The impossibility of proving a negative, and the abuse of trust

It's harder to disprove a claim than to prove one

As mentioned previously, the western media's coverage of Russia's Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been the catalyst for my complete loss of trust in said media. But it seems that I am still in a tiny, if growing, minority. Many people that I know and care about (and many more that I no longer care about) think that I have taken leave of my senses, their reasoning being that it is simply inconceivable that the news is either lying or ignorant on the scale that I claim it is.

It's hard to convince people of this, when the entirety of the western media - supposedly free and independent - reports the same facts. Some things get repeated so often, that the sheer volume of repetition forms a kind of proof in itself; this technique of relentless reinforcement is what a certain Joseph Goebbels called The Big Lie.

Discussing Russia's 'potential use of nuclear weapons'

Something that I've heard repeated as if it were fact, is that Russia has made threats of nuclear war towards the west. If you take the BBC seriously and at its word, as many people in the UK do, then the following stories would appear to confirm that Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons:

Ukraine war: US says it takes Putin nuclear threat seriously

Ukraine war: Putin not bluffing about nuclear weapons, EU says

Ukraine war: Biden warns Putin not to use tactical nuclear weapons

All these stories are reporting what a third party (the US, the EU, Joe Biden) says that Putin did, i.e. threaten to use nuclear weapons. Apparently he made these threats during a speech - so could we see that speech? None of the articles include the source to which they all refer. These speeches are all televised, and the BBC is a TV news service, so it would not be unreasonable to expect them to show us what it was he said, would it?

Dig a little deeper into the articles and these threats become 'veiled threats', suggesting that even if he didn't actually say it outright, it is reasonable to assume that he meant it. The best the BBC can manage is that "On Wednesday Russia's leader warned his country would use all the means at its disposal to protect its territory". The implication is that since Russia has nuclear weapons, they come under the umbrella of 'all the means at its disposal', ergo he threatened to use nukes.

So after reading the articles, it becomes clear that Putin did not explicitly threaten to use nuclear weapons. But those three headlines all include the words "nuclear weapons", and there are many other similar headlines from different news sources. The cumulative impression given is that there surely must be some truth in all these headlines, because there are so many of them.

This is where I come to my point about the impossibility of proving a negative. A deluge of headlines claiming that Putin threatened to use nukes provides a sort of proof that he did, but only if you trust the media producing those headlines not to lie to you. As long as people still trust the media, the onus is on me, as the naysayer, to somehow prove that he didn't say this. How can I do that? The articles themselves concede that the threats were 'veiled', so am I now to somehow prove that he didn't mean nuclear weapons? Even if I were to watch all of his speeches given this year and tell you that he never made explicit threats to use nuclear weapons, why should you trust me? The fact that I'm going to such lengths to defend Putin (shock horror!) shows that I'm therefore a de facto Russian propagandist, and should be dismissed and distrusted as such. Plenty of people have said that to me, practically verbatim.

As Foreign Secretary, in the lead-up to her comically brief tenure as Prime Minister, Liz Truss said that she would use nuclear weapons, and it didn't hurt her chances of becoming PM. How would you see that, if you were Russian?

Anyone disagreeing with the western line is inherently untrustworthy

I posted a link on Facebook to this video, made by Patrick Lancaster, an American who has lived in the Donbass since 2014. In it, he shows people in Mariupol hiding in a basement from shelling. When he asks them who they believe is shelling them, they somewhat indignantly reply "Who do you think? Ukraine of course, the Nazis". He repeats this process in many of his videos - he asks people who they believe is shelling them, when he knows full well the answer. Their indignation comes from the fact that they do not know who he is; their assumption upon meeting a Western journalist is that he is going to misrepresent the situation and claim that the Russians are the ones shelling them.

The responses I got to this from some of my 'friends' (ha!) were disheartening, to say the least. A general assumption seemed to be that even if this was not fake, then it certainly didn't prove anything about the conflict, even if Lancaster was making such videos on a nearly daily basis at the time. One reply that stood out to me was "All I see is some people stuck in a shitty situation" - it struck me as being a comment more appropriate to people taking cover from a hurricane than from targeted shelling.

Another erstwhile friend replied to my post with a link to a rather obvious hit piece about Lancaster that describes him as "Russia's favorite war propagandist", and my friend said that he seemed like a 'shyster'. I asked my friend if he had actually watched any of Lancaster's videos, and I suggested that if he's prepared to believe the top result of a search engine - that article was the first result on Google at the time, but there are many more hit pieces now - he perhaps try DuckDuckGo. No reply. The hit piece itself is an incredibly lazily-written article that does little more than scoff at everything Lancaster does, and suggest that because he has received coverage in Russia, therefore he is untrustworthy. It says that Lancaster "calls himself an independent journalist", without offering any proof at all that he is not. He makes no secret of the fact he's done pieces for RT, that's what being a journalist is!

So if Lancaster is called a liar when he describes himself as an independent journalist, how can he, I, or anyone, prove that he is telling the truth? The prevalence of accusations against him creates doubt in someone looking for reasons to doubt him, without having to provide a shred of evidence. Worse, when he documents evidence of Ukrainian atrocities, it is simply dismissed as Russian propaganda and taken as 'proof' that in fact they did it. Lancaster is risking his life in Donbass (and getting himself added to the Ukrainian hit-list Myrotvorets), yet unscrupulous media organisations like Vox or Grid News have no qualms calling him a liar, safe in the knowledge that they won’t suffer any repercussions and that many people reading the article will believe it. Lazy. Disgusting. Cowardly.

State media vs Corporate media

To return to RT (Russia Today), there is a widespread assumption that because it is Russian state media, it is therefore untrustworthy propaganda - a sentiment that many Russians would agree with, by the way. In mainstream media this equivalence of state media with propaganda apparently only applies to Russia, and not to the BBC, NPR, CBC, France24 etc. The fact that corporate media says the same things that (supposedly trustworthy) state media says, is taken as proof that the corporate media is as trustworthy as state media - rather than proof that state media is as corruptible as corporate media.

Here is why I stopped trusting the BBC.

Russian 'influence'

I brought up the Ukraine conflict with a friend recently. I tried to talk to him about the historical context for the SMO (starting with the Euromaidan coup and ensuing Donbass war), and one thing he kept asking was whether I could be sure that Russia didn't influence events in some way, in effect 'force' Ukraine to shell Donbass; insisting that my inability to do so to his satisfaction clearly proved that they did. When I told him that the US has been giving Ukraine military aid since at least 2014 and training neo-Nazis, he called these conspiracy theories.

If you trust a source like Wikipedia, which theoretically should reflect reality because anyone can edit it, then you could be forgiven for believing that the biolabs that Russia said they found were indeed a conspiracy theory. The fact that Victoria Nuland carefully admitted to Ukraine hosting US ‘biological research facilities’ doesn’t get a mention.

I think it's fair to say that Russiagate gave a lot of people the impression that the Russians hacked the US election for Donald Trump, despite the fact that this has been shown to be completely untrue, and that actually prominent Democrats used the FBI to pressure Twitter into saying that Russian bots existed. But the persistence of the story in the media did its job: Russia/Putin is now believed to be in the business of influencing foreign countries’ elections. As if the USA doesn't do that everywhere, all the time! Likewise, the absence of any stories about the US's involvement in Ukraine (let alone the Hunter Biden laptop saga, which in any sane media environment would be held up as proof of corruption at the very highest levels) did its job: these are now considered wild conspiracy theories.

To convince someone that the ‘conspiracy theories’ are the ones with evidence, and that the stories the media has been pushing in fact much better fit the definition of ‘conspiracy theories’, is a difficult and thankless task.