{"id":42688,"date":"2019-01-13T16:46:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-13T21:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42688"},"modified":"2019-01-13T16:46:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-13T21:46:45","slug":"the-original-fake-news-the-bbc-and-the-information-research-department","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42688","title":{"rendered":"The Original \u2018Fake News\u2019? The BBC and the Information Research Department"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Original \u2018Fake News\u2019? The BBC and the Information Research Department<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Last month Ritula Shah<\/strong> presented a BBC World Service discussion programme entitled Is \u201cFake News\u201d A Threat To Democracy?<\/em><\/p>\n

Predictably the debate focused on Russian attempts to influence Western populations and political systems.<\/p>\n

Asked whether the US has been involved in similar activities, Dr Kathleen Bailey<\/strong>, a senior figure in the US State Department\u2019s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the 1980s, was dismissive:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe [the US] certainly do not have a budget, bureaucracy or intellectual commitment to doing that kind of thing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carl Miller<\/strong>, the research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, also played down the West\u2019s activities:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Western countries do do less of this as a kind of tool of foreign policy than autocracies.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cRead real journalism\u201d \u2014 presumably BBC journalism \u2014 was one of the guest\u2019s suggestions for countering Fake News.<\/p>\n

Putting this self-serving and self-congratulatory narrative to one side, it is worth considering the BBC\u2019s, and particularly the BBC World Service\u2019s, own relationship to the British government\u2019s own propaganda.<\/p>\n

\u201cDirectly funded by government [the Foreign Office], rather than the licence fee\u201d the World Service is \u201cdeeply embedded in the foreign policy, security and intelligence apparatus of the British state,\u201d Dr Tom Mills<\/strong> notes in his must-read 2016 book The BBC: Myth of a Public Service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In particular, the BBC had a very close relationship to the Information Research Department (IRD) \u2014 \u201ca Foreign Office propaganda outfit which sought especially to foster anti-communist sentiments on the left,\u201d explains Mills, a Lecturer in Sociology and Policy at Aston University.<\/p>\n

Set up in 1948, the IRD \u201cwas one of the largest and best-funded sections of the Foreign Office until it was discreetly shut down in 1977 on the orders of [then foreign secretary] David Owen,\u201d investigative journalist Ian Cobain<\/strong> reported in the Guardian in July 2018.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Original \u2018Fake News\u2019? The BBC and the Information Research Department Last month Ritula Shah presented a BBC World Service discussion programme entitled Is \u201cFake News\u201d A Threat To Democracy? Predictably the debate focused on Russian attempts to influence Western populations and political systems. Asked whether the US has been involved in similar activities, Dr […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[64,23918,204,2779,6110,23915,23916,4194,23917,694],"class_list":["post-42688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-bbc","tag-bbc-world-service","tag-democracy","tag-fake-news","tag-global-research","tag-ian-sinclair","tag-information-research-department","tag-military-intervention","tag-ritula-shah","tag-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42689,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42688\/revisions\/42689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}