Media and Politics in Europe

The piece is marked “sponsored” at the top, followed by a line identifying the content as “provided by” Thailand’s foreign ministry. A line at the end in smaller, fainter font states that the article was not produced by Reuters journalists. Reuters has a section on the homepage dedicated to sponsored content, and stories sponsored by the Thai government are mingled with news stories in Google search results about the topic. But research suggests that many are either oblivious to these disclaimers or do not know what they mean.

News providers got 20 percent of their ad revenues from native content in 2017, according to a global study of 148 publishers by the Native Advertising Institute and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. By 2021 executives expect that to increase to 36 percent

“the reason these advertorials exist is to fool at least some readers into thinking they are legitimate editorial content, or at least imbued with the rigor of Reuters reporting.”

One potential benefit of publishing a counter message on the same platform where the bad publicity originated, Wojdynski says, is having positive content appear alongside negative stories in search results.

the fact that Reuters itself has covered this issue makes the ad even more noteworthy than other paid stories. He notes that early last year the agency’s charitable arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, published pieces pointing out that traffickers were still forcing people into the seafood industry despite reforms. “Publishing this sponsored content without the conflicting context provided by Reuters’s own reporting on this issue seems pretty unethical to me,”

The commotion over the sponsored piece raises questions not just about the ethics of native advertising, but about news providers’ broader relationships with governments. Where and how should publications draw the line when taking money from governments? Should certain clients be completely off limits, and if so how does one decide which ones?

deciding which messages are harmful requires making political and moral judgements, even if they’re unacknowledged

The way we talk about social media is central to narratives that blame the oppressed for their own oppression. Online bigotry, abuse and trolling are often framed as problems of the unwashed masses, who need to be regulated by ‘benign’ institutions such as global data corporations or the police. In reality, whilst racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-immigrant hysteria and other forms of bigotry feature up and down the social spectrum, their recent mobilization is part of a different story. It has been led and co-ordinated by elite networks, seeking to reshape the world at the dusk of neoliberalism. And they are often in direct collaboration with these supposedly respectable institutions, from Facebook to the FBI.

the decade since the financial crisis has accelerated the emergence of a new global oligarch class. With growing wealth has come growing power and a growing ability to shape political debate through the dominant communications technology of the era: TV and the internet. As has long happened with right-wing movements, they have done so in close collaboration with military and security networks. Because the era is neoliberalism, those networks are largely privatised, made up of mercenary firms with names like Palantir, Arcanum, SCL, AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica.

Leave.EU, associated with the further-right UK Independence Party, fronted by iconic blazered bigot Nigel Farage and primarily funded by an insurance man called Arron Banks. (Banks, by my sums, claims to have funnelled about £15m into the group

We know that the person who introduced the UKIP frontman, Nigel Farage, to the supposed money man, Arron Banks, is the Isle of Man-based Brexit-backing billionaire Jim Mellon, who made millions from mass privatisations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And we know that Arron Banks lied about meetings with the Russian embassy, to which it now turns out he was a regular visitor, discussing various business opportunities.

The Commission has concluded that it has ‘reasonable grounds to suspect that Mr Banks was not the true source’ of the millions he poured into the Brexit campaign. After London’s Metropolitan Police didn’t bother to pick up the relevant files for months, Banks is now at last being investigated by the UK’s National Crime Agency.

How Banks’s millions were spent is, largely, a mystery. Under the referendum rules, Leave.EU could spend only £700,000 in the last ten weeks of the campaign, but spending before that period isn’t restricted and doesn’t have to be declared. When I compared the declared donations to Banks’s various groups and the amounts they said they spent in that limited period, there was a gap of £11m.We don’t know how that was spent. However, the most likely destination of the missing millions is online adverts

Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK where political donations aren’t public: a provision that the main parties had managed to smuggle into law during the peace process, in theory as a way to protect donors from reprisals. Someone was using this loophole to flood cash into the referendum campaign.

We now know that the donation was £435,000 – around 20 times what the DUP spent in the general election in June 2017. We forced the DUP to reveal that the money had come via a previously unknown group in Glasgow called the Constitutional Research Council, chaired by the former vice-chair of the Scottish Conservatives, Richard Cook.We discovered that Richard Cook set up a company in 2013 with Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the former head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service, and with a man called Peter Haestrup, who admitted to us that he was involved in running hundreds of Kalashnikovs to Hindu terrorists in West Bengal in 1995 – though he hinted at intelligence service links, telling my colleague Peter Geoghegan that he was ‘on the right side – that time’.

Cook’s group, the Constitutional Research Council, also provided a route for cash to be funnelled into the key organisation of Brexit-backing Tory MPs, the European Research Group.

