By Natalie Anne-Hall
This blog was originally published at the website of the research project "Reframing Russia: From Cold War to 'Information War'?" on May 19, 2020.
This month, as the world has been debating how and when to lift Covid-19 ‘lockdown’ and Boris Johnson set out the UK’s moderate (if confusing) easing of restrictions, RT has published a series of anti-lockdown op-eds. Since 1 May, nine opinion pieces (by six different authors) have been published on RT’s website criticising the UK’s restrictions, compared with just one in support of them (back on 1 May). All of these op-eds have also been posted to the RT UK Facebook page, increasing their visibility. Many of the authors of these pieces, like Damian Wilson, Robert Bridge, Rob Lyons and Norman Lewis, are regular contributors to RT online, writing from politically and economically right-wing standpoints including attacks on climate activism, refugee programmes and ‘PC culture.’
These pieces have a distinct libertarian tone, evidenced in incendiary language like ‘riding roughshod over basic freedoms’. Much of the language used is provocative, with words like ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘socialist experiment’ conjuring images of communist dictatorships. In his piece following the 10 May announcement, Norman Lewis calls Johnson’s policy ‘patronizing and demeaning,’ eluding to a small-government, free-market approach. Mitchell Feierstein in his piece twice likens the government’s furlough scheme to the fiscal irresponsibility of ‘Zimbabwe and the Weimar Republic,’ and stokes anxiety with lines like ‘I am frightened by what I have been hearing, and you should be, too’. A third piece published on the same day (13 May) by Damian Wilson compares the UK’s current situation with the poverty and rationing experienced by Cuba in the 1990s, saying ‘the UK has sleep-walked into socialism without a single tank bearing cigar-smoking, khaki-clad revolutionaries rolling up Whitehall’. There are arguably dangers, as well as political benefits, of invoking such alarmist and militaristic analogies.
Some of the pieces also use decidedly Brexit-style language and appeals. The term ‘project fear’ is resurrected with the claim that Britons have been driven to ‘existential angst’ and become ‘petrified of normal life’. Brexit itself is mentioned in a handful of the pieces, for example jibing at the irony of Remainers now ‘embracing public opinion’ over the lockdown. More subtly, the same anti-trust, English nationalist and nostalgic messaging that has been seen in Brexit campaigning both on and offline is present in many of the articles. In his 11 May piece, James Heartfield uses the terms ‘English liberty’ and ‘British liberty’ interchangeably, and stokes nostalgia for a time before the end of the Cold War, when this ‘proud tradition’ suffered a ‘strange death’ and was replaced by fear and snowflake-like vulnerability (as though the Cold War period itself was free of public anxiety and paranoia). In the same piece he bemoans the government’s having ‘caved in to the experts’ and reminisces about the days when Tories like Michael Gove boldly claimed that ‘the people in this country have had enough of experts’ during the 2016 referendum campaign.
In line with these anti-expert sentiments, the pieces also make claims about the effects of lockdown strategies that are unevidenced and as-yet unverifiable, such as that the proposed necessity of lockdowns to ‘flatten the curve and protect the health service’ has now been exposed as ‘just fearmongering and exaggeration’, or that Sweden’s soft-touch policy has succeeded in the ‘bolstering of immunity among the young and the healthy’. Conversely, one of the most recent pieces entitled ‘London’s Covid-19 R number is well below critical at 0.4, with only 24 new cases a day. NOW why can’t we have our lives back?’ appeals specifically to ‘the science’ in its call to end the lockdown. It does not, however, stop short of employing cultural logic, claiming that as Britons, ‘Social distancing is already a way of life, we are born into it.’ Rob Lyon’s piece also published 15 May calls for the UK to ‘end the lockdown as soon as possible’ and ‘conquer the fear factor’ for the sake of the economy, on the grounds that the most recent figures show ‘hardly any’ recorded deaths by the virus for under-40s.
While most of the pieces constitute direct and obvious criticisms, some, like Damian Wilson’s piece on ‘Professor Lockdown’s career ‘thankfully’ being over, use popular news stories to package their critique. Similarly, Robert Bridge’s 7 May piece began by predicting the unfortunate loss of customs like handshaking, only to move dangerously close to ‘plandemic’ conspiracy theories by pointing to Bill Gates’ financial interest in vaccines. He then uses such logic to proclaim emphatically that being ‘forced to endure endless lockdowns and quarantines behind surgical masks’ is a strategy that ‘cannot last forever’.
If this wasn’t enough to convince readers of RT’s position, a standard news article with the innocuous headline ‘PM Johnson says UK hopes to EASE some lockdown measures on Monday’ published on 6 May was accompanied by an image of protesters holding signs that say ‘No more lockdown’, both on RT’s website and the RT UK Facebook page. Like such strategic choices of photographs, the publication of op-eds can be conveniently non-committal. ‘Op-eds’ are just that, opinion pieces by those whose views are allegedly ‘their own,’ to some extent absolving RT of journalistic responsibility around their accuracy. But given what is at stake in a pandemic that has already claimed over 300,000 lives, this one-sided promotion of anti-lockdown viewpoints by the outlet could be a dangerous game.