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Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories

Outsiders and the disenfranchised have always embraced the existence of wild plots and cover-ups. But now the biggest conspiracy-mongers are in charge writes Anna Merlan in The Guardian


In January 2015, I spent the longest, queasiest week of my life on a cruise ship filled with conspiracy theorists. As our boat rattled toward Mexico and back, I heard about every wild plot, secret plan and dark cover-up imaginable. It was mostly fascinating, occasionally exasperating and the cause of a headache that took months to fade. To my pleasant surprise, given that I was a reporter travelling among a group of deeply suspicious people, I was accused of working for the CIA only once.

The unshakeable certainty possessed by many of the conspiracy theorists sometimes made me want to tear my hair out, how tightly they clung to the strangest and most far-fetched ideas. I was pretty sure they had lost their hold on reality as a result of being permanently and immovably on the fringes of American life. I felt bad for them and, to be honest, a little superior.

“The things that everyone thinks are crazy now, the mainstream will pick up on them,” proclaimed Sean David Morton early in the trip. “Twenty sixteen is going to be one of those pivotal years, not just in human history, but in American history as well.”

Morton is a self-proclaimed psychic and UFO expert, and someone who has made a lot of dubious claims about how to beat government agencies such as the IRS in court. (In 2017, he was sentenced to six years in prison for tax fraud.) I dismissed his predictions about 2016 the way I dismissed a lot of his prophecies and basic insistence about how the world works. Morton and the other conspiracy theorists on the boat were confident of a whole lot of things I found unbelievable, but which have plenty of adherents in the US and abroad.

Some of them asserted that mass shootings such as Sandy Hook are staged by the US government with the help of “crisis actors” as part of a sinister (and evidently delayed) gun-grab. The moon landing was obviously fake (that one didn’t even merit much discussion). The government was covering up not just the link between vaccines and autism but also the cures for cancer and Aids. Everywhere they looked, there was a hidden plot, a secret cabal and, as the gospel of Matthew teaches about salvation, only a narrow gate that leads to the truth.

I chronicled my stressful, occasionally hilarious, unexpectedly enlightening experience onboard the Conspira-Sea Cruise as a reporter for the feminist website Jezebel, and then I tried to forget about it. I had done a kooky trip on a boat, the kind of stunt journalism project every feature writer loves, and it was over. Conspiracy theorists, after all, were a sideshow.

But I began to notice that they were increasingly encroaching on my usual beats, such as politics. In July 2016, I was walking down a clogged, chaotic narrow street in Cleveland, Ohio, where thousands of reporters, pundits, politicians and Donald Trump fans had amassed to attend the Republican national convention. I was there as a reporter and was busy taking pictures of particularly sexist anti-Hillary Clinton merchandise. There was a lot of it around, for sale on the street and proudly displayed on people’s bodies: from TRUMP THAT BITCH badges to white T-shirts reading HILLARY SUCKS, BUT NOT LIKE MONICA.

Some of the attendees were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspicion – a radio show, website and vastly profitable store of lifestyle products – founded by Austin, Texas-based host Alex Jones. For many years, Jones was a harmless, nutty radio shock-jock: a guy shouting into a microphone, warning that the government was trying to make everyone gay through covert chemical warfare, by releasing homosexuality agents into the water supply. (“They’re turning the freaking frogs gay!” he famously shouted.)

President Barack Obama, subject of a number of conspiracy theories, not least that he was born in Kenya. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

Jones also made less adorably kooky claims: that a number of mass shootings and acts of terrorism, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were faked by the government; that the CEO of Chobani, the yogurt company, was busy importing “migrant rapists” to work at its Idaho plant; that Hillary Clinton is an actual demon who smells of sulphur, hails from Hell itself and has “personally murdered and chopped up and raped” little children.

Jones and Donald Trump were longtime mutual fans. After announcing his run, candidate Trump made one of his first media appearances on Jones’s show, appearing via Skype from Trump Tower. Jones endorsed him early and often and, in turn, many of the radio host’s favourite talking points turned up in Trump’s speeches. Jones began darkly predicting that the elections would be “rigged” in Clinton’s favour, a claim that Trump quickly made a central tenet of the latter days of his campaign. At the end of September, Jones began predicting that Clinton would be on performance-enhancing drugs of some kind during the presidential debates; by October, Trump was implying that, too, and demanding that Clinton be drug-tested.

