“Fake News” swiftly made its way into the heart of the American lexicon. Collins Dictionary and the American Dialect Society both dubbed President Trump’s favorite accusation the word of the year in 2017. But it is much more than a silly term to shout at opponents on Twitter. There are active chains of disinformation that masquerade as news that must be regarded with all seriousness.
In late April, I came across the intrepid headline “BREAKING: OPCW finds NO Chemical Weapons at Damascus research center,” a claim peddled by a website named the Duran that had quickly gained momentum on Facebook.
This account of findings by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) turned out to be false. Fact checking it, I began to see just how much “fake news” the Russian and the Syrian governments had been churning out since the chemical attacks earlier that month, and how some Western media outlets came to accept these stories.
On April 7, the rebel-held town of Douma, in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, was attacked. Videos and images of the devastating aftermath quickly circulated online: lifeless bodies strewn across rubble-filled basements, gas cylinders that had reportedly been dropped from a helicopter above, medical personnel frantically washing out the eyes and mouths of victims and placing oxygen masks over the faces of terrified, coughing toddlers. The evidence was supported by reports from NGOs, medical personnel, and eyewitnesses. The Syrian government denied any involvement and suggested that it was a hoax meant “to hinder the army’s advance” on Douma. Hours after the attack the rebels abandoned the town.
Partners of the World Health Organization reported that more than 70 people, including women and children, had been killed, with “43 of those deaths ‘related to symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals.’ ” The State Department issued a statement saying that the “reports, if confirmed, are horrifying and demand an immediate response by the international community.”
Syria is a Russian client, and Russia-friendly media outlets quickly began spreading skeptical accounts saying that Bashar al-Assad would never attack his own people and positing that any attack came at the hands of the rebels rather than the Syrian government. “Cue the chemical weapons stunt in Syria,” ran a headline in the Kremlin-controlled Sputnik on April 8, alongside dozens of similar columns and articles pushing the “hoax” theory.
Two days after the attack, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson also cast doubt that Assad was the perpetrator. “We should be skeptical of this,” Carlson told viewers on April 9, “starting with the poison gas attack itself.” “How would it benefit Assad using chlorine gas last weekend? . . . It wouldn’t,” Carlson said, pointing to Trump’s stated desire to pull troops out of Syria (which a renewed use of chemical weapons would undermine) and Assad’s nearing victory over the rebel forces. “ ‘Well, he did it anyway,’ they tell us. ‘He’s that evil!’ Please.”
Russia Today spread the pro-Assad narrative nonstop from its worldwide television network, repeatedly claiming in the days after the attack that it was “staged to provoke a U.S. airstrike.” “Syria and Russia have dismissed the accusations and called the reports fake news,” Russia Today announced one day after the attack, “aimed at helping the extremists and at justifying potential strikes against Syrian forces.”
On April 13, Russia’s defense ministry accused the U.K. of helping the rebels stage the attack, a line that Russia Today and Sputnik soon picked up. Such “false flag” theories have been promulgated by Russian media outlets and the Assad regime after previous chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The line runs counter to a 2017 U.N. report confirming that Assad’s government had perpetrated at least 27 chemical attacks since the civil war began seven years ago. The U.S. government says there have been 50 chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, and there are unconfirmed accounts placing the number above 70.
More than a week after the Douma attack, reporters from London’s Independent newspaper and One America News Network (OAN), a right-wing U.S. cable channel, were allowed in under the supervision of the Syrian government. Their on-the-ground reports both supported the claim that the attacks never truly took place—or if they they had, the rebels were to blame.
“When I asked [the doctors] what they thought the chemical attack was, they told me, all of them told me, that it was staged by the rebels who were occupying the town at the time,” OAN’s Pearson Sharp told viewers in a videocast. (Sharp, it should be noted, was a prominent publicist of the Seth Rich conspiracy last year—the bogus theory that Hillary Clinton ordered the murder of a young Democratic National Committee staffer.) A “senior doctor” told Robert Fisk in an “exclusive” for the Independent that there were in fact victims in Douma, but that they had not been affected by chemical weapons “but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.” Other doctors and nurses told al-Ekhbariya, a pro-Assad TV channel, that the attack “ignited fires that triggered asthma symptoms in many people.” Fisk and Sharp ignored reports from the U.S., French, and British governments—alongside those from multiple NGOs and partners of the World Health Organization—that confirmed that a chemical-weapons attack had taken place.
The Guardian and the Washington Post both reported that medical personnel in Douma were ordered by Syrian forces to say nothing of the attacks, with the severity of these threats increasing when investigators from the OPCW arrived. The Russian government argued that a thorough investigation should take place before any accusations were levied, but when the OPCW attempted to examine the attack sites on April 14, the fact-finding team was blocked by Russian and Syrian troops. It took another week for them to be allowed access.
Meanwhile, claims that the attack was all one big hoax multiplied. Russia Today proclaimed “no attack, no victims, no chem weapons.” “You really need to engage your brain to understand what’s going on,” former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford told Russia Today on April 26, arguing that certain conflicting testimonies “backed up the Russian version of what happened.”
On April 22, London’s Daily Telegraph reported that Ford had recently been appointed director of the British Syrian Society, an organization “founded by Fawaz Akhras, a London-based cardiologist whose daughter Asma is married to President Assad, and is closely linked to the regime.” A former ambassador to Syria who is in league with an organization founded by Assad’s father-in-law was appearing on major Western news outlets to discuss the Syrian leader. Ford argued against the idea that Assad was behind the Douma attack in interviews with both the BBC and Fox News. On Tucker Carlson’s show, Ford said that the chemical attack was a hoax, “all being carefully videoed and put out by rich Arab country propagandists.” There is no evidence, however, to support Ford’s claims. An April 14 report from the French government confirmed the authenticity of the majority of the footage and images from the attack.
Nevertheless, Russian propaganda continued to appear, leading us back to the false report on April 26 in the Duran. It claimed that the OPCW had confirmed there were “no chemical weapons” in one of the research facilities bombed by the United States, France, and the U.K. in retaliation for the Douma attack. The article relied on a false report from Sputnik, which quoted the Russian general Sergey Rudskoy citing the OPCW report. But Rudskoy was clearly referencing a 2017 report from the OPCW, not anything from the current fact-finding mission. The OPCW will not release its findings on the Douma attack for another few weeks. While the Duran has issued a correction to its report—though the false headline, subhead, and body of the text remain—Sputnik has made no such correction.
So goes the life of a fact checker in 2018, pulling on one thread to see an entire narrative unravel. A denial from Assad turns into a counternarrative from the Russians and dozens of little lies from their propaganda machine. All dangle as bait to susceptible Western journalists interested chiefly in “exposing the lies of the mainstream media.”
The countless “Fake News!” accusations flying around the Twittersphere can seem no more important than the latest salacious tidbit about a porn star and her president. But in some places around the world, fake news is the difference between life and death.
