Real Fake News

Techniques of Propaganda and Deception-Based Mind Control – From Ancient Babylon to Internet Algorithms

T J Coles

Red Pill Press 2018 279p, ind, ISBN 9780692196175

Following on from 2016’s Britain’s Secret Wars, TJ Coles continues his exploration of the State’s investment in a fluid enterprise with very real human consequences. Real Fake News addresses the complicity between political authority and the media it relies upon to perpetuate its control. Beginning with an excursion into the murky world of post-factualism, Cole outlines frequently used strategies such as omission, snowballing, conspiracy and counter-narrative – key tools in thought control.

He looks at the history and exploitation of fake news, and the battle against its global spread. Even the ancient world was at it: Babylonian city builder and all-round superhero Ur-Nammu had the clay tablets to prove his kinship with the God-Man Gilgamesh; and the stelæ celebrating Rameses III’s military success over the Libyans must be accurate! Cole details the informational obfuscation that followed the famines that struck Ireland and India in the 19th century. He draws the role of education into his survey of indoctrination and the cultivation of a passive population. The questionable claims of ‘Big Pharma’, he asserts, testify to the prevalence of less-than-empirical studies being ratified by peer reviews at the behest of big business… Where will it end? We may never know, given we can no longer rely on visual information in the age of the ‘Digital Necromancer’. He cites Georges Méliès staged photographs of Muslim atrocities in the Græco– Turkish War of 1897 and the CIA’s Bin Laden sex tapes.

Part two discusses the misinformation generated by British intelligence, the CIA and psyops consultancies – along with mainstream media – in the (mis-)representation of Iraq, Libya and Syria. Counterinformation from Russia, Al-Qaeda and masters of the green screen ISIS further complicates the matter of ‘truth’. With plentiful Internet references as footnotes, Coles guides us through how the BBC (in his opinion) reported on weapons of mass destruction and staged bombings with little or no context and no follow-ups. For many, perhaps, this comes as no surprise; paranoia seems to be the name of the game in our world of slippery ‘factuality’. Discussing the difficulty of weighing the truth content of our daily media fodder, Cole considers how Western

neo-liberalism places shareholders’ expectations before the duty of objective reporting. The democratic potential of the Internet, he argues, has been co-opted by the billionaires who control print and televised information, and appear to operate with impunity. Once the mainstream becomes the opposition, Cole asks, will we be able to pin down what is real? He concludes with a vision of our already desperate informational landscape being further blighted by algorithms, clickbait and ‘bots’.

For those with an interest in media history and conspiracy in the post-factual age, Real Fake News offers grim reading, close analysis and scholarly citation, though it sometimes labours its central ideas.

Chris Hill

★★★ ★★