because truth doesn’t matter — only power does. Equality goes out the nearest window. Justice is turned on its head, and rage and hostility are all that count. The far right has managed to recode democracy itself — as authoritarianism, regress, just a way to get what you want, even if it means hurting anyone and everyone else, not giving them liberation, too.

The billionaires — the Spotify guy, for example, or Zuck — fund the millionaires — Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, whomever — to recode everything into its opposite, from freedom to democracy to truth itself.

The Great Gaslighting. This is how everyone became a dumb toxic bastard. You can see that they outnumber us. Nobody on those planes was like Jesus, people, stop. Think. It was like a zombie movie in that regard. They all succumbed, and those who didn’t were a) outnumbered and b) quaking with silent horror. The Great Gaslighting works.

What does the far right hate? Everything. Everything you can think of. Masks. Books. Kids. Women. Gay people. Immigrants. Science. History. Reality. Civilization. Disney World. Kids books about unicorns. Kids wearing masks. Women wearing masks holding kids. Kids who want to grow up to be scientists.

Someone like this walks around hating most of the people they see. Way more than half of us, after all, are women and kids. That much hate is actually pathological. It is literally insane to hate this much. Who does that? Who wants to live like that? It’s not normal and it’s not healthy. Imagine walking around hating…most people and things you see. 99% of what you see makes you angry, curdles your lip in rage. That’s psychosis. It’s paranoia. It’s delusional.

Italy is often seen as a soft touch for Kremlin disinformation and a potential Trojan horse in Europe because of historic ties to Russia based on strong economic ties and the largest Communist party in the west.

In perhaps the most egregious example of a top Russian official exploiting western media for disinformation, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared in an interview on a privately-owned TV channel founded by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He used the occasion to assert falsehoods virtually unchallenged, including an inflammatory assertion that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood” — a remark for which Putin ultimately had to apologize to Israel. The European Commission was forced to remind EU broadcasters that they “must not allow incitement to violence, hatred and Russian propaganda in their talk shows.”

Italy’s parliamentary committee for security, Copasir, last week opened a probe into disinformation, in response to widespread concerns that Italian news outlets are being used to spread the pro-Putin line.

Putin built a warm relationship with Berlusconi, based on shared economic interests. Over the past decade, and even after the annexation of Crimea, Putin has engaged with the rise in populist and anti-establishment parties — and especially the far-right League party — who saw him as a fellow adversary of the EU and global western elites

As far as Lavrov’s appearance goes, Berlusconi’s Mediaset defended the interview saying it confirmed Putin’s unwillingness to arrive at a diplomatic solution and therefore allowed us to learn something about the Russian leadership. On the same evening, another channel interviewed Vladimir Soloviev, a presenter on Russian state TV, who is subject to sanctions, and described by the U.S. State department as the Kremlin’s most energetic propagandist today.

Italian TV stations were forced to apologize after publishing a graphic that apparently showed NATO biological laboratories underneath the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, but was in reality drawn from an apocalypse-themed board game.  

The Fatto Quotidiano newspaper published a full-page article blaming the U.S. and the EU for “the massacre that is taking place in Ukraine” so favorable to Russia it was retweeted by the Russian Embassy in Italy.

Italy’s distinctive political talk show tradition, strong on melodrama and orchestrated arguments and light on fact-checking and tough interviews, that is causing the most commotion. The all-in-one politics and show-business format began with shows such as Rita Dalla Chiesa’s Parlamento In, on Berlusconi’s private TV channels in the 1980s, but was soon imitated by the state broadcaster Rai.

The talk shows “are a kind of infotainment,” said Romano. “The objective is to create a row not inform.”

The parliamentary investigation will look at how talk show guests are selected and whether they had been paid by the Kremlin

The Italy media landscape is more polluted than other countries, she said. “The talk shows fail to give context, distinguish between opinion and facts. They care more about creating a show and ratings.”

Romano, the MP, agrees. “We cannot treat facts and opinions with equal value, you wouldn’t have Goebbels debate Anne Frank about the Holocaust.”