Soon after, the US narrowly elected a conspiracy enthusiast as its president, a man who wrongly believes that vaccines cause autism, that global warming is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese “in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” as he tweeted in 2012, and who claimed, for attention and political gain, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. One of the first people the president-elect called after his thunderous upset victory was Jones. Then, in a very short time, some of the most wild-eyed conspiracy-mongers in the country were influencing federal policy and taking meetings at the White House.

Here’s the thing: the conspiracy theorists aboard the cruise and in the streets of Cleveland could have warned me that Trump’s election was coming, had I only been willing to listen.

Many of the hardcore conspiracy theorists I sailed with on the Conspira-Sea Cruise weren’t very engaged in politics, given that they believe it’s a fake system designed to give us the illusion of control by our real overlords – the Illuminati, the international bankers or perhaps the giant lizard people. But when they did consider the subject, they loved Trump, even the left-leaning among them who might have once preferred Bernie Sanders.

They recognised the future president as a “truth-teller” in a style that spoke to them and many other Americans. They liked his thoughts about a rigged system and a government working against them, the way it spoke to what they had always believed, and the neat way he was able to peg the enemy with soundbites: the “lying media”, “crooked Hillary”, the bottomless abyss of the Washington “swamp”. They were confident of his victory – if the globalists and the new world order didn’t get in the way, and they certainly would try. Just as Morton said, they were sure that 2016 was going to change everything.

Trump’s fondness for conspiracy continued apace into his presidency: his Twitter account became a megaphone for every dark suspicion he has about the biased media and the rigged government working against him. At one particularly low point he even went so far as to accuse his political opponents of inflating the number of deaths in Puerto Rico caused by Hurricane Maria. His supporters became consumed by the concept of the “deep state”, seized by a conviction that a shadow regime is working hard to undermine the White House. At the same time, Trump brought a raft of conspiracy theorists into his cabinet: among them was secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson, who suggested that President Obama would declare martial lawand cancel the 2016 elections to remain in power. There was also National Security adviser Michael Flynn (who was quickly fired), notorious for retweeting stories linking Hillary Clinton to child sex trafficking.

With the candidacy and then election of a conspiracy pedlar, conspiratorial thinking leaked from its traditional confines to spread in new, more visible ways across the country. As a result, a fresh wave of conspiracy theories and an obsession with their negative effects engulfed the US. We all worried late in the election season about “fake news”, a term for disinformation that quickly lost all meaning as it was gleefully seized on by the Trump administration to describe any media attention they didn’t like. We fixated on a conspiracy theorist taking the White House, and then we fretted over whether he was a true believer or just a cynical opportunist. And as left-leaning people found themselves unrepresented in government, with the judicial, executive and legislative branches held by the right, they too started to engage more in conspiracy theorising.

The reality is that the US has been a nation gripped by conspiracy for a long time. The Kennedy assassination has been hotly debated for years. The feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s were, for a time, believed by a not-inconsiderable number of Americans to be part of a communist plot to weaken the country. A majority have believed for decades that the government is hiding what it knows about extraterrestrials. Since the early 1990s, suspicions that the Clintons were running a drug cartel and/or having their enemies murdered were a persistent part of the discourse on the right. And the website WorldNetDaily was pushing birther theories and talk of death panels (the idea, first articulated by Sarah Palin in 2009, that under Obamacare bureaucrats would decide whether the elderly deserved medical care) long before “fake news” became a talking point. Many black Americans have, for years, believed that the CIA flooded poor neighborhoods with drugs such as crack in order to destroy them.

 

Trump supporters cheering the then Republican presidential nominee in 2016. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty

The Trump era has merely focused our attention back on to something that has reappeared with reliable persistence: the conspiratorial thinking and dark suspicions that have never fully left us. Conspiracy theorising has been part of the American system of governance and culture and thought since its beginnings: as the journalist Jesse Walker writes in his book The United States of Paranoia, early white settlers, including history textbook favourite Cotton Mather, openly speculated that Native Americans were controlled by the devil, and conspiring with him and a horde of related demons to drive them out. Walker also points to the work of the historian Jeffrey Pasley, who found what he called the “myth of the superchief”: the colonist idea that every Native-led resistance or attack was directed by an “Indian mastermind or monarch in control of tens of thousands of warriors”.

