{"id":13364,"date":"2021-04-28T15:14:32","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T15:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=13364"},"modified":"2021-04-28T15:14:33","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T15:14:33","slug":"strategic-lies-in-downing-st","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2021\/04\/strategic-lies-in-downing-st\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Strategic lies’ in Downing St"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s Boris Johnson\u2019s word against that of his former alter ego, Dominic Cummings. And, depending where you have read or heard about the accusations and counter-accusations flying between the pair, one or both are being a trifle \u201ceconomical with the truth\u201d. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact is that most of what people see will have originated in either leaks from\u00a0unnamed witnesses<\/a>, or via the as yet unsubstantiated claims on\u00a0Cummings\u2019 blog<\/a>, will have only further muddied the waters.<\/p>\n

But the biggest problem the prime minister and his erstwhile chief adviser have is that a growing number of people, whether inside or outside the Westminster bubble, are finding it increasingly difficult to take either men at their word.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s their own fault, really. They have both long been devotees of what I and my colleague Caroline Fisher\u00a0describe in a new journal article<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cstrategic lying\u201d. This is a technique \u2013 honed by Cummings himself during the Brexit campaign and played masterfully during the 2019 election campaign \u2013 in which a politician tells a deliberate lie with the purpose of shifting the news agenda onto his or her preferred territory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter if the lie is easily rebutted. Indeed in one sense rebuttals are part of the plan because they result in the subject of the lie being amplified and kept on, or near, the top of the news agenda. The ultimate goal of strategic lying is to have an impact on the salience of issues.<\/p>\n

As American media scholar Spiro Kiousis and colleagues explain in a\u00a02010 study of US election coverage<\/a>, this is a central objective for all political public relations messaging, particularly during an election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Agenda-setting theory is useful for understanding this strategy, especially in the digital age. It is, if it ever was, not just a top-down activity but involves messages moving from politicians, to the media, to the public and back up again with the message being tailored at every point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The related concepts of \u201cpriming\u201d and \u201cframing\u201d come into play here \u2013 often seen as extensions of agenda-setting, they look at not at just what issues are being discussed in the media, but how they are discussed, the context and emphasis \u2013 in plain language, \u201cspin\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2018Brilliant\u2019 Brexit ploy<\/h2>\n

The classic strategic lie was the slogan painted on the side of the Leave campaign\u2019s bus during the Brexit referendum that claimed that the UK sent \u00a3350 million a week to the EU. It was a figure that was easily, and frequently, rebutted \u2013 not just by Remain campaigners but by all the\u00a0reputable fact-checking<\/a>\u00a0organisations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that didn\u2019t matter. Cummings, made no attempt to defend the figure in his blog about the campaign but instead\u00a0described it<\/a>\u00a0as \u201ca brilliant communications ploy\u201d saying that it \u201c\u2026worked much better than I thought it would\u201d.<\/p>\n

Cummings\u2019 ploy could be seen up and running within days of the Leave campaign\u2019s launch, when ITV\u2019s News at Ten devoted a full eight minutes to an interview in which Johnson was repeatedly and robustly challenged over the truth of the \u00a3350 million claim. The more na\u00efve might have thought that the interview had effectively destroyed the Leave campaign\u2019s key slogan. But far from it. The interview, and similar ones on other news bulletins, meant the issue of the UK\u2019s payments to Europe was seen by millions of viewers as the most important issue of the campaign.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition, once a statement \u2013 or lie for that matter \u2013 has found a sympathetic ear, then no amount of rebuttal will convince people\u00a0that it is not true<\/a>. This is because the lie fits their worldview and to believe anything else would create a sense of cognitive dissonance, something we all\u00a0seek to avoid<\/a>. Furthermore, people\u2019s memories of corrections fade rapidly, but the memory of the\u00a0original lie remains<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hence, Remain campaigners found that every time they sought to rebut statements such as the \u00a3350 million claim \u2013 or, for example, the notion that Turkey was about to join the EU (it wasn\u2019t, but it kept the issue of immigration front and central) \u2013 they found themselves inadvertently rebroadcasting the lies. This has been described\u00a0by media scholar Caroline Jack<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cunintentional amplification\u201d, which in turn leads to another phenomenon which she identifies as \u201cinadvertent legitimisation\u201d \u2013 the act of giving credibility to \u201cstrategic lies\u201d simply by repeating them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mud sticks<\/h2>\n

Striking quick and hard is one of the key components of the strategic lie playbook, as the Brexit referendum demonstrated and as could also be seen during the 2019 general election. In the first week of the campaign, the Conservatives posted a doctored video clip showing Labour\u2019s then EU spokesperson, Keir Starmer, apparently stumbling over a question about the party\u2019s Brexit stance. But in the original Starmer had not stumbled at all.<\/p>\n

Challenged about the\u00a0doctored clip<\/a>, Conservative party chairman James Cleverly sought to laugh it off by telling BBC Breakfast: \u201cEveryone could see the video was \u2018obviously edited\u2019 because of the music underneath.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding this, the doctored clip was viewed over a million times in the days immediately following and Labour\u2019s subsequent disavowal posts were seen by many more \u2013 just one BBC report of the incident received 1.1m hits on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Clearly, strategic lying raises a number of major ethical issues, but there is also an important practical one. What do journalists, particularly those working for the regulated public service broadcasters, do when faced with the conflict between disseminating what they know to be a lie and their legal responsibilities to exercise \u201cdue impartiality\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do they challenge the lie on-air, quote an opponent, quote a fact-checking organisation or just not broadcast the lie? All are, or could be, problematic in the current regulatory environment. The quality of our democracy depends on the quality of the political debate within the public sphere. New campaigning techniques represent a real threat to both the debate and our democracy and something needs to be done urgently to address this problem.<\/p>\n

First published by The Conversation<\/a><\/p>\n

Featured image<\/em> of Boris Johnson (April 28’s minute of silence last year ) by Andrew Parsons\/No 10 via flickr \u00a0CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The quality of our democracy depends on the quality of the political debate within the public sphere. New campaigning techniques represent a real threat to both the debate and our democracy and something needs to be done urgently to address this problem.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":10802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}