Making Up Stories for “News”

There is a good article today in the Wall Street Journal about the stories coming out of Russian news services trying to explain the assasination attempt on Sergei Skripal, so that “anybody but Russia” gets blamed for the events that took place in England.  In my third book, I wrote about the Russians elaborate stories surrounding the shooting down of a commercial airliner in the Ukraine.  They said, of course, the Ukrainians did it trying to shoot down Putin’s aircraft.  Not even Russians believed that one, so they just put out more until they found some that worked for their own population.

Now we see the same thing again, to deflect blame from the obvious source of the crime - Russia - to anybody else.  There are some imaginative stories being told as truth here, but they are something else.  The usual standby has already emerged - The British did it to embarrass Russia.  Not even the Russian news services can possibly believe that one, but they throw it out there knowing a few of their own people will believe that conspiracy theory.  The second, he died of natural causes and the people at his hospital just thought he was still alive.  That is creative but not very practical since all we have to do is asked about his death which hasn’t happened yet.  The third was that it was close to the plot of a new TV series in England, so mass hysteria has overcome the UK where television plots are real for everyone who watches.  This one has traction, so they ride this for as long as the news cycle allows.  Truth does not matter - plausible stories are the currency in political warfare.

This reminds me of US news services like CNN, FOX, and MSNBC who create news where there is none, then comment on that made news with an incessant stream of commentators.  The truth is out there, but it is lost in a long string of stories that are “based on fact” but interpreted to be something else entirely.    This is not about news, since these stories are developed by intelligence services and fed to news outlets that work for the government as distributors of Russian stories.  I wish the US news services had the same excuse.  They look more like the Russians every day.