Half-Truth and insinuation

Journalism in Bourgeois Society

Disinformation and deception techniques

 Half-Truth and insinuation

Half-truth and insinuation, as methods of bourgeois propaganda, are false argumentation with facts, their manipulation within the material, and in some cases, the inadequacy of facts and arguments to conclusions. These two methods are also found in their pure form, but more often they are intertwined, passing one into the other.

The manipulation of facts within the material can take different forms: these are false conclusions from true facts, and mixing slander with the truth, and breaking temporal and logical connections between facts, presenting them in false relationships. Such methods of disinformation are widely used today in all types of bourgeois newspapers and magazines.

The bourgeois press, seeking to cover up its lies with an appearance of plausibility, sometimes, for the sake of one falsified phrase, piles up a large number of facts that have taken place. The use of materials that correspond to reality makes it difficult for the reader to identify fabrications.

“In the field of social phenomena,” wrote V.I. Lenin, “there is no method more widespread and no longer consistent, like snatching out individual facts, playing with examples. It is necessary to take not individual facts, but the totality of facts related to the issue under consideration, without a single exception, because otherwise there will inevitably arise a suspicion, and a completely legitimate suspicion that the facts are chosen or chosen arbitrarily ... " coll. v. 30, pp. 350-351.

But the whole sum of facts, the whole truth of social development is unnecessary and even hostile to bourgeois propaganda, because, taken as a whole, they testify against capitalism as a system with no prospects and no future. 

According to the most prominent theoretician of American propaganda, W. Lipman, “the modern theory of newspaper business in America is that such an abstraction as truth, and such a virtue as honesty, the needs of civilization must be sacrificed when someone thinks that this is required. ... Modern journalism ... puts truth second only to what it understands to be the national interest."

In other words, the tendentiousness and mendacity of the bourgeois press is not only its practice, but also one of its theoretical postulates.

The half-truth method consists in mixing real facts with slander. Insinuation, according to the definition of N. I. Kondakov, is “slander, deliberate malicious fabrication with the aim of discrediting someone- malicious fiction.” But insinuation differs from direct slander in that it is expressed in the form of a hint or in the form of mixing slander with the truth," which is already indicated by the very meaning of the Latin word "insinuatio" (smartness). According to one of the old definitions, insinuation is “a turn of speech in which something is suggested in the form of a soft, imperceptibly creeping into the minds of listeners, in order to avoid their displeasure.” However, this definition does not fit well with the modern bourgeois press since the insinuations in it are quite frank and rude.

Disinformation in its purest form, a newspaper "duck" - a device too primitive, even an inexperienced reader can expose it. At the same time, a dose of slander mixed with a true report can be taken on faith and assimilated along with it. True facts, especially if they were already known to the reader and he believed in them, as if create a credibility to all the rest of the material. However, the "credit of trust" in this case can be understood in a broader sense - as a predisposition of the reader, brought up in the spirit of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism, to a positive perception of the facts that correspond to these ideological attitudes.

The reader, even if he realizes that he is dealing with misinformation, as a rule, it is difficult to judge at what stage of the preparation of the material, its meaning is distorted, who exactly owns the far from honorable authorship of the fake - whether the journalist with his claim to objectivity and impartiality or the editor.

This newspaper business kitchen is hidden from prying eyes. And only very rarely do facts like the one that Martin E. Marty, referring to his journalist friend. During the Vietnam War, this journalist gave his editors a short information that 10 US Air Force aircraft made a sortie from Bangkok, and nine returned to the base. The note was printed, but with one amendment: the air base in it was moved from Bangkok to Saigon. The editors considered it best not to mention Thailand in this case, which then formally did not take part in the war. So, a half-truth was born, and if we are not talking about propaganda methods and assessing the true meaning of this disinformation, then there is a direct lie about the true US policy in Southeast Asia.

American propagandists use similar methods mainly in materials about the Soviet Union, the countries of the socialist camp, the world communist movement, the détente of international tension, the limitation of strategic offensive weapons - in other words, in the propaganda of anti-communism, anti-Sovietism, to the further arms market.

And while half-truths about the internal or international politics of a particular capitalist state, as in the above episode, can sometimes be exposed to a wide audience, in most other cases it goes unnoticed. However, the episode referred to can hardly be called a real exposure: after all, the truth was not published in the same newspaper as a refutation but made public in a rather narrow circle of mass communication specialists and made public in a book published for them.

Bourgeois science, placed at the service of politics, also sometimes provides material for disinformation in the big press. Thus, referring to a study conducted at the University of Michigan (such references create the appearance of objectivity and respectability, inspire confidence in the source of information), The New York Times writes that in the USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe “higher education...still largely reserved for the elite. The students come mainly from "establishment" families living in big cities. Rural youth, who are needed in the economy, are not encouraged by poorly educated parents to receive an education, and their theoretical training is insufficient for studying at the university. Yes, the level of preparation of students in rural schools is sometimes lower than in urban ones. Necessary measures are being taken in the country to solve this objective problem. The authors of the study, which claims to be "scientific", and after them the editors of the New York Times "forgot" even to mention the existence in the USSR of educational faculties at universities specifically for working and rural youth, about students - factory and collective farm scholarships, to write that higher education in the Soviet Union is free and that all citizens, regardless of social origin, have the right to it, as they have “forgotten” and that the “elites” and the system, where the majority of Soviet students supposedly come from, do not exists at all, so that, using these terms of bourgeois sociology to describe the Soviet way of life, the authors deliberately slander it.

