hello I'm Paul Mason
with the Czech spying allegations sections of the British media
crossed the line from right-wing propaganda to outright fake news
what happened next has big implications not only for
politics here in Britain but for the way the American media handles Donald Trump
and the right going forward
so we at Novara Media have put together
this guide to how the fake news ecosystem works
it always starts with an outrageous claim
against a political target like for example the idea that
President Obama was not an American citizen or that Hillary Clinton was
running a child sex ring from a pizza restaurant
then it moves to the alt-right social media
the websites the Twitter feeds they take it up
and they say "wow look at this"
but their main aim is to get it into the mainstream media
because here is where it can do the damage so if the mainstream media
refused to take it up what then happens is conspiracy theories begin about censorship
the fake news industry then asks why isn't the mainstream media
taking up the story is it a case of self-censorship are their bosses
clamping down on them are they under pressure from dark and sinister forces
but if the mainstream media do take it up what they often then say is well
maybe the claim can't be verified but it speaks to a wider issue and of course
then their op-ed and opinion writers get to work attacking the target on the
wider agenda of their opposition to whatever the target stands for
Hillary Clinton, Obama and in this case Corbyn
meanwhile you've got the whole social media
the conspiracy theory websites websites and web TV channels
which in America make a lot of money about simply spinning around and around
the fake claims always saying the target has questions to answer
even if the claim is not completely verifiable
and finally what happens is this if you make
an outrageous claim against somebody who has political power it will often
trigger someone just an ordinary person watching it all their mind
dominated by this bullshit to do something and that something can be
write to their MP write to their congressperson, compile a dossier on their
target but it can as in this case of pizzagate with Hillary Clinton
trigger somebody into actual violence
And so fake news is not just about a false
claim it's about how an ecosystem weaponises this false claim to take
down a political target and sometimes leads to violence
now what happened with Jeremy Corbyn?
The claim came from a spy who said that Corbyn was taking money to
spy for the Eastern Bloc against the West in the 1980s
no documentation to prove it
one single claim and the story changed over a period of several days
the website Guido Fawkes which is rapidly becoming the go-to alt-right website in
Britain then took the claim and they fired it into the mainstream media
the Sun, the Telegraph, and the Mail all took up various forms of this story but then
something happened in Britain that doesn't happen in America
our mainstream media includes big publicly funded and publicly regulated TV stations which are
not allowed to retell lies they got their expert reporters many of whom have
very expert sources among the intelligence services to find out if the
story was true and it was bullshit so they said so
and what happened next was
that some very senior journalists at the BBC took down the story and they didn't
just take down the story they started to take down the politicians who've been
repeating the essential allegation saying well maybe it's not completely
true but the guy has questions to answer finally another circuit breaker kicked
in because in Britain we have the libel law and when a politician from the
Conservative Party repeated the claim that Corby n was a paid spy of the Soviet
Union the libel law very quickly led to the claim being withdrawn
so what can we learn from this?
well the two things that disrupted the fake news cycle
in the Corbyn case are two things Rupert Murdoch and the
other right-wing press barons want to get rid of that is publicly funded and
regulated TV news and the libel laws or people's access to those libel laws
because of course they're expensive
why does it matter?
Well there are three reasons
the first is: this is just a foretaste of what's going to happen if
in Britain we get the Labour government the right-wing press will weaponise
disinformation to try and destabilise a government led by Jeremy Corbyn the
second problem is when you do fake news you're just undermining democracy you
are creating the conditions as in the 1930s for people to say "I'm just tired
I'm tired I can't work out what's true or false anymore" and then they say
"please somebody save me
please President Trump or Erdogan in Turkey or Putin
in Russia you take control of society because democracy is too tiring it's too
much effort to work out what is true and what is not" and that brings us to the
third big problem with fake news what you're doing if you start this stuff is
to open your democracy to all the bad actors in the world to play in whether
it's the Russian Secret Service your own Secret Service the Secret Service of
another country that doesn't like the target or simply these armies of paid
private trolls who can be hired by Putin one day and by somebody else the next
you are effectively opening up the core democratic process of the West to
manipulation that's what happened in America that's partly what gave us Trump
and it is partly what the people who've begun to do this want to happen here in Britain
and I think by knowing what they're doing they can be stopped