I try to avoid posting links that are making the rounds, because I don’t like being redundant. I doubly try to avoid posting political links that are making the rounds, because the word ‘politics’ is already big and honking and red up there in the righthand corner. But I feel that this story is of particular note, and an important watershed that I want to emphasize.

Have you been hearing the stories about the Iranian government preparing a law to require Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians to wear specially-colored clothing? Maybe heard it picked up in one or two “news” outfits? I did. And it really struck me as odd. I am very much not a fan of fundamentalist religious governments, especially explicit autocracies such as Iran. But this sort of action was so blatant, so obviously … impolitic that I felt it kind of hard to swallow. Only the need to maintain an air of ‘not paranoid-delusional’ kept me from flat-out denying it instantly.

Well, turns out the story is demonstrably false. It is, in fact, so easily verified as false - one search in Google news would have debunked the story - that any reporting organization that has chosen to make news of it is instantly of suspect motivation.

Or, at least, methods. I’m reminded of this article from the March 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review:

[The Pentagon Information Operations Roadmap, signed by Donald Rumsfeld, stated that] “psyop messages . . . will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public.” The Smith-Mundt Act, signed into law in 1948, was designed to prevent the American people from being targeted with propaganda meant for foreign audiences (specifically, it prohibited the broadcast of the Voice of America within the U.S.). But technology has rendered it effectively moot.

I know this is probably, uh, old news by now. But more than the executive branch playing the same old game of abusing source confidentiality to plant political cover stories or even fake journalists who suspiciously receive coveted White House access, the idea that our military is knowingly planting overtly fake news with the understanding that they will sway political opinion inside the United States disturbs me to the very core. Combine this admission of complicity with an environment in which it’s clear that the incentives to produce verifiably accurate journalism are greatly diminished, both for resource and legal concerns, and we have a complete evaporation of the news media’s privilege as the (delegated) ‘fourth estate.’ I’d say that now, as much as any time before, in any country on earth, the onus is on each and every citizen to not only question, but to use the unprecedented tools at our disposal to actively verify everything we hear, see, or read. And then, if we find something that doesn’t jibe with the official story, it is our responsibility to ensure the counter-meme rises to as great or greater prominence as the fake story itself, lest the vague impression of past lies be used as cover for another military misadventure.

Related Posts:

• Demotix: Citizen Journalism (July, 2008)
• “The Hamsher Theory” making the rounds (October, 2005)
• News Items from Goma, Congo (July, 2007)
• White House Seeks New Bad Guy (October, 2005)
• Most amusing news story of the month (October, 2006)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 11:56 pm and is filed under doomsaying, politics, society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.