The elements of suspicion were present long before the 2016 election, quietly shaping the way large numbers of people see the government, the media and the nature of what’s true and trustworthy.

And for all of our bogus suspicions, there are those that have been given credence by the government itself. We have seen a sizeable number of real conspiracies revealed over the past half century, from Watergate to recently declassified evidence of secret CIA programmes, to the fact that elements within the Russian government really did conspire to interfere with US elections. There is a perpetual tug between conspiracy theorists and actual conspiracies, between things that are genuinely not believable and truths that are so outlandish they can be hard, at first, to believe.

But while conspiracy theories are as old as the US itself, there is something new at work: people who peddle lies and half-truths have come to prominence, fame and power as never before. If the conspiratorial world is a vast ocean, 2016 was clearly the year that Alex Jones – along with other groups, such as anti-immigration extremists, anti-Muslim thinktanks and open neo-Nazis and white supremacists – were able to catch the wave of the Trump presidency and surf to the mainstream shore.

Over and over, I found that the people involved in conspiracy communities weren’t necessarily some mysterious “other”. We are all prone to believing half-truths, forming connections where there are none to be found, or finding importance in political and social events that may not have much significance at all.

I was interested in understanding why this new surge of conspiracism has appeared, knowing that historically, times of tumult and social upheaval tend to lead to a parallel surge in conspiracy thinking. I found some of my answer in our increasingly rigid class structure, one that leaves many people feeling locked into their circumstances and desperate to find someone to blame. I found it in rising disenfranchisement, a feeling many people have that they are shut out of systems of power, pounding furiously at iron doors that will never open to admit them. I found it in the frustratingly opaque US healthcare system, a vanishing social safety net, a political environment that seizes cynically on a renewed distrust of the news media.

Together, these elements helped create a society in which many Americans see millions of snares, laid by a menacing group of enemies, all the more alarming for how difficult they are to identify and pin down.

Let’s pause to attempt to define a conspiracy theory. It is a belief that a small group of people are working in secret against the common good, to create harm, to effect some negative change in society, to seize power for themselves, or to hide some deadly or consequential secret. An actual conspiracy is when a small group of people are working in secret against the common good – and anyone who tells you we can always easily distinguish fictitious plots from real ones probably hasn’t read much history.

Conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially at times of rapid social change, when we are re-evaluating ourselves and, perhaps, facing uncomfortable questions in the process. In 1980, the civil liberties lawyer and author Frank Donner wrote that conspiracism reveals a fundamental insecurity about who Americans want to be versus who they are.

“Especially in times of stress, exaggerated febrile explanations of unwelcome reality come to the surface of American life and attract support,” he wrote. The continual resurgence of conspiracy movements, he claimed, “illuminate[s] a striking contrast between our claims to superiority, indeed our mission as a redeemer nation to bring a new world order, and the extraordinary fragility of our confidence in our institutions”. That contrast, he said, “has led some observers to conclude that we are, subconsciously, quite insecure about the value and permanence of our society”.

In the past few years, medical conspiracies have undergone a resurgence like few other alternative beliefs, and they have a unique power to do harm. Anti-vaccine activists have had a direct hand in creating serious outbreaks of the measles, which they have then argued are hoaxes ginned up by the government to sell more vaccines. There is also evidence that this form of suspicion is being manipulated by malicious outside actors. A 2018 study by researchers at George Washington University found evidence that Russian bot accounts that had been dedicated to sowing various kinds of division during the 2016 election were, two years later, tweeting both pro- and anti-vaccine content, seeking to widen and exploit that divide, too.

Medical conspiracy theories are big, profitable business: an uptick in the belief that the government is hiding a cure for cancer has led people back to buying laetrile, a discredited fake drug popular in the 1970s. Fake medicines for cancer and other grave diseases are peddled by players of all sizes, from large importers to individual retailers. People such as Alex Jones – but not just him – are making multimillion-dollar sales in supplements and quack cures.

At the same time, medical conspiracies aren’t irrational. They are based on frustration with what is seen as the opacity of the medical and pharmaceutical systems. They have taken root in the US, a country with profoundly expensive and dysfunctional healthcare – some adherents take untested cures because they can’t afford the real thing. And there is a long history around the world of doctors giving their approval to innovations – cigarettes, certain levels of radiation, thalidomide, mercury – that turn out to be anything but safe.