Why is there such a heap of lies? To conclude: "Many young people with natural talent never get higher education, just like in Western countries"; in both bourgeois and socialist society there is a privileged elite; here and there it is difficult for young workers and peasants to obtain a higher education.”

Thus, we have two methods of insinuation at once: using one existing fact, bourgeois propagandists substantiate it with false theses and draw slanderous conclusions from it. Lies on an essentially local topic - education in the USSR - develop into slander against the entire socialist system and are used to defend the capitalist one.

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Whatever platforms the bourgeois journalists subsume for their writings, whatever freedoms, and rights they call themselves defenders, making such statements, they objectively play into the hands of the most right-wing circles of international reaction. And their terminology remains the same as during the Cold War, striking in its archaism, for example: "The Iron Curtain looks even more formidable than a few years ago."

Insinuation as a method of bourgeois propaganda is a continuation of insinuation as a method of bourgeois politics, and politics at the highest level. Materials of the bourgeois press on the topic of arms limitation and disarmament are usually based on intimidating the layman with a threat from outside, although it is officially recognized that there is parity between the USSR and the USA in the field of nuclear weapons, on the basis of which the current negotiations are being conducted, and a Provisional agreement on the limitation of strategic offensive arms. True, when the issue of the military budget and the need to “frighten” readers in connection with this in order to squeeze out new appropriations are not on the agenda, the American press happens to admit that the United States is not so helpless in the face of the “Soviet threat”. In particular, Newsweek magazine reported that the Pentagon is developing a new and improved missile defense system. But even here there were some insinuations. It turns out that the development is connected with new assumptions that “Russia is moving far ahead of the United States in terms of nuclear power: The system itself is not designed to defend against a possible enemy in general, but to “repel the first strike from the USSR” and is built based on “30-minute flight time of Soviet missiles. Thus, a rather calm note in tone, devoid of direct slanderous attacks on the USSR, nevertheless contains a false allusion and objectively serves to whip up military hysteria, creating an atmosphere of distrust in the Soviet Union as a potential adversary.

Trying, contrary to the truth, contrary to the irresistible tendency of historical development, to resurrect their own long-obsolete theories, bourgeois propagandists at the same time declare obsolete the really living, truly scientific theory of social development - Marxism-Leninism. 60 years ago, they proclaimed the death of the Soviet country, now they are proclaiming the death of scientific communism.

The editor-in-chief of the Italian Stampa, A. Levy, in an article published by the American magazine Newsweek under the meaningful heading "Requiem for an Ideology," announced, as many others had done before him, that "communism as a universal ideology is dead. Communism, like the church, is a memory of the past; it is more of a habit than a belief."

Unable to refute the living reality of scientific communism, whose ideas are embodied in the USSR and other socialist countries, the authors of such insinuations are trying to "bury" the communist ideology. The very use of religious terms should create the impression that we are talking about something old-fashioned and obsolete. In reality, there is not a single movement in the world as vibrant, massive, and united as the communist one. Communism, unlike bourgeois concepts with their helpless argumentation, never demanded faith from its adherents, but always conviction.

In the struggle against the communist movement, bourgeois propaganda places its main stake on undermining the unity of the communist and workers' parties, trying to slander the CPSU and oppose it to other parties.

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The well-known American journalist, columnist for The New York Times, D. Reston, in his correspondence "Castro on the Road" quite seriously and clearly spoke about the successes of the Cuban people in the socialist transformation of the republic, but in the end, speaking about the assistance of the Soviet Union to Cuba, he could not resist from the insinuation: "With the development of closer ties between the United States and the USSR, there is always the possibility that this subsidy may one day be reduced or even discontinued", hinting that assistance from the USSR is supposedly a tactical maneuver carried out not so much for the sake of supporting socialist Cuba, but against the USA. The purpose of such insinuations is to sow discord among the socialist countries.

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Summing up, we can single out the following methods of insinuation and half-truth in bourgeois propaganda: a mixture of facts and slander that took place; adding a false fact (sometimes just a word) or a false allusion to a message containing mostly real facts; violation of logical connections between facts; substantiation of the thesis by false arguments; false conclusions from true facts; compositional completion of a newspaper page, where a certain combination of materials and headings can also perform the functions of disinformation.

The method of defamation adjoins the methods of half-truth and insinuation. Defamation in jurisprudence involves the disclosure of information discrediting someone that corresponds to the truth. This method of bourgeois propaganda is, strictly speaking, one of the varieties of the half-truth method. Operating with real facts, bourgeois journalists place them in a context in which their true meaning is distorted and excessively exaggerated. Defamation is often used in the internal political struggle of bourgeois countries as a means of discrediting an opponent and taking him out of the game. An example of this is the “case” of Senator E. Kennedy, inflated by the US media, who got into a car accident with his secretary, as a result of which the girl died. For the bourgeois press, this fact was important, and by no means the clarification of what actually happened. The political opponents of the Kennedy clan sought, first of all, to compromise the senator, who was distinguished by liberal views, in order to deprive him of political authority.

Even more often, the defamation method is used in materials about the life of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Speculating on the facts that have taken place, bourgeois journalists present them in such a way that private questions grow almost into global problems.

The goal is to fool the reader, to make him forget about the truly gigantic achievements of the Soviet country.

The fact that the capitalist press in its practice not only does not shy away from such dirty methods as insinuation, half-truth, defamation, but also uses them more and more intensively, testifies to the ever-growing crisis of bourgeois ideology and propaganda.