Sunday Times Insight team: Propagandists for Internet censorship and war
By
Steve James and Laura Tiernan
7 May 2018
The Insight team at the Sunday Times were pioneers in investigative journalism. In 1963, the group’s first efforts exposed slum landlord Peter Rachman and gave a new word, Rachmanism, to the English language.
How the mighty are fallen. Last week’s Insight report into alleged “Russian meddling” in the British general election of 2017 marked a low point in the collapse of bourgeois journalism into state propaganda.
“Exposed: Russian Twitter bots tried to swing the general election for Jeremy Corbyn” was the newspaper’s frontpage headline. Inside, the results of an investigation, “How Russian bots invaded Twitter to fight in Jeremy Corbyn’s army,” ran across pages eight and nine.
For more than 18 months the New York Times, the Democratic Party and powerful sections of the military-intelligence apparatus have alleged Russian “fake news” interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. The aim of this anti-Russia campaign has been twofold: (1) to install, via the methods of palace intrigue and coup, a regime prepared to militarily confront Russia and (2) to justify sweeping Internet censorship and other dictatorial measures on the grounds that the population is being indoctrinated by the Kremlin.
The Sunday Times feature published April 29 confirms that a similar campaign has begun in Britain. This version is directed against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the millions of people who have registered their opposition—on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and memes—to the Conservative government of Prime Minister Theresa May’s agenda of war and austerity.
The Insight Research Team—George Arbuthnott, Jonathan Calvert, Krystina…