In the tenth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, Morgan McSweeney and Rachel Riley come for the Canary – and attempt to destroy us. This is the fourth part of Chapter Three.
The purview of Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) extended beyond alleged antisemitism. SFFN also tackled what it called ‘fake news’. In a Twitter thread from April 2019, SFFN explained that:
fake news . . . means lies & deliberate misleading, particularly when designed to fuel hate.
This definition is important, because it meant that SFFN, in effect, defined fake news as disinformation rather than misinformation. Disinformation refers to the creation and spread of false information with the intention to deceive; misinformation refers to false information spread without such intention.
SFFN: fake news outfit targets… ‘fake news’
The irony was that SFFN, run by a man who had made his career as a factional spin-doctor, could itself be regarded as a prime example of fake news. SFFN did not disclose the actors behind its creation and operation; it was only in May 2020 that SFFN declared any relationship with CCDH.
For the first year of its public existence, SFFN explained to readers of its website that “we would like to be open about our identities, but doing so could put our activists at risk”. SFFN was thus presented as a group of anonymous ‘activists’ inspired by a US campaign called Sleeping Giants, which had targeted the rightwing Breitbart News in the US. But the contrast between the two initiatives is stark: Sleeping Giants was initiated and run by grassroots campaigners, while SFFN was resourced from undeclared funding provided by millionaires to Labour Together, which itself featured three Labour MPs on its board alongside Morgan McSweeney – who subsequently became perhaps the most powerful non-elected official in the country.
SFFN was assiduous in cultivating this grassroots image in profiles of its work. In April 2019, the Jewish News described SFFN as a “small group of friends” and “activists”. Explaining why they had remained anonymous, these plucky underdogs said they:
didn’t want the levels of hate that far braver people than ourselves have been subjected to.
They then neatly deflected attention away from their anonymity by explaining that “the campaign isn’t about us” but relied on ordinary people taking a “stand for truth and tolerance”.
A textbook example of astroturfing
SFFN’s failure to disclose its true origin, funding, and political leanings makes it a textbook example of what is known as astroturfing. As an academic article from 2019 explains, political astroturfing involves:
a centrally coordinated disinformation campaign in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently.
The article warned that such campaigns can:
influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behaviour’.
As this definition indicates, astroturfing is not just considered ethically dubious but is a form of disinformation. SFFN was thus an astroturf disinformation campaign purporting to target disinformation.
SFFN’s astroturfing had a profound impact on how it was received. The group’s work would surely not have resonated as widely as it did if audiences had known the group was founded by Labour Party insiders who despised Corbyn’s leadership and run by a man with a long history of battles against the independent media outlets he was now trying to demonetise. Its studied secrecy allowed SFFN to pass as non-partisan, a false impression that would have rendered its activities more credible.
Anonymity also made SFFN and its controlling minds unaccountable to public scrutiny and, most importantly, the law. Because no-one knew who was behind SFFN, it would have been difficult to bring claims of libel against it. To do so would have required getting Twitter or SFFN’s website registrars to disclose confidential information, which may have ultimately needed court applications.
There is a good case to be made that SFFN may have defamed media outlets, their editors, and journalists when it accused them of making up “lies” and being “deliberate[ly] misleading”, especially when such allegations were directed against outlets like the Canary that were independently regulated and whose survival depended on public trust. Yet these targets were, on account of SFFN’s anonymity, effectively denied their legal right to defend their reputation at the time.
SFFN’s endorsements from Labour figures
SFFN launched its online campaign on March 5, 2019, with a series of Twitter posts directed at advertisers. SFFN targeted four sites from what it presented as ‘both sides’ of the political spectrum: Evolve Politics and the Canary on the left, Westmonster and Politicalite on the right. Its methodology was strikingly similar to that employed by the likes of LAAS. SFFN compiled virtual ‘dossiers’ against their targets based on deep dives into social media posts. The dossiers were then posted in long Twitter threads as evidence of fake news and antisemitism.
For a budding new campaign of disconnected grassroots activists with no obvious political connections, SFFN was able to secure some remarkably quick endorsements from niche Labour Party figures. “Fantastic new campaign to persuade advertisers to stop funding fake news sites that spread hatred, bigotry, and warp our politics towards extremism stopfundingfakenews.com”, Steve Reed tweeted out on the evening of March 6. The following day, Hannah O’Rourke, the long-time Labour Together staffer, posted her own endorsement.