Medical conspiracy theories are startlingly widespread. In a study published in 2014, University of Chicago political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood surveyed 1,351 American adults and found that 37% believe the US Food and Drug Administration is “intentionally suppressing natural cures for cancer because of drug company pressure”.

Meanwhile, 20% agreed that corporations are preventing public health officials from releasing data linking mobile phones to cancer, and another 20% that doctors still want to vaccinate children “even though they know such vaccines to be dangerous”. (Though the study didn’t get into this, many people who feel that way assume doctors do it because they’re in the pockets of Big Vaccine, although vaccines are actually less profitable than many other kinds of medical procedures.)

 

President John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy travelling in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963, moments before his assassination. Photograph: Jim Altgens/AP

Subscribing to those conspiracy theories is linked to specific health behaviours: believers are less likely to get flu jabs or wear sunscreen and more likely to seek alternative treatments. (In a more harmless vein, they are also more likely to buy organic vegetables and avoid GMOs.) They are also less inclined to consult a family doctor, relying instead on friends, family, the internet or celebrity doctors for health advice.

The anti-vaccine movement is the most successful medical conspiracy – persistent, lucrative and perpetually able to net new believers in spite of scientific evidence. It is also emblematic of all such conspiracy theories: people get caught up in them through either grief or desperation, exacerbated by the absence of hard answers and suspicion about whether a large and often coldly impersonal medical system is looking out for their best interests. And an army of hucksters stands ready to catch them and make a buck.

The king of dubious health claims is Alex Jones, whose InfoWars Life Health Store sells a variety of questionable supplements. Most of Jones’s products come from a Houston-based company called the Global Healing Center and are relabelled with the InfoWars logo. Global Healing Center’s CEO, Dr Edward Group, is also Jones’s go-to health expert, regularly appearing on the programme to opine about vaccines (he thinks they are bad) and fungus (the root of all evil – luckily, one of the supplements that Jones and Group sell helps banish it from the body).

Group isn’t a medical doctor but a chiropractor, although his website claims a string of other credentials, such as degrees from MIT and Harvard, where he attended continuing education programmes that are virtually impossible to fail provided you pay the bill on time. Until a few years ago, Group also claimed to have a medical degree from the Joseph LaFortune School of Medicine. The LaFortune School is based in Haiti and is not accredited. That one is no longer on his CV.

Several disgruntled Global Healing Center staff members spoke to me for a 2017 story about Group and Jones’s relationship, claiming that the company earns millions a year while toeing an extremely fine line in making claims for its products. “Global Healing Center pretends to care about FDA and FTC regulation, but at the end of the day, GHC says a lot of things that are “incorrect, totally circumstantial or based on incomplete evidence,” one employee said.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the claims that Jones and Group make about colloidal silver, which Jones sells as Silver Bullet. Colloidal silver is a popular new-age health product, touted as a miraculous antibacterial and antimicrobial agent that is dabbed on the skin. But Group and Jones advocate drinking the stuff. In 2014, Group told the InfoWars audience that he has been doing so for years. “I’ve drank half a gallon of silver, done a 10 parts per million silver, for probably 10 or 15 days,” Group said reassuringly.

Group also claims that the FDA “raided” his office to steal his colloidal silver, because it is too powerful. “It was one of the things that was targeted by the FDA because it was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and a threat for doctor’s visits because it worked so good in the body.”

 

Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin on the moon in 1969 – an event contested by many conspiracy theorists. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
Colloidal silver doesn’t, in fact, work so good in the body; you are not supposed to put it there. The Mayo Clinic says silver has “no known purpose in the body” and drinking colloidal silver can cause argyria, a condition that can permanently turn skin, eyes and internal organs an ashen bluish color. (Jones and Group acknowledge on InfoWars that this can happen, but only when people are using silver incorrectly.) Jones and their ilk complain that they are under attack by the media, the government and some shadowy third entities for telling truths too powerful to ignore.