Ruling classes have always sought to blame bigotry on the working classes

Vote Leave was eventually fined by the regulators over a different affair, where it got round referendum spending limits by giving £675,000 to a small campaign run by a fashion student in his early twenties called Darren Grimes

Vote Leave gave £100,000 to another group, Veterans for Britain, which in many ways represents the core of the part of the establishment which brought Brexit to Britain.Veterans for Britain is more than the hobby of a few ex-squaddies. Its advisory board includes a collection of very senior retired military figures. Most senior of them all is Field-Marshal Lord Guthrie, the former head of British armed forces and chief of defence staff.

There is no evidence that Palantir was involved in the Brexit referendum. However, another mercenary surveillance/propaganda firm sat at the very centre of the Brexit solar system, arguably the star around which both campaigns orbited. And that company was Cambridge Analytica.

Vote Leave’s online operation was run by people who learnt their skills as mercenary military propagandists

while the supposedly respectable official Leave campaign had focussed on the economy in the traditional media, its targeted Facebook adverts, seen by millions of people across the country, focussed very heavily on immigration and on Islam

During the referendum, the ideas – often straight lies – promoted in these adverts took hold in the minds of many voters; particularly effective was the fiction that Turkey is on the verge of joining the EU. This social media campaign didn’t exist in a vacuum, of course – it acted in concert with the oligarch-owned tabloid press.

The idea that powerful groups would spread racist messages through the dominant media is nothing new. In the UK, we’ve had tabloid newspapers for decades. In Italy, similar ideas are promoted on TV by the Berlusconi-owned media, and across the western world powerful groups have always used the dominant communications technology of the era to shape political debate.

Online communications technology is sometimes described as though it’s some kind of voodoo – able to hypnotise audiences into doing anything. This is a mistake. But it’s also a mistake to discount it entirely: companies pay for advertising because it works.

like the traditional rightwing press, far-right groups tap into the neuroses of the societies in which they operate. They jump on reactionary backlashes to egalitarian movements, they pump up latent ideas of racism and sexism that exist throughout society. Brexit, Trump, Orbán, Salvini, Bolsonaro and Le Pen all tap into deep social and cultural crises in their countries

encouraging people to blame anyone but those with real power

Neoliberalism in general, and the asset-stripping of the former Soviet Union in particular, produced a new generation of oligarchs, expert in hiding money from the prying eyes of state officials. Traditional authoritarianism emerges from alliances between the very wealthy and military and police networks. But neoliberalism has also delivered a largely privatised military, and it is to them that this rising class has turned when it wishes to secure power.

Who is this reconstruction for, and for what purpose?

At their best, these heritage reconstruction efforts offer not just symbolic progress but jobs to local residents. The UAE projects that the reconstruction of the al-Nuri mosque will employ 1,000 Iraqi graduates. The World Monuments Fund is training Syrian refugees in Jordan to assist in heritage reconstruction efforts when they return home. But even then, these projects suggest a skewed set of priorities.

Reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Syria have been a top-down process, as several architectural experts have warned. Their agendas are set not by the needs of communities so much as the interests of national governments. And it is in the interests of those governments — not only the Iraqi and Syrian governments themselves, but also Russia, the UAE, and others — to promote the restoration of cultural heritage. Heritage tourism is very lucrative. Heritage also allows governments to burnish their image and questionable legitimacy, to consolidate their power after civil wars, and to project a false sense of normalcy. And funding heritage allows other countries to pose as the saviors of civilization. There is much less symbolic value, or money, in practical things.

Culture is important, but it’s hard to enjoy it when you can’t find food to eat or a place to sleep … or a city to return home to.

“Rebuilding is easy. People can rebuild their city and go back to their lives. They just need some money.” Iraqis and Syrians know what they want to rebuild (notably, ruins like Palmyra do not top the list). Local architects are full of ideas of what they want their cities and towns and villages to look like in the future. We only need to start listening.

Shining light on each individual component, in isolation, will therefore not expose the Frankenstate. As long as the individual components are not connected, each measure is also, in and by itself, not enough to create a sense of alarm, let alone urgency, among the citizenry and internal organizations. Look at the hapless responses of the European Union to Orbán’s near-decade of attacks on democracy in Hungary, or the lukewarm responses to voter suppression in many US states

We need the media to break out of its mutually beneficial addiction with mediagenic authoritarians like Trump, and shine its spotlight on the real threats to democracy, rather than the deflections offered by the authoritarians. But even if the media do that, democracies will still die when mainstream elites – cultural, economic, political and religious – continue to collaborate with authoritarians rather than openly oppose them. And they will continue to die, if democratic politicians do not offer better alternatives than the authoritarians.

We need to look at trends that underlie the “news of the day”, and not be distracted by every Trump tweet or focus almost exclusively on the low-hanging fruits (like the latest raucous White House press conferences or palace intrigues)