I’ve been looking at a White House disinformation story that has kind of led me down a rabbit hole of thinking around disinformation. This week, the Trump administration called out four separate Chinese media organisations for their operations in the United States — China Central TV, China News Service, People’s Daily and the Global Times.
They’re making the case that the media outlets are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and has designated them as “Foreign Diplomatic Missions”. Which is bad.
Now, a couple things stand out to me here. The first is understanding precisely what the US means by “Foreign Diplomatic Mission”. It’s a relatively benign sounding nominate. And in fact, there’s not a problem with foreign diplomatic missions. They’re entities from one state, present in another, but representing their home country. That would be diplomatic, embassies, etc.
The issue here is that these organisations are calling themselves “press” while actually functioning as representatives of the CCP – the Chinese Communist Party.
And that brings me to my second issue. Because this announcement came from Trump’s White House, I found that I immediately doubted it. The stream of White House disinformation is so pervasive, even announcements around political positions that I might agree with — and that’s the case here — I immediately find suspect.
And this — this is a foundational technique of contemporary propaganda. To fill the information and media stream with so many stories, half-truths and outright lies, that the public no longer knows who to trust or believe in. Not the mainstream press. Not the alternative press. Not the government. Not the opposition.
It’s a technique promoted by Steve Bannon — flooding the channel with, let’s say, rubbish. Which is not to say this story is rubbish. But the point is, you can’t tell what’s rubbish and what isn’t.
But it’s also a foundational technique of Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s man when it came to disinformation operations, both at home and abroad. Surkov served various roles in Putin’s government — from advisor to Deputy Prime Minister — but he’s been seen as the main ideologist of Putin’s Kremlin, responsible for keeping the Putin circle in power. The BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis talks about how Surkov will have the Kremlin publicly support one side of a protest, while financing the other side, but then letting it be known that both happened. What this does is undermines any sense of reality in relation to government. And soon, nobody believes anything.
Surkov, by the way, came from a background in experimental theatre — so the manipulation of the real and the surreal is familiar territory.
And now we find we’re in a similar predicament to the Russians. In the same week Trump announces that much Chinese media in the US is CCP propaganda, he releases a video that manipulates a CNN news report to show the opposite of what the report originally said. This is the video about two black and white children who are friends. Trump’s video turns the white kid into a racist, and uses fake chyron graphics to then tell the lie that it was a CNN report.
And it’s the same week that thousands of Gen Z K-Pop stans punked the president’s rally in Tulsa, even as his campaign office was claiming rioting outside the building was what was keeping numbers low.
And in the same week we hear from John Bolton that Trump begged Chinese President Xi to help his reelection effort, and the two leaders talked about eliminating US term limits.
I mean, the channel is full. From this White House, it’s nearly impossible to know what to believe.
But yes, they’re CCP media outlets. Yes, Trump is a liar. And yes, Vladimir Putin is having a great couple of innings.