CONSPIRASPHERE

When the New York Times recycles the same story with different details, is it a conspiracy theory? NOEL ROONEY wonders what we should make of such MSM confabulation.

WHACK-A-MOLE TROPES

It’s a characteristic of classic conspiracy theories that certain elements of them can be recycled to fit new theories as they arise: think crisis actors, baby-eating Satanists, or FEMA coffin stores. One could say they are perennial tropes of the conspiracy grand narrative, the equivalent of a refrain in a biblical psalm, or a chorus in a Tik-Tok sea shanty.

So it’s amusing to observe the same thing happening in the mainstream news cycle. Amusing, and instructive; a dispassionate observer might turn to thinking that either the conspiracy meme bug has infected the unwitting media, or that media outlets are explicitly indulging in conspiracism.

A little over a year ago, largely buried under the burgeoning story of coronavirus, the New York Times, a paper known for its cosily close relationship with intelligence services, published a story suggesting that the Russian government was paying a bounty to terrorists and insurgents for killing US military personnel in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. So far, so CIA-generated propaganda; the story was repeated, evidence-free, in a number of other media outlets, and a few politicos were rolled out to express their shock and anger.

And then the story died. Except that, a few months later, it resurfaced, this time with Iran playing the part of evil sponsor. Same story, same sources, same route to the mainstream. And a few months after that, up it popped again, and this time the sinister paymasters were the Chinese (why not? They were already in the cross-hairs for foisting the bat plague on an unsuspecting world). And just for continuity’s sake, in the run-up to Joe Not Trump’s inauguration, the story reappeared with the Russians back in the central casting frame.

The right wing of the Conspirasphere reacted fairly predictably to the story; when it named the Russians and the Iranians, they saw it for what it was, and laughed it off as a governmentinspired conspiracy theory. But when the Chinese were nominated, they leapt on the story as yet more evidence that the Chinese were out to destroy America. The left wing got excited when the Russians and Iranians were the bad guys – particularly the Russians, as they are the default bogey man for all Democrat worries – and giggled at the idea of the Chinese doing something so outlandish.

The story never got the traction its anonymous authors desired, which in part explains why it kept reappearing wearing a different face mask, but here’s the thing: when this happens in the Conspirasphere, we recognise it for what it is – the rinse and repeat clichés of a narrative that, at its core, never changes, and which never lets lack of evidence get in the way of a good blood-libel – but when the mainstream does it, and by extension, government does it, what do we call it? How do we characterise an action that, in conspiracist terms, is part of the confabulating infrastructure of a narrative that superficially morphs to suit the bias du jour?

Two possibilities spring to mind. First, the steady creep of conspiracy theory into the mainstream, and the steady expansion of the Overton Window it seems to have enabled, has opened a conduit for the more loosely hinged members of the intelligence community; because so much of what passes for news (the news used to contain information, didn’t it? Or is that just a mournful rendering of the Mandela Effect on my part?) is now just someone or other putting it out there, and others picking up on the meme, it has become OK for intelligence mavericks to concoct a juicy – but clearly meat-free – story and watch it surf the media wave. In this case we could characterise it as a strange form of public entertainment, and a tacit recognition that we are all, to some extent, conspiracy theorists now.

The second, and more sobering, inference is that it has always been thus. The various centres of power, and their willing acolytes in the media, have habitually circulated false stories in the mainstream, to nudge public opinion at critical times (such as an election where the Establishment has a very definite dog in the race), or to shore up the demonisation of a perceived enemy when they are just not acting wickedly enough to maintain the façade; and these stories bear all the hallmarks of a classic conspiracy theory. And here, we find ourselves in a grey zone, a strange demimonde where the rabbit holes are shrouded in a miasma of uncertainty, and the entrances are stamped with an offifificial seal.

And why does this matter? It matters because the generalist, psychologised view of conspiracy theory, the view that regularly seeps into public consciousness, tends towards the idea that the theory itself is largely irrelevant; it’s the mindset of the recipient that tells you what you are looking at. As well as removing agency from the theory as a phenomenon in its own right, this tendency has the effect of cordoning off certain categories of conspiracy theory from the domain of investigation; a story emanating from offifificial sources, even one as blatantly fictitious as the Russian/Iranian/Chinese bounty myth, can’t be a conspiracy theory because it doesn’t demonstrate the glib psychopathology that animates the academic industry. Or if it does, no one is talking about it.

As a result, the generation of conspiracy theory is compartmentalised to the extent that much of it is not treated as conspiracy theory at all. The further we voyage into the uncharted waters of the post-truth world, the more precarious such distinctions may prove to be; and that is not an edifying prospect.

We are all, to some extent, conpiracy theorists now

SOURCES: www.nytimes. com/2020/06/26/us/politics/ russia-afghanistan-bounties.html; https://edition.cnn.com/ 2020/08/17/politics/irantaliban-bounties-us-intelligence/ index.html; www.voanews.com/ south-central-asia/china-accusedoffering-bounties-afghan-nonstate