Our government is ‘sexing up’ the threat of a Russia-Ukraine conflict

Fake news, disinformation, misinformation – call it what you will. The study of disinformation has become ubiquitous across the western world and currently draws lavish funding.

Its aficionados tend to proceed from two assumptions. One is that the world is made up of “us” and “them”, friend and foe, and disinformation always and only comes from “them”. The other, which often shines through the painstaking analysis of algorithms, bots and the rest, is the belief that the majority of our fellow human beings are too stupid to tell truth from falsehood, and need to be taught, by the initiated and from an early age, how to spot the rogues.

None of this helps, however, when erroneous, misleading or – perish the thought – actual disinformation comes from your own side. When that information also has the potential to distort or fuel a changing and potentially incendiary situation, it poses a big question for journalists: can you believe what you are being told and, if not, what can and should you do about it?

This question has seemed all the more urgent in recent weeks, as much of the US and UK media have sounded ever more lurid alarms about an “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine. The information has come largely from government officials who are relying, in some instances, they say, on intelligence. This has given us numbers and approximate positions of Russian troops and assumptions about Moscow’s intentions that have often seemed to me, at best, worthy of further questioning and, at worst, plain wrong.

Personally, I remain sceptical about any Russian plan to invade. But such overheated talk, from wherever it comes, risks bringing about precisely that result. Why now? And why has this western alarmism – as I see it – not been challenged more than it has?

Last week – in a chapter that made some waves in media circles – a US journalist finally lost patience at a State Department briefing and went some way towards broaching the dangers, if not the actual fact, of media manipulation. The spokesman, Ned Price, had dangled the prospect of a Russian plot to fabricate “a propaganda video”, including faked pictures of explosions, that could form a pretext for invading Ukraine.

The journalist, Matthew Lee of the Associated Press (AP), asked repeatedly what evidence there was for such a plot, and on being told it came from declassified US intelligence, he asked, not unreasonably, why he should believe it. The response was twofold: the standard parental  “because I say so’’, and the implicit threat that if you doubt my word, you are effectively colluding with the other side. That such an exchange takes place in a formal briefing room setting should not detract from the harm such insinuations may do to a journalist’s reputation (as governments well know).

I had had my own small run-in with the UK Foreign Office just a few days before, after the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, appeared on the BBC’s Today programme. In the course of the interview, she had made at least three statements that seemed to magnify what the government had said before, so I asked what the basis was for the new assertions.

She had said that there were “hundreds of thousands” of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border (the highest figure generally given at the time was 125,000). She had also used forms of words that gave the impression that Russia had already mounted “false flag” operations to try to provoke a Ukrainian military response, and had already made attempts to oust the Ukrainian government. Previous statements – attributed to intelligence – had suggested only that such attempts might be in preparation.

It seems to me that, by accident or design, this amounted to misrepresentation and had the effect of magnifying a threat – sexing it up, if you like – in a way that seemed highly irresponsible, given the charged atmosphere at the time.

The response I received from the Foreign Office – after some prodding – was, to be generous, insubstantial. I was merely referred to other government statements (which did not include the exaggerations). It is worth noting, perhaps, that while Truss has not corrected the record, she has not repeated the claims either.

The point is, though, that, as a journalist, I have a channel for posing such questions. Most people do not have that. As a long-time Russia-watcher, I also have some expertise, speak the language, and maybe know some of the questions to ask. This can be a help. But it is still hard for reporters to challenge officials if they are set on using journalists to convey an “authorised” version to the public, especially when – as with Russia-Ukraine – that version is supported only by selective intelligence. By what right do we question the wisdom of those whose job it is to keep our country safe?

For some of us, there is an answer: the false premise that took the US and the UK into a war with Iraq. In the US, the New York Times journalist, Judith Miller, the paper’s award-winning specialist in terrorism and related issues, received privileged briefings on Iraq’s supposed capabilities that bolstered the case for war, and the reports gained credibility from her byline. When they were subsequently discredited, it was she – more than the New York Times or those who had “spun” the information – who took most of the flak.

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The UK government, for its part, contributed the so-called “dodgy dossier” and its sequel, claiming that Iraq still had large stocks of chemical weapons and missiles that could reach British bases in Cyprus. Remember The Sun headline (on 25 September 2002, at a crucial time in government efforts to convince public opinion of the need for war), “Brits 45 mins from doom!” That headline was inevitable, the moment government spokespeople briefed the 45 minute detail. Government communications specialists well know what makes journalistic juices run.

And to question, let alone reject, this sort of briefing is more problematic than it might look. Not only could the warnings prove correct, in which case your credibility is dented, but you earn the opprobrium of the information-givers and so risk being left out of any future loop.

There is also the difficulty of exactly how to cast doubt on an official line. I remember returning from various Iraq-era Foreign Office briefings and reporting to my editor that we had been told X and Y, but I didn’t believe it. But no editor could, or should, wave through a news article saying this is what the government briefed today, but our reporter “doesn’t buy it”.

An element of scepticism can be injected by putting a headline in quotation marks, but any reporter challenging the government line needs supporting evidence, and when the government cites intelligence, it is – as the AP reporter at the US State Department showed – essentially their word against your judgement.

Finding anyone qualified to gainsay hitherto secret and selectively disclosed details is nigh impossible in the time available, or at all. It is also fraught with danger for anyone on the inside who talks. The hounding of the government scientist, David Kelly, after he was outed as a source for the BBC and others, will be a further deterrent.

The problem may be particularly acute with intelligence, but the same applies to any area of specialist information, when a government has a fixed line and for whatever reason brooks no dissent. Remember how the UK government was “led by the science” during the pandemic. MPs subsequently criticised ministers for not challenging scientists enough. But, as those same ministers and journalists, responded: not only did we lack the requisite expertise to mount an informed challenge, but even those who were qualified to dissent and prepared to speak out, found themselves silenced as a threat to the nation’s health.

That some dissenters found a forum in the alternative media did not help, as it allowed governments and other scientists to dismiss them as outsiders, and there was still no debate. It is only now that the trade-off between lockdowns, economic damage and postponed treatments in the health service is being even tentatively addressed.

In sum, it is not just in authoritarian states that governments hold the advantage in getting their point across. It is too easy to regard the Iraq war, with its dodgy dossiers, sexed-up intelligence and the rest, as a disastrous one-off that the government and media have learned from. It is not evident to me that they, or we, really have, given the alarm that has been whipped up over the Russia threat on the basis of distinctly questionable, but largely unquestioned, information.