By far the most consequential endorsement came from Rachel Riley. “Just had a look at your website @SFFakeNews and actually burst into tears seeing where all the hate I get daily is coming from. With you in any way I can be, you have my full support”, Riley posted at 6.18 p.m. on March 6, 2019, ending her post with a link to the SFFN website.
Rachel Riley: the celebrity face of the campaign to defund the Canary
Riley had agreed to front the SFFN campaign a month earlier. She had been taken to meet McSweeney and Ahmed at Labour Together’s offices in February 2019, brought there by Adam Langleben. Langleben was a prominent member of the Jewish Labour Movement, a Labour Party affiliate that was sharply critical of Corbyn and his supporters. As discussed later, Langleben would work closely with McSweeney to ‘engineer’ the JLM’s submissions to the EHRC, whose slapdash findings would prove devastating to the long-term reputation of Corbynism. “McSweeney and Ahmed made a modest proposal. Might Riley be the face of a campaign to defund The Canary? She agreed with alacrity”, Pogrund and Maguire write.
Both Evolve Politics and the Canary had emerged in reaction to what was perceived as a media environment hostile to left-wing ideas and, specifically, the Corbyn leadership. The Canary, formed in 2015 by Kerry-Anne Mendoza and her wife Nancy Mendoza at a cost of £500, grew spectacularly in its first year. By July 2016, it was listed as the seventy-ninth-most-viewed UK Media Publishers website, attracting over 7.5 million views a month. Both outlets grew their reach and impact in the crucible of the 2017 election, where their pro-left and generally pro-Corbyn stance garnered significant social media support. The Canary’s revenue allowed it to employ twenty-five editorial staff.
Numerous studies have argued that the Canary, in particular, played a significant role in Labour’s better-than-expected showing at the 2017 general election. Two weeks after SFFN launched its campaign, the Canary celebrated publishing its ten-thousandth article.
Smearing independent, gold standard regulated reporting
The two other sites targeted by SFFN were Westmonster and Politicalite. Both were right-wing and accused by SFFN of posting Islamophobic material. Westmonster was funded by Arron Banks, the controversial Brexit backer.
But SFFN’s ‘both sides’ approach, and its explicit decision to target these four websites first, was a striking act of unfair conflation. Westmonster and Politicalite had never agreed to be regulated and both received mixed reviews from services that monitor media bias and trustworthiness.
By comparison, both Evolve Politics and the Canary had been regulated by the independent regulator Impress since 2017. Impress was the first regulatory body approved by the Independent Press Review Board, itself created by Royal Charter to implement the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry. The combustible first phase of the Leveson Inquiry had looked into historic cases of media abuses, including phone hacking. It made recommendations about setting up robust systems for press regulation that were properly independent of media proprietors. Impress was thus the first media regulator that actually met the stringent tests and guidelines suggested by Leveson. Its regulation arguably represents the gold standard of press accountability in Britain.
In April 2019, not long after SFFN launched its campaign against the Canary, the independent and often-cited Media Bias/Fact Check service described the site’s reporting as manifesting a liberal ‘bias’ but gave its factual content a ‘high’ rating for accuracy. In the same month, the Canary was one of the first media websites in the UK to be awarded a green trust mark for credibility by Newsguard. And while Evolve Politics has not been reviewed by either service, it was considered sufficiently credible that, in 2018, it was given a press pass for ‘the lobby’: the political reporting centre of Westminster.
‘Destroy the Canary, or the Canary destroys us’
But it was the Canary that was the real target of SFFN’s early operations. Indeed, as Anushka Asthana tells it, the Canary was one of McSweeney’s ‘obsessions’. It had featured prominently in McSweeney’s 2017 SWOT analysis, which had decried the power of independent media outlets in buttressing Corbynism.
With no little hint of irony, one of the biggest threats that McSweeney identified in the same analysis was that the Canary might discover what the Labour Together Project was really up to. Or, seen another way, one of the biggest threats to his project was that the Canary’s dogged investigative journalists might discover the truth and report it accurately. As Asthana tells it, McSweeney’s warning to Labour Together insiders was stark: “Destroy The Canary, or The Canary destroys us”.
