Ireland’s ‘National Counter Disinformation Strategy’ was published today, much to the relief of the nation, and we can take great solace in how independent the process behind producing it was given the sensitivities involved in tackling the modern scourges of mis- and dis-information.
Or can we?
Media Minister Patrick O’Donovan last week, in response to a parliamentary question from Fianna Fáil TD Paul McAuliffe essentially about where Government is at in terms of tackling disinformation, said that his Department “provided the secretariat to the independently chaired working group that was established to develop a national counter disinformation strategy”.
Now, unless the word “independent” has lost all meaning, I don’t know how Department reps acting as secretariat to a working group, which is also “independent”-ly chaired by the national coordinator of the State media regulator-facilitated Media Literacy Ireland, can be all that independent.
The 55-page strategy, which I haven’t had a chance to look through exhaustively yet, mentions the secretariat four times:
Based on those few mentions, it’s reasonable to say that the secretariat, which appears to have been made up of a rotating group of three Department staff, of the independent working group had a major role in terms of setting the agenda, and determining which issues are or are not prioritised or discussed. In what way, then, was this an “independent” working group? The Department had some key role in terms of shaping the direction their work went in.
This would be objectionable in relation to any number of less contentious sectors than the media industry, but – I dare say – this is the one ecosystem the Government should not be dabbling in. That the Department apparently can’t see that heavy State involvement in combating something so subjective as disinformation and shaping the national media space towards that end is entirely inappropriate is worrying.
None of this is to mention all of the other incestuous elements even a brief skim of the strategy revealed: that Media Literacy Ireland-member The Journal was invited to present to the working group on the topic of its so-called ‘FactCheck Unit’, or that the Rethink Ireland-funded Hope and Courage Collective had its say, too.
I plan to revisit the strategy to see precisely how it intends to equip Ireland to combat disinformation, but prior even to that, it’s worth noting that dubbing this working group “independent” may be a deft bit of disinformation itself.