by Manuel Delia (Repubblika)
For people who pay bribes, corruption is a tool, a business expense incurred to secure economic monopolies and unfair advantage. Bribing officials and politicians is cheaper than violence. But it is just as an effective means of coercion for organised crime. For people who accept bribes, corruption is the real motivation for their public service. They seek personal profit, unlawful enrichment, which comes cheap to them because the currency they use is the people’s goods.
Both sides of corruption share one important requirement for their swindle to work. They need uninterrupted access to the assets of the state which they misappropriate and extract as parasites do. Any parasite needs a compliant and barely conscious host.
This is why the perpetrators of corruption conspire to undermine any means by which ordinary citizens can become aware of what is being taken away from them. Organised crime conspiracies seek to capture and weaken the institutions that could apprehend them. They seek to capture law enforcement agencies and judicial bodies. They seek to compromise them and involve them in their schemes. That’s not enough.
Perpetrators also seek to assimilate the media, to get it to collaborate, whether it does so knowingly or not, in the collective illusion that there is no organised crime and there is no corruption. They will capture the media, and by extension public awareness, in the least aggressive way possible. Firstly, by owning as much of the media as they can. Concentrated ownership mobilises enough news sources to unleash the smoke and mirrors that cover up corruption.
For the media that can’t be owned or controlled, perpetrators reserve harsher treatment. Independent journalists who investigate corruption are directly denounced by the criminals they expose. The subjects of scandal are incredibly adept at playing the victim. Reporters are portrayed as enemies of the people, conjurers of fake news, driven by partisan motivations.
The assault on journalists is heightened for the more effective and stubborn reporters who refuse to be silenced or intimidated. They are branded as traitors, fifth columnists who betray the country’s interests by undermining its great leaders. Reporters are put under enormous pressure. They are made the subject of the story in place of the corruption they reveal, their private lives are exposed, their reputations threatened, their energies sapped defending often vexatious, invariably ruinous lawsuits.
The patterns of false narratives are often predictable.
Journalists are accused of taking payment from obscure, hidden interests, forming part of some established cabal, or fantastical conspiracies like the deep state. People in political power who are accused or exposed of acting in pursuit of private profit find it convenient to retort that ‘everybody does it’, even the holier than thou journalists who report on them. If everybody does wrong, nobody is pure enough to denounce it.
But the fundamental assault on the work of journalists is ultimately the assault on truth itself and the idea that alternative realities, however outlandish and without basis in fact, can be offered by people whose influence and power is threatened by honest reporting. The public is bombarded with contradictory realities from which individuals can decide to walk away with ambivalence or enthusiastically choose what conveniently confirms their bias.
In this context every fact can become a hoax, every scandal can be made normal, and the ability of anyone to be scandalised or shocked by corruption or improper behaviour (and therefore to demand for consequence) is neutralised by force of habit or the loudness of the noise.
There’s only one way of combating false narratives, and that’s with true ones. The key is in empowering the public to discern the difference and to be zealous about their right to know. Nobody said this was going to be easy.