This background must, of course, raise questions about whether SFFN was established out of an authentic impulse to challenge disinformation and hate – or whether it was created to neutralise an obstacle to the success of the Labour Together Project, cynically deploying anonymity and widespread concern about disinformation as its weapons of choice.
The Canary the clear target of its crusade
SFFN’s focus on the Canary is clear in retrospect: between its first post and the 2019 general election, SFFN posted no fewer than 176 tweets about the Canary, which it branded a “Fake News website”. In its first anti-Canary broadside, it highlighted stories published by the website that questioned aspects of the alleged Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’, as well as a story about the poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal.
When the Canary rejected the allegations that it purveyed fake news, SFFN responded by listing a number of articles with which it took issue. The number of pieces that SFFN highlighted amounted to a tiny fraction of the site’s output. But in an approach that characterised much reporting of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ more broadly, this unrepresentative sample was used to justify a sweeping delegitimisation.
SFFN misrepresenting the facts to attack the Canary
The paucity of SFFN’s claims against the Canary was revealed when SFFN cited an Impress adjudication as evidence against the Canary. What this judgment actually showed was that the Canary had voluntarily submitted to rigorous regulation and assiduously corrected errors in its reporting.
To summarise a somewhat complex case: the headline of a Canary article claimed that Laura Kuenssberg, the political editor of BBC News, was speaking at a Tory party conference. The Canary asked the BBC for comment but the BBC did not provide one by the noon deadline, when the Canary hit publish. The BBC then responded in the late afternoon, noting that Kuenssberg was not a speaker but merely an invitee. The Canary fixed the article and put out a correction on social media.
Impress investigated the Canary after a complaint from the public. The regulator found that the Canary should have done more to put questions to the BBC prior to publishing. It also commented that the Canary’s note of correction should have appeared at the top and not the bottom of its amended article. Impress directed the Canary to apologise and publish Impress’ decision, which it duly did.
A strange form of ‘fake news’
This was a strange form of ‘fake news’, indeed: not only had the Canary contemporaneously corrected an error in its reporting, but it also then voluntarily submitted to an independent investigation and swiftly carried out the remedial measures required. This was best practice, not fake news.
SFFN followed up its screenshots of the Kuenssberg article by quoting a New Statesman headline that accused the Canary of running a “misogynistic” campaign against Kuenssberg. This was a remarkable accusation to level at the only independent media outlet in the country edited by a lesbian woman of colour.
Later, in May 2019, SFFN would share a link to a Press Gazette story reporting that among outlets regulated by Impress, the Canary had received the most complaints – again effectively attacking the Canary for having submitted to robust oversight. SFFN failed to note that of the eighty complaints received, only two were upheld by the regulator – including the Kuenssberg case.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel for ‘incriminating’ social media posts
SFFN also accused the Canary of antisemitism based on social media comments made by Canary journalists in their personal capacity as well as a handful of Canary articles. By way of illustration, SFFN was scandalised by a social media post from Canary journalist Emily Apple. “Israel is a cunt”, she had written in 2010, a full nine years before SFFN’s campaign (they really scraped the barrel). This comment accompanied a link to a protest march against Israel’s killing of nine activists involved in the Free Gaza Flotilla.
In SFFN’s fevered imagination, this off-colour epithet directed against a state that had just killed unarmed civilians was not only antisemitic but sufficiently egregious to warrant the closure of an entire independent media website that the writer would contribute to nearly a decade later. In another four-part exposé, SFFN criticised an article written by Apple that had the temerity to criticise Britain’s chief rabbi for contentious comments he had made about Jeremy Corbyn.
It should be noted that Emily Apple was raised in a Jewish family (her father is Jewish) and has written movingly about how her Jewish upbringing forms a central part of her identity.
Elsewhere, SFFN pointed to multiple Canary headlines that supposedly demonstrated the publication’s antisemitic tendency. One of these purportedly incriminating headlines read: Jewish Voters Are Done with the Bogus Antisemitism Smears Against Jeremy Corbyn. The accompanying article was based almost entirely on comments by left-wing Jews that contested media allegations about the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’. The Labour Together Project’s secret astroturf campaign was effectively amplifying claims that left-wing Jews were antisemitic, such that giving space to their perspectives constituted a form of antisemitic denialism.
The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.
Featured image via the Canary
By Paul Holden
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