Give War a Chance? Fake News Is Already Making It Happen in Ukraine

 Martin JAY

Martin Jay is an award-winning British journalist based in Morocco where he is a correspondent for The Daily Mail (UK) who previously reported on the Arab Spring there for CNN, as well as Euronews. From 2012 to 2019 he was based in Beirut where he worked for a number of international media titles including BBC, Al Jazeera, RT, DW, as well as reporting on a freelance basis for the UK’s Daily Mail, The Sunday Times plus TRT World. His career has led him to work in almost 50 countries in Africa, The Middle East and Europe for a host of major media titles. He has lived and worked in Morocco, Belgium, Kenya and Lebanon.

Western media leads us into war in Ukraine with Russia, but don’t worry, Biden’s got the autocue working now.

“We’re heading for a war in Ukraine not because of Putin but because of western media provoking one” is not an erudite argument which many will want to embrace. But western media is in such a poor state and its journalists such low grade, that warmongering is to be expected more than ever now. Fake news has really taken over the domain as hacks scramble to outbid one another for the latest juiciest headline and in so doing, actually stir up the atmosphere so that the political establishment gets hooked on the media coverage so much that it tacitly edges itself into the war zone.

If we look for one moment of the British media’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis, we can see at an instance that few journalists are even interested in due diligence in giving the Russian side the right to reply to their jaded narrative, which is, in a nutshell that Putin will invade Ukraine based on a staged provocation. The sloppy journalism is stunning. The Sun newspaper, arguably Britain’s most popular tabloid which it could be argued is the founding father of fake news from as far back as the 80s, never lets the truth stand in the way of a good story. It declared in a thundering piece on February 15th that Russian troops would invade the following day with 200,000 troops and a missile “blitz” – attributed of course to U.S. intelligence reports. When journalists are complicit in news which they doubt is true, they are at least obliged to put the story into context. Unless of course they are simply ignorant and are just anxious to get a sexy headline and feed the clickbait machine. Sadly, this latter scenario is what is driving most western media newsroom agendas as journalists today are no more than stenographers sitting at a machine and waiting for instructions.

The state of media now in the west is so piss poor that most journalists in British newsrooms writing about the Ukraine crisis haven’t even the faintest idea what the nuances of the story are and are just primed to write up any garbage which is handed to them, U.S. intelligence reports being perfect fodder which of course is not even checked. We saw exactly the same scenario play out for years in London with journalists covering Syria who were happy to just write factual reports about Assad’s chemical weapons attacks allegedly on his own people – based on nothing but finger-pointing by western governments and fake news generated on social media – only to be held to account years later by a scandal in the very weapons watchdog which exposed the reports to be entirely wrong and fabricated by western intel agencies who carried them out, complete with actors providing staged video footage to the BBC.

Is the same going to happen with the Ukraine war?

It’s already happening. Putin has been demonised to such a point that not one of the so-called frontline journalists camped in Ukraine wishes to go into two regions which are controlled by “Russian separatists” and do some old school investigating. Time after time British media giants like Sky wheel out anti-Russian so-called experts to unravel the reports and how they are interpreted as it always results in Russia being the enemy, because that’s manageable, bite-sized and everyone in the newsroom can work with it as it doesn’t challenge what their own government is spewing out in the world of call centre journalism which we know as ‘mainstream media’ today.

Putin can hardly believe his luck. This oversimplification and binary approach to war reporting assists him no end. Ignorance of the west to the Ukraine crisis works well in these times of crisis. Biden, who just recently announced for the second time that he was confident Putin was about to invade begins to look even more stupid and misinformed than ever before. And that’s quite an achievement.

Yet the truth is that the third-rate leaders which we elected because of a lack of confidence in the establishment are letting western voters down in their policies and are fighting for their political lives. And so, a war in Ukraine needs to be talked up and Putin needs to be provoked to actually do it, just so they can throw a huge blanket over their own egregious failures in office and work on promoting themselves as defending western values.

 Boris, Biden and Zelensky are all a joke. Literally. The thing that unites them is that they could use an invasion as a God-given media distraction and, they believe, save themselves from being ousted at the polls or replaced by their own parties. Similarly, the EU is in an all-time political crisis and it will almost certainly direct its servile brown-tongued journalists in Brussels to knock out blinding copy showing how the European Union is part of a humanitarian crisis and “leading” the EU armies which sent troops there. Brussels might even convince some EU member states to put on its soldiers’ arms an EU arm band to feed the fake news media machine with more lies. Of course, those journalists – like the FT one who recently wrote up a boring conference in Brussels about its relations with African countries as an award winning PR stunt for the EU itself – will not be looking for any annoying facts to get in the way of a good story. One, for example, being that it was the EU goading Ukraine to become a western ally and join NATO which is the root of the entire crisis now.

A war in Ukraine will whitewash so much bad news away in Brussels like how pathetic the eurozone is doing in growth, how Poland and other member states are emerging as Brexit-like contenders or just simply how clueless the EU is on big picture foreign policy stuff and can only really wrap itself around the leg of Uncle Sam and do a nodding dog routine, demonstrated quite well by Josep Borrell in Washington recently. Biden’s popularity also might be suspended temporarily from the current freefall if he can come across as statesman-like and actually complete whole sentences while stammering away into his autocue and using highbrow words or remembering the capital of the Ukraine. All this while the coin-operated stenographers of MSM in both the U.S. and the UK just stop wholesale in covering other galactic media events altogether – like the war in Yemen, for example – and focus on the Ukraine war story, which actually just writes itself anyway, complete with its own clichés.

 I wonder what the late P J O’Rourke would have made of it all.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2022/02/19/give-war-chance-fake-news-is-already-making-it-happen-in-ukraine/