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Gibson Nyikadzino

Correspondent

Do media audiences know why fake news or disinformation reports are frequently shared and at times believed than verified news reports?

The answer is simple. A huge chunk of online disinformation, fake news and online propaganda is quite profitable, financially. 

Therefore, cutting off the revenue stream becomes difficult because disinformation, though an old practice, has become a profitable trade that essentially legitimises information that may be circulating on media platforms.

Globally, we now live in an age of super disinformation characterised by conspiracy theories, invented stories and outright lies that are now competing with the truth. As such, this disinformation has one goal, that is, to gain public acceptance for the distortion through repetition and periodic resurfacing of false and fake information campaigns.

The invasion of Iraq by Western forces, one quick example, was primarily anchored on neither misinformation normal information, but greatly on disinformation. 

Journalists also played key role in spreading disinformation during that invasion, which former British Prime Minister Tony Blair later admitted was based on false intelligence that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

 But this disinformation campaign was designed to induce fear and profess the threat of weapons of mass destruction and explicate Saddam Hussein’s affiliation to Al-Qaeda as a threat to the world at a time the world was introduced to the “campaign against terrorism”.

Because of the Iraq disinformation, Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter served a jail sentence over that as she had become a poster girl for journalistic misdeeds.

In the past, the United States has manufactured atrocities. The list is lengthy, but most people continue to trust them and all they read or hear without examination or other viewpoint. Those who try to challenge them are frequently harassed and called names. 

This, too, reflects one’s own lack of intelligence rather than the person on the receiving end.

The same strategy is being employed by the NATO coalition and the entire Western political establishment, this time against Russia and China.

Against China, Western media speaks of the “China threat” and the genocide against the Uyghurs, while in Russia is targeted for “genocide in Ukraine.”

All of this is being done to change public opinion and get the US to accept to go to direct military confrontation with either Russia or China. This is a strategy that has been employed before, and it is remarkable how many people are still ignorant that they are being controlled.

The repercussions of a Russia-US military confrontation are what is known as a mutually assured destruction (MAD) and nobody wants to be involved in that, except the US that thinks it will benefit from it.

The West is therefore not at any time slowing down with their disinformation campaign against Russia, which they are accusing of intentionally creating a global food market crisis and anticipated famine. 

And journalists are now caught up in this disinformation campaign to aid Western countries entangle the world in this information mess.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 2023 report on the state of food insecurity and nutrition in the world note that between 691 million and 783 million people or about 9,2 percent of the world’s population faced hunger last year. 

This is significantly higher than 7,9 percent of the global population in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. 

This means the food situation was better before the pandemic than it is today, and those to be affected the most are Africans.

According to Western countries, these pending global food shortages are a result of Russia’s policy of non-cooperation with the rest of the world and its non-commitment to play a positive role in the eradication of hunger and ending poverty.

Unfortunately, some experts have fallen for such propaganda. 

It would only be better for Africans to know that the US led Western alliance has imposed economic sanctions on Russian fertilisers which are key to boost food and agricultural production in the world.

Russia’s biggest fertiliser manufacturing and exporting company, PhosAgro, has been blacklisted by the West, yet its fertilisers are ideal for African soils and climate.

According to UN statistics, 40 percent of land in Africa suffers from degradation due to cadmium from fertilisers with heavy metal impurities. Russian mineral fertilisers produced by PhosAgro do not contain concentrations of cadmium and other toxic substances harmful to human health and soil, and have the best eco-efficiency indicators in the world.

Over the past five years, PhosAgro increased the supply of mineral fertilisers to Africa 4,5 times from 117,9 thousand tonnes in 2018 to 540 000 tonnes in 2022.

Through the grain deal over the last twelve months, 32,8 million tonnes of supplies were exported from Ukraine under the deal, yet more than 70 percent exports ended up in high and upper-middle-income countries, including the EU. 

Countries that were expected to benefit from the deal, among them, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, as well as Yemen and Afghanistan, received less than three percent of supplies, that is, less than one million tonnes.

In short, Russia cannot be blamed and is not to be blamed for unbalancing the global food market. It is the selfish destructive policy of the USA and her Western satellite countries that are fuelling food shortages and want the entire world to shift the blame on Russia.

By doing this, it is becoming evidently clear that the West is afraid and it is in fear because the US, EU and NATO have been coining lies to lure developing countries to create a movement of Russophobes in their quest to soft power domination through this disinformation exercise to de- intellectualise even the most ardent anti-imperialist African academics.

Many people are unknowingly controlled by Western individuals who have a disinformation agenda, unaware that they are being controlled in the first place. They are so persuaded that their judgments about Russia and the state of global food prices are their own, yet they are being conditioned to believe this way. 

Thus, through fear, the West has found it as an effective technique for controlling and manipulating people.

This is nothing about Russia, but all about the West’s desire to control the world and maintain spheres of influence through both fear and disinformation.

Gibson Nyikadzino is a Media and International Politics researcher. He holds a MSc in Politics and International Relations.