Unusually, medical conspiracy thinking is not solely the province of the far right or the libertarian bluish-from-too-much-silver fringe. The bourgeois hippie left participates, too. The website Quartz published an astonishing story showing that many of the products sold by Jones are identical to thosepeddled by Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s new-age lifestyle website. And there’s David “Avocado” Wolfe, another new-age lifestyle vlogger, who has called vaccine manufacturers “criminal and satanic” and said that chemtrails are real and toxic. (“Chemtrails” are actually contrails, or water vapour from airplanes, which people in the deep end of the conspiracy pool think are clouds of poison gas being showered on the populace to, once again, make us docile and weak.)

It is only fair to note, however, that these people have been made prominent by the internet, but are also rigorously fact-checked because of it. Jones has been subjected to a very thorough investigation of his claims, particularly since the 2016 election, when his friendship with Donald Trump gave him an enormous boost in public attention. Goop is regularly skewered by doctors, including Dr Jen Gunter, a gynaecologist who takes great joy in wryly puncturing the site’s weirder assertions about vaginal health, such as the benefits of jade “yoni” eggs for vaginal toning.

But it is difficult to figure out whether the two sides balance each other out, whether the scrutiny bestowed by the internet is equal to the new set of consumers it potentially introduces to Goop or InfoWars products. And when people follow the advice of the likes of Jones, it may not only be their wasted money at risk. In October 2017, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Center for Environmental Health, independently tested two InfoWars supplements – Caveman True Paleo Formula and Myco-ZX – and found high levels of lead in both. Myco-ZX is meant to rid the body of “harmful organisms”, and it is one of InfoWars’ most heavily marketed products.

“It is not only ironic, but tragic, when we find lead in dietary supplements, since consumers are ingesting the toxic chemical with every sip and swallow,” CEH CEO Michael Green said in a press release.

“These products are supposed to enhance human health and performance,” Green added, “not lead to increased risk of heart attacks and sperm damage.”

On the English Cricket Board and insider journalists

What the papers say

by Maxie Allen  in The Full Toss • June 19, 2015

Over at our friends Being Outside Cricket, there have been some interesting discussions about the nature of the mainstream cricket press, its relationship with the cricketing public and its attitude to those of us ‘below the line’. You can read the pieces here and here.

At the risk of committing plagiarism, I thought I’d take the liberty of penning a few thoughts of my own. What follows is inspired by, not a response to, the thoughts of Lord Canis Lupus and The Leg Glance. I thank them for that inspiration, not to mention their wisdom and insight.

The misadventures of the cricket media are hardly new territory in our tier of the crickosphere. Many of the key points may already be very familiar to you, echoing hundreds of your own comments on both blogs during the last eighteen months. But we’ve not touched on the theme here on TFT for some time, and it’s worth updating our perspectives in the context of the here-and-now – the new mood of optimism and concord subtly washing over English cricket.

I believe there are three misconceptions about the nature of the cricket press. Firstly, I doubt all the principal correspondents have total editorial control over their copy. The editor is in charge of the paper, and beneath him or her is the sports editor. It’s they whom the correspondent is trying to satisfy, not only the reader. The bosses may ask for a particular editorial line, or at least a tone – upbeat, angry, patriotic, kick them while they’re down.

The space allocated for their reports will fluctuate according to the news agenda, with copy truncated by the sub-editors overnight if need be. If Jose Mourinho gets sacked by Chelsea, there will be less room for nuances about the third ODI. The words below the correspondent’s name will not always entirely be written by them.

That said, the more senior the hack, the more sovereignty they have. Mikes Selvey and Atherton, or Scyld Berry, are less likely to have their copy reworked than a junior reporter.

Secondly, the mainstream press do not write specifically for people like us, who read and write cricket blogs and follow the minutiae of every story. They aim at readers with a passing-to-serious interest in cricket, who have little spare time and probably read only a single paper. A city trader on the Tube. A van driver on his lunch-break.

This means complex stories get simplified – as happens in all branches of news. It also explains why journalists often put a postive spin on events, to the disgust of bloggerati sceptics. In their eyes, punters follow cricket for fun, as an escape from the drudgery of work. So hacks write about good news, and feats of derring-do, with an appeal to patriotism. They suspect too few readers are interested in the Byzantine plot-twists of ECB politics.

Thirdly, newspapers and websites (but not the BBC) are under no obligations to anyone. They are private publications, unsubject to statutory regulation which mandates fairness, balance, and specific editorial standards. If you don’t like a newspaper, so the logic goes, you don’t have to read it.

