Dances of Disinformation: The Partisan Politics of the Integrity Initiative
Is there such a plane of blissful, balanced information, deliberated and debated upon? No. Governments mangle;
corporations distort. Interest groups tinker. Wars must be sold; deception must be perpetrated. Inconsistencies must be
removed. There will be success, measured in small doses; failure, dispatched in grand servings. The nature of news,
hollow as it is, is to fill the next segment for the next release, a promiscuous delivery, an amoral ejaculate. The
notion a complicated world can somehow be compressed into a press release, a brief, an observation, is sinister and
defeating.
The believers in an objective, balanced news platform are there. Grants are forked out for such romantic notions as news with integrity, directed to increase “trust in news”, which is
tantamount to putting your trust in an institution which has been placed on the mortician’s table. The Trump era has
seen a spike in such funding, but it belies a fundamental misconception about what news is.
Funny, then, that the environment should now be so neatly split: the Russians (always) seen to distort from a central
programme, while no one else does. The Kremlin manipulates feeble minds; virtuous powers do not. The most powerful
nation on the planet claims to be free of this, the same country that boasts cable news networks and demagoguery on the
airwaves that have a distinct allergy against anything resembling balanced reporting, many backed by vast funding
mechanisms for political projects overseas. Britain, faded yet still nostalgically imperial, remains pure with the BBC,
known as the Beeb, a sort of immaculate conception of news that purportedly survives manipulation. Other deliverers of
news through state channels also worship the idol of balance – Australia’s ABC, for one, asserts that role.
We are the left with a distinct, and ongoing polarisation, where Russia, a country relatively less influential than
other powers in terms of heft and demography, has become a perceived monster wielding the influence of a behemoth on the
course of history. Shades and shadows assume the proportions of flesh and meat. The fact that the largest country on the
planet has interests, paranoias and insecurities other countries share is not deemed relevant but a danger. Russia must
be deemed the exception, the grand perversion, a modern beast in need of containment.
Terry Thompson of the University of Maryland supplies readers with a delightfully binary reading, because the forested world of politics is, supposedly, easy to hive off and
cultivate. The woods will be ignored, and small, selective gardens nurtured. The United States has been indifferent,
even weak, before the Kremlin’s cheek and prodding ways, or so goes this line of thinking. The time for change is nigh,
and the freemen and women of the US imperium must take note. A hoodwinked US will arise, and learn from those states who have suffered from Moscow’s designs! “After years of anaemic responses to Russian influence
efforts, official US government policy now includes taking action to combat disinformation campaigns sponsored by Russia
or other countries.”
In this intoxicated atmosphere comes the Scottish based Integrity Initiative, a “partnership of several independent institutions led by the Institute of Statecraft. This international public
programme was set up in 2015 to counter disinformation and other forms of malign influence being conducted by states and
sub-state actors seeking to interfere in democratic processes and to undermine public confidence in national political
institutions.”
This low level clerk depiction is all good, a procedurally dull initiative designed to harden the mettle of debate
against those who sneer and seek to discredit certain institutions. Democracy is often the victim of such paper clip
fillers and grant seekers. Then comes the nub of the matter: the political thrust of this entire exercise. Where did the
Integrity Initiative get its pennies? Moral citizens, perhaps? Bookworms with deep pockets?
That political thrust was revealed, we are told, by a hack. It came from the devil incarnate, those bear like fangs
sharpened on the Russian steppes. “It is of course a matter of deep regret,” came a statement from the group in November, “that Integrity Initiative documents have been stolen and posted online, still more so
that, in breach of any defensible practice, Russian state propaganda outlets have published or re-published a large
number of names and contact details.” Transparency is a damn bugger, but forced transparency for outfits claiming that
no one else practices it is an upending terror.
The revelations were striking on a few fronts. Britain’s Labor Party had been a target, with the group’s Twitter account
used to heap upon its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But more to the point, it blew the lid off the notion of pristine, exalted
partiality. Funding, it transpired, had been obtained, and in abundance, from that most self-interested of bodies, the
UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In effect, monies had been supplied to the Initiative via a government body to
attack the opposition, not exactly a very democratic practice.
On December 3 lasts year, Sir Alan Duncan, in response to a question from Chris Williamson, the member for Derby North, claimed that the FCO had funded the Institute for
Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative to the tune of £296,500 in the financial year 2017/8. That amount has ballooned for
the current financial year to the tune of £1,196,000. “Such funding furthers our commitment to producing important work
to counter disinformation and other malign influence.” Russian practitioners could hardly have said it better
themselves.
The technique here remains dog-eared: discredit the hackers as criminal and sidestep the implications of the content
revealed. “We note,” claimed the initiative, “both the attempts by Russian state propaganda outlets to amplify the volume of this leak; and the
suggestion by a major Anonymous-linked Twitter account that the Kremlin subverted the banner of Anonymous to disguise
their responsibility for it.”
In December, the group, as did Duncan, reiterated the notion that it was a “non-partisan programme of The Institute for Statecraft, a non-partisan charity which promotes
good governance.” On no occasion had the group “engaged in party political activity and would never take up a
party-political stance.” Charming in such insistence, if somewhat disingenuous: any statement with a political target
is, by definition, political activity. Not so for the Initiative, which claims that the FCO’s funding merely reflected “their appreciation of the importance of the threat, and a wish to support
civil society programmes seeking to rebuild the ability of democratic societies to resist large scale, malicious
disinformation and influence campaigns.”
The very idea of insisting on information that corrects disinformation must, by definition, be politically oriented. It
has a target, and objective. The world is wrong, at least according to one version, so right it. We know it, and others
do not. The implication is inescapable.
An example of a journalist outed by the hack is illustrative. He fell from Olympus. He thought he was all fair and high,
a prince of objectivity. James Ball, somewhat slighted by the exposures stemming from the Integrity Initiative
documents, described the Kremlin’s approach to managing the message in The Guardian as follows: “Russia’s information manipulation strategies are many and varied, and far more sophisticated than simply
pushing out pro-Putin messages. It uses a mix of Russian-owned media outlets, most notably RT (formerly Russia Today)
and Sputnik, sympathetic talking heads, social media ‘bot’ accounts and state-sponsored hackers to influence western
politics and media coverage.”
To deny the existence of such media management strategies would simply be silly. But equally daft is the suggestion that
journalism run through the corporate mill in the United States, or through media conglomerates in Europe, identifies
some miraculous golden mean of objective fairness. Ditto numerous governments, who have a deep interest in selling a
particular story within, and without their jurisdiction. Respective messages are doing a dance, and governments the
world over are attempting to influence the course of discussion. They are the self-appointed bulwark against
“post-truth”, a nonsense term that has assumed the very thing it seeks to combat.
Ball falls into the trap of heralding the virtues of free speech and media only to then find fault with them. Even he
doesn’t entirely these tendencies. Russia, he argues, simulated a “virus that turns its host’s immune system against
itself” using an “information strategy… turning free media and free speech against its own society.” And what of it?
Surely, models of information parry and thrust can drive the bad out with the good, or is there, underlying these
criticisms, the latent suggestion that free society harbours the imbecilic and destructive? As with any wading into
these murky waters, the danger is that none of these catalytic engagements seeks free speech, merely a managed
deployment of spears analogous to battle. The amoral terrain of the Cold War re-appears, and behind many interlocutors
lies the funding of a state.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
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