Sky Views: Sowing doubt is dangerous

Tom Rayner, Political Correspondent

How do you control a message when you can't control a message?

For political leaders across the world, this has become a fundamental question.

From dictators to democrats, it is an underlying dilemma with which politicians of all stripes must wrestle.

A political message now doesn't just need to survive the scrutiny of established news organisations, but the interrogation and discussion of millions of individuals connected via social media.

And that presents all sorts of problems.

Understand this, and suddenly many things start to make a lot more sense.

On Saturday evening I was in Istanbul, covering the commemorations of the 15 July failed coup.

Hundreds of thousands gathered at the foot of the Bosphorus Bridge (now re-named Martyr's Bridge) to hear President Erdogan address a "national unity" rally.

From our vantage point on a platform erected for media, we looked over a portion of the crowd that was - at least for the hours prior to the President's speech - largely facing in our direction, and largely focused on making their hatred of us rather clear.

"Yalan haber", Turkish for "lying news", was one of the chants. Another, targeted towards the correspondent of CNN's Turkish channel, was "CNN out" or "CNN scum". Every now and then a water bottle would be hurled at the woman as she stood in front of her camera.

It didn't seem to matter that one year earlier, at the height of the coup, it was CNN Turk who broadcast a FaceTime call, made by a visibly shaken President Erdogan, that allowed him to urge his supporters to take to the streets - arguably the key turning point of the night, and the reason civilian protests ultimately overwhelmed the tanks.

Those facts are now long forgotten by Mr Erdogan's supporters - erased by 12 months of accusations that independent media is part of a dark plot to destroy democracy. All that's left is an unquestioning, snarling aggression.

In reality, Mr Erdogan's 'national unity rally' was nothing of the sort. Instead it defined the 'nation' as his supporters alone, and 'unity' as nothing more than their fealty to him.

The reason for this is clear. In the wake of the attempted coup, Mr Erdogan has been attempting to control how that event is remembered.

He cannot allow it to be framed as an attempt to topple him - a narrative which would allow the possible failings of his leadership prior to the coup to be discussed as potential motivations for it.

Instead it must be seen in stark terms, a plot devised and executed by people driven by nothing more than their inherent evil, who were set on destroying Turkey.

This is the only way the waves of arrests and purges of ministries, universities and other institutions can be justified as a clear defence of democracy, rather than an opportunistic effort to wipe out those who oppose him personally.

But while this is a straightforward message to convey, it is now a much harder message to control.

Turkey is a developed, sophisticated, connected country.

Even in the climate of fear that prevails, there are plenty of people who opposed the coup still willing to ask difficult questions of Mr Erdogan.

And so his response has been similar to what has been seen elsewhere around the world.

If you can't fully control the message, you do the opposite - you smash the credibility of anyone who asks questions and the platforms from which those questions are asked, you create a climate of doubt as a distraction, you demolish the space for nuance until all that's left is tribal loyalty.

That is the landscape in which questions can be drowned out by emotive demands of allegiance to the flag, to the nation, to the leader. It is the 21st century evolution of 'strong man' propaganda.

Anger is not something easily turned off - once you whip up hostility, it can take on a life of its own. If controlling a message is hard, controlling popular fury once ignited is even harder.

Leaders of the "strong man" mould be it Erdogan, Putin, Sisi, Netanyahu, Mugabe, Modi, or Trump tend to rely on messages that consolidate their base support, rather than reach out to those who disagree.

The strength of a "strong man" leader derives from the fervour of those loyal to them, rather than their ability to build a broader consensus.

But in this connected world, their supporters can be exposed more and more to facts and arguments that may cause them to question their loyalty. Unable to prevent this, the strong men instead stoke the fervour.

It's for this reason Donald Trump has become so reliant on his Twitter accusations of 'FAKE NEWS!'.

Despite Mr Trump's almost child-like delivery of the phrase, it is strategically astute.

Let's not forget, in early 2016 when the presidential campaign was building momentum, the debate around "fake news" was very different.

It was about the completely fictitious articles from completely fictitious online news outlets often written by teenagers in eastern Europe out to make a dime from the clicks generated.

The debate, back then, was about whether the Trump campaign was doing enough to tell its supporters that the anti-Clinton articles they were sharing en masse were simply not true.

Fake news was a problem for Mr Trump.

But since then he has appropriated the phrase to such a degree that he owns its use and meaning.

"Fake news" is now as idiosyncratic of Mr Trump as "you're fired!". It is a remarkable political turnaround.

He deploys it to tarnish the mainstream media and give his supporters a reassuring mantra for whenever their hero's greatness seems in question. Its roots in the obscure corners of Facebook, made in bedrooms in Macedonia, have been long forgotten.

It is the same ultimate strategy as that used by Mr Erdogan when the questions challenge the message: sow the seeds of doubt and ensure all criticism is seen as conspiracy.

You create a world in which your supporters can believe that everything they are hearing is simply made up.

But sowing these seeds of doubt is a dangerous game.

In the short-term it can be used to solidify support - there's nothing like a loosely-defined enemy posing a loosely-defined threat to unify a cause.

But the idea that everything that challenges one's beliefs or convictions is by definition a fiction, is a notion that will ultimately be much harder to control.

Back in Istanbul, as the anti-media chants got louder, someone on the Tannoy asked the crowd to remember the focus of the day was supposed to be on those killed a year earlier.

Sing their names instead, said the announcer.

It was a request that fell on deaf ears.

Instead, the event organisers just turned up the volume of the thumping nationalist songs blaring out over the PA system in a vain effort to drown out the venom that was distracting from the narrative of the day.

Anger is not something easily turned off - once you whip up hostility, it can take on a life of its own.

If controlling a message is hard, controlling popular fury once ignited is even harder.

Strong man regimes may be increasingly reliant on doubt and confusion, but no stability will come of it.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Paste BN editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Sophy Ridge - Leaks and chaos are good for democracy