And we can’t always regard the cricket press as a uniform entity. Its exponents occupy a fairly broad spectrum, possessing a range of attitudes and approaches. Some have been more sympathetic than others to the laments of those below-the-line. A few have listened to, absorbed, and reflected our (often disparate) views.

All of this may sound like excuse-making. But there are a multitude of hefty ‘but’s. On the whole, the response of the established cricket media to the turmoil triggered on 4th February 2014 has fallen so far short of adequacy that no caveats amount to exoneration.

Newspapers and mainstream websites, along with broadcasters, enjoy many privileges. The ECB award them the status of ‘accredited’ media. This means their correspondents are appointed as the public’s eyes and ears, and receive seats in the press box, as well as interview access to players and staff, and off-the-record conversations with officials. Neither bloggers not readers are afforded such accreditation.

With privileges come responsibilities – chiefly, the duty to hold authority to account. You can’t have one without the other, especially when many papers regard themselves as ‘newspapers of record’. The inky press generally exudes a sense of entitlement and officialdom. “Because we’re the Daily X, we should be able to do y and find out z”. Once again, that right brings a responsibility.

With the Pietersen affair, the cricket media signally failed to hold the ECB to account. The ECB lied, and covered up their lies. It was as clear a case as you could imagine of misconduct and moral corruption by a public body. Yet this was barely explored and never properly investigated. Even material in the public domain was poorly studied. The ‘due diligence’ dossier passed by largely unremarked. Pietersen’s book was skim-read for lurid slurs while his serious accusations of ECB bullying and hypocrisy were ignored.

When vocal members of the public complained about this dereliction of duty, some pressmen replied by saying, ‘well we asked them, but they wouldn’t say’. This was a ridiculous excuse. In other spheres of news, the silence of authorities during a scandal becomes a story in itself. Front pages scream for answers. Newspapers ratchet up the pressure by cajoling third parties to provoke a response.

There were plenty of options available to the cricket press, had they been more tenacious and inquisitive. They could  have highlighted the blatant contradictions in the ECB’s own testimony. They might have striven for a whistle-blower. They should have piled pressure on the DCMS, Sport England (who give the ECB funding), and England sponsors Waitrose and Investec, to demand answers.

Unless I’ve missed something, none of this happened. Some journalists tried. A few tried hard. But no one tried hard enough. Too many approached the saga with all the forensic analysis of the lazy-thinking, cliche-reliant golf club bar-bore. They couldn’t see past Pietersen’s bad-egginess to the real story, and misconceived the saga as a debate about Pietersen the man, instead of what it was, a powder-keg of ECB malpractice and mendacity.

The recent explosion of the FIFA scandal provides an instructive parallel. While there is no suggestion the ECB or its officials have engaged in financial corruption or bribery, the misconduct of each organisation has common strands.

Both the Pietersen affair, and the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, gave off an overpowering miasma of fishiness. In each case a bizarre decision was taken but never convincingly explained. Attempts at scrutiny were met with bluster, evasion, and arrogance. What had actually happened was not what was officially presented.

The British press, rightly sensing the truth, refused to let FIFA off the hook. Uncowed by Sepp Blatter’s snarls, they plugged away tenaciously, month after month, even after the original story faded from the agenda. The Sunday Times led the charge, their detective work uncovering a web of brown envelopes emanating from Qatari-FA linked magnates. The hacks kept up the pressure, and eventually the levee broke. Look where we are now.

When Blatter appeared at press conferences and argued black was white, the hacks tore him to pieces. By contrast, what happened in cricket? In April 2014, when Paul Downton emerged from hiding at the Moores press conference, and met questions about Pietersen with a risible stew of lies and obfuscation, the cricket correspondent of The Independent famously gave us this. 

----

Stephen Brenkley @stephenbrenkley

It took 10 minutes for Pietersen issue to be raised at Moores' press conference. Downton handled it with aplomb, as did Moores.

----

If the likes of Brenkley or Mike Selvey had covered the FIFA story, we’d have probably read something like this:

It is time to cease asking such impertinent questions of Mr Blatter, a good man who has suffered much unwarranted personal abuse.

