IN these days of Russian bots and Trumpian fake news, there is something charming, almost comforting, about a PR man admitting he just made things up to get headlines for his company.
Step forward Alan Clark, for 21 years a Ryanair spokesman, quoted in Holyrood magazine as having participated in unlikely stories such as the airline’s supposed plans to save wages by reducing the number of pilots on board to one, or for there to be standing places on the planes, or – chortle – charging a euro for the use of in-flight toilets. All made up by the Ryanair PR machine, apparently.
Mr Clark boasted to a conference that his reward included a pile of cuttings marked, appropriately, “toilet”. He seemed very pleased with his endeavours, adding “perception is the only reality”. Apparently he now advises government ministers, which might explain a lot.
Such conference boasts seem frivolous. Few people take Ryanair’s publicity machine seriously, and when bad news came – in the form of thousands of cancelled flights last autumn – it undermined the airline’s shaky theory that “any publicity is good publicity”. Nevertheless the travails of the budget airline pale compared to the almost-daily exposure of propaganda and manipulation involving media and politics these days.
The contortions, revelations and counter-claims concerning Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and their impact on the US election and the UK’s European referendum in 2016 have cast doubt on the democratic process. Beyond the everyday machinations of political campaigning, they may even usher a new “cold war” represented by dark Russian interference in Western democracy.
How did we get here? Public dismay has undermined people’s faith in conventional politics. Our institutions, including the media, face varying degrees of scepticism. Now everyone is their own media channel, just by access to broadband and a free Twitter account. We are free to believe anything we want, and to disclaim conventional sources. We can source, swallow and promulgate any old rubbish, often anonymously and with no supporting evidence either.
It would be nice to say this has led to a world of greater knowledge, broader understanding and improved public discourse. Nice, but untrue.
The language of politics has coarsened. The bitterness spawned by the Brexit decision, and perhaps even the Scottish referendum before it, is expressed often in terms way beyond normal debate. I have watched TV audiences in Barnsley and Sunderland – to name just two – turning on participants with unprecedented venom. Can we really despise our neighbours so much? Can we really get frothing mad about the supposed iniquities of Brussels, or Westminster, Washington, or whoever is in our sights?
“Fake news” is a chimera. It means different things to different people. The phrase was used first to describe some of the nonsense pushed on social media, and seized upon by those Russian bots. It led to bizarre stories such as Hillary Clinton being implicated in child murders and other proven nonsense. People believed these tales. In some cases they seemed to actually want to believe them. Their dislocation from the world inhabited by Mrs Clinton, by the rich and famous, the political and media classes swollen with entitlement, made it easier for them to believe that this is a world dominated by sinister conspiracy.
President Trump himself was able to turn the phrase to his advantage. Where “fake news” was created as a means of explaining his apparently inexplicable rise, he used it to defame the mainstream media to his own faithful. We live in a world where Ryanair’s frivolous and inconsequential puffery about paid-for toilets on planes has been way outmatched by real, important and dangerous lies that many people hold to be true.
The genie is out of the bottle. Where and when did it happen? Many people who previously had no interest in politics and are now among the most rabid activists will point to Tony Blair’s blind support for Bush’s war on Iraq. Here in the UK, the Americanisation of politics, the fluidity of spin doctors and special adviser roles, has not helped.
Even here in douce Scotland, where we have a Parliament obsessed with political correctness and whose policy differences often can be measured in polite shades of grey, we have three political parties whose behaviour belongs in the playground. To be on the mailing lists of the Labour, SNP and Tory press operations is to be bombarded by a hail of fake outrage best summed up as a challenge to a fight behind the bike-shed. Scarcely a day goes by without the SNP demanding an apology from the Tories, Labour calling the SNP names or the Conservatives contorting some hard-to-swallow “fact” from a Freedom of Information inquiry.
Where does it end? Will Trump voters ever come back to the Democrats? Will Leave voters ever accept that a soft Brexit might be of far greater benefit than some overblown beef deal with Australia? Will Scottish campaigners ever accept that the other side – whichever side – might actually have Scotland’s best interests at heart?
The answer, presumably, lies in leadership. We need politicians and parties that inspire. Who can provide some real positive vision about where our post-crash, post-industrial, post-truth society is headed. Look around us, and that leadership, that vision, is clearly lacking right now.
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