Russia’s efforts to disorient Italians seem to be working. According to a recent poll, half of Italians think coverage of Ukraine is distorted. And 25 percent say they don’t believe the media on Ukraine. Italians are also far less supportive of arming Ukrainians than other Western allies, with only around 30 percent in favor of sending more weapons compared to around 60 percent in the U.K. and U.S., according to polls.

Head of Rai Carlo Fuortes has suggested it may finally be time to rethink the talk show format, to avoid inflammatory debates at the expense of serious and informed exchanges.

Carlson had been billed as a key speaker at the CPAC conference, but the Fox News talk show host sent only a 38 second video message, in which he extolled Hungary under the Orbán government as a model for the US.

Journalists from international media outlets were denied access to the event, including the New Yorker, Vox Media, Vice News, Rolling Stone, and the Associated Press, despite months of requests. The organizers either ignored their requests for accreditation or told them to “watch the event online”.

Zsolt Bayer, a pro-Orbán pundit who formerly called Roma people “animals”, referred to Jewish people as “stinking excrement” and used racist slurs for Black people during the BLM protests.

Twitter prohibits the impersonation of "individuals, groups, or organisations to mislead, confuse, or deceive others".The company told us that since the war began, it has removed more than 100,000 accounts for violations of its platform manipulation and spam policy, including the suspension of dozens of accounts connected with the hashtags #IStandWithRussia and #IStandWithPutin.

Lenta, one of the largest sites in the country with more than 200 million monthly visitors, has been part of the relentless propaganda machine used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Lenta is owned by Rambler, a media group that was bought in 2020 by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, which is state-owned and under US and UK sanctions.

Polyakov and Miroshkina also published a personal letter on the website, which urged readers: “Don’t be afraid! Don’t be silent! Fight back! You are not alone, there are many of us! The future is ours!”It is the first major act of protest seen in Russian state media since Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, broke on to the set of the nightly news in mid-March shouting: “Stop the war. No to war.”

“Of course I am afraid,” Polyakov said. “I am not ashamed to admit that. But I knew what I was doing, what the consequences could be.”

the Rutube video platform was taken down by pro-Ukrainian hackers on Sunday night, while local television menus were hacked, with programme descriptions on smart TVs replaced by a message reading: “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.”

While other metrics like race and gender representation had improved in recent years and were representative of the workforce overall, for class the number of people coming from higher socioeconomic backgrounds had risen by eight percentage points from 72% in 2016.

The report’s author, NCTJ research consultant Mark Spilsbury, suggested that the reason behind the rise in the number of journalists did not necessarily mean more people were working for newspapers or magazines, with content writing and journalism-adjacent roles now becoming more spread out across the economy.

According to one 2019 report, at half of UK universities fewer than 5% of students are classified as being from disadvantaged white backgrounds.

Mike Hill, director of the MA News programme at Cardiff University shared his experiences entering journalism as the son of a Yorkshire miner and shared concerns that his journey into the industry would be impossible now. He said: “Becoming a journalist to me was akin to getting onto the space programme. My dad was a miner, which when I tell that to my students now it’s a bit like saying he was a blacksmith or a thatcher.” He added: “Rather than this being an inspirational tale, it’s also a cautionary one. There are lots of things that have happened between me in the late 1980s and 1990s becoming a journalist and now that means I wouldn’t make it currently. “My local library is shut, my old school is in special measures, there isn’t the funding from employers to send people on training courses, people are spooked by the £10,000 figure to pay for postgraduate journalism training. “Then there’s the lack of cash, there being no network - I didn’t know anyone who went to university let alone who was a journalist - and then there’s the imposter syndrome.”

non-white staff were less represented in senior roles, with just 10% of editors being of non-white ethnicity

One of the moments Galliano says marked this shift was the Queer British Art exhibition at London’s Tate Britain in 2017, marking the 50th anniversary of decriminalisation.But a permanent, national museum marks another step forward, making sure that “queer storytelling and histories are not just about anniversaries” – and that those cis, straight masses are involved, too.