The FIFA scandal demonstrates more than simply what can be achieved by tireless journalistic inquisitiveness. It proves that tales about corrupt sports administrators can be major box office and appeal to passing readers. And it shows the merit of pressmen fighting for their stories. There must have been times during the FIFA investigation when editors lost confidence and threatened to pull the plug and save resources.

But back to Pietersen. Not all journalists failed to ‘get it’. But too many did. And no one closed the deal. Why?

It wasn’t because readerships lost interest in Pietersen, judging by the sheer quantity of copy written about him. In some instances, editorial diktats, from above, could provide partial explanation. But surely no editor would have turned down a juicy story about skulduggery in the corridors of Lord’s if offered up a scoop on a plate.

The real reasons are several and over-lapping. Some pressmen were lazy, others too gormless to realise what all the fuss was about. A few were deterred by fear of losing access to the inner circle. But many were simply out of their depth. It’s one thing to write about batting technique or line and length. It’s quite another to cut through a dense thicket of political intrigue and obfuscation. A previous career as a professional cricketer does not in itself an investigative journalist make.

A number of hacks were guilty of blatant bias, which took various forms. They had a personal dislike of Pietersen. They were friends or former team-mates of Paul Downton, Andy Flower, Graham Gooch or James Whitaker. Correspondents were often reporting on the conduct of people they’d known personally for years. Within this incestuous bubble, objectivity was impossible. Broadcast interviews were suffused with matiness. It was the equivalent of Alastair Campbell hosting Newsnight.

Just as influential was a subtler and less conscious form of bias. Many former players now inhabiting the press box are cut from the same cultural cloth as the ex-pros who became administrators: workmanlike county stalwarts who never amounted to much at international level. Even if they didn’t realise it, those correspondents were always likely to empathise with the likes of Downton and Whitaker, see things from their point of view, and fail to probe.

By the same token, they were unlikely to view the story either from the readers’ perspective, or Kevin Pietersen’s. Pietersen, with his vast success, huge wealth, brazen ambition, and buccaneering flamboyance, became everything they never were. Unable to relate to him, the ex-pros naturally viewed the ECB’s position as plausible, inhibiting their curiosity. And it wasn’t only about empathy. It’s easy to sense in their copy their feelings of distaste for Pietersen’s brash and unclubbable angularity. But it went further. They resented him for his success – a success which held up a light to their own mediocrity. It’s not going too far to suggest that in several cases their journalism was corrupted by envy.

In the main, the press allied to the establishment, a total inversion of their proper role. They sympathised with authority instead of putting it under the microscope. This response stemmed from an inherent emotional alignment, between media and ECB administrators, for reasons more profound than the limited emotional imaginations of ex-professionals.

Journalists, players, ex-players, ECB apparatchiks, and mandarins, together form the Cricketing Class. All these people have far more in common with each other than with any of the spectating public. They inhabit the same biosphere, sharing press boxes, hotel lobbies, bars and airport lounges around the world. They mutually provide each other with parameters and reference points of conduct, acceptance and vindication.

The incestuousness of the cricket circuit explains much of the Pietersen failure, but also plenty more. Many, especially the ex-players, have little experience of professional life beyond cricket. Insulated within this cosy cocoon, a tranche of the cricket press long since lost touch with the people they’re writing for – members of the public who follow cricket as a pastime.

When was the last time any of them paid their own money to attend an England match? Mike Atherton, say, probably hasn’t since he was a teenager. How many of them queue up for a soggy £7.50 burger, when they can rely on the courtesy sponsors’ lunch, while watching every ball of play from the best seats in the house, not only for free, but paid to be there.

This being the nature of their working lives, for years or decades on end, it requires conscious effort to see things from a punter’s point of view. This is no more than a journalist’s duty, but few achieve it.

So they often fail to share the public’s healthy scepticism of the motives of those in charge, exemplified by their constant talk of “good men”, “working hard”, in “difficult jobs”. They lose track of vital consumer issues central to the supporters’ experience, from ticket prices to free-to-air television coverage. Mainstream mediacrats can’t imagine a world where you must pay £80 for a ticket, or £400 a year for a TV subscription, from limited means, just to watch the game in the first place.

I suspect this also explains why virtually no-one in the press box understood, and barely discussed, the impact of the ECB’s “outside cricket” jibe. When push came to shove, the hacks also regarded themselves as “inside”, treasuring their insider status and mounting the barricades against the revolt of the great unwashed.

This explains their defensive hostility towards readers who dared complain about their misconceived analyses and flawed reporting. Rattled by the impudence of outsiders questioning their judgment, a few openly insulted their own audience, in what must be a British media first. Several of Mike Selvey’s Tweets became infamous

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mike selvey @selvecricket

Social media was a good way to pass on information. But the trolls, idiots and know-nothings make it unpleasant. So I'm out of here. Sorry.

mike selvey @selvecricket

Often hard for journos to remember they are read by many many more people online than few bilious inadequates who dominate comment section.

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Selvey’s generation had failed to grasp the reality of twenty-first century media interactivity. In return for their custom, today’s consumers expect an equity share and a seat at the discussion table. They – we – visit mainstream websites to participate as much as to read. Cricket followers trust their own knowledge and judgement. They expect to hold the work of professional correspondents – who have chosen to put their heads above the parapet – up to scrutiny. And they can publish views themselves, via blogs or Twitter. You no longer need a job on Fleet Street to enter the public domain.

Every other branch of journalism realised this years ago. In cricket, though, few accepted the new deal and most were slow to realise how radically the interface has changed. Grandees raged against the dying of the light, firing arrows from their ivory towers towards the peasants storming the drawbridge. Their rhetoric of entitlement spookily echoed the ECB’s ‘outside cricket’ press release, with its bleats of “uninformed…unwarranted and unpleasant criticism”, which “attacked without justification” their “rationale…and integrity”. These patrician correspondents expected deference by virtue of their position alone, and met irreverence or opposition with pompous sanctimony and sour self-importance.

Others, however, were happy to engage with the public in a generous, constructive and cordial manner, on terms more – but never fully – equal. There lingered a loose sense of masonic, closed-shop sniffiness, which implied a belief that a human being is elevated to the rank of Approved Commentator on Cricket only through an elite process of divine selection.

In reality, cricket punditry is not akin to medicine or law, in which only hard-won professional qualifications confer authority. You can be right about English cricket even if you don’t have a badge on your lapel. This is ordained by the internal logic of the profession itself. If cricketers with no journalistic training can waltz into Fleet Street jobs, and journalists with no professional cricket experience can write about foot movement and bowling actions, why can’t any lifelong cricket follower have something equally useful to say?

The division between writer and writee was akin to clergy and laity. The common man could not be trusted to read the Bible in English because he was too simple to understand the word of God. Emblematic of a common press attitude were responses you could characterise as follows:

If you knew what I knew you would think the same. But I’m not going to tell you what I know. Why should I? In your position, you take my word for it. I am right because of who I am. You are wrong because you are on the outside. You are ignorant and uninformed, unlike me.

Such ripostes were usually fortified by reference to “sources”. In other words, the hack trumped a rebuke by claiming an insider had imparted to him an earth-shattering revelation, without ever saying exactly what. But what if that source was, without the hapless correspondent realising, telling them a load of complete bollocks? During the Pietersen nuclear winter, plenty of “sources” with agenda had every reason to spin a yard to their advantage. Because the press identified neither the sources nor the content, nothing could be scrutinised for its true worth. In the final reduction, anonymous vagaries were passed off as empirical evidence.

This story was not just about Pietersen, by any stretch. The competency of Paul Downton. The merits of Peter Moores. The legitimacy of Alastair Cook. Free-to-air television. Time and again, the agglomerate press circled their wagons of legitimacy and insisted they were right, whatever the evidence to the contrary. They branded as rabid freaks anyone foolish enough to reject their authority and disagree.

The more they lost touch, the more stubborn they became. And when opportunities arose to prove their good judgement, they gleefully taunted their own readers with boasts of one-upmanship. Desperate straws were clutched at. While thousands of sober, thoughtful critics, on BTL boards and Twitter, were dismissed as a baying, irrelevant, mob, a few hundred paying Ageas Bowl spectators who applauded an Alastair Cook innings were seized upon as representatives of the nation’s soul.

This wave of condescension and antipathy, directed by writers, and some broadcasters, at their own audiences, is unique in the history of British media. When bums start leaving seats, every other branch of journalism and entertainment responds by updating their product and raising their game. If X Factor viewers complain or switch off, Simon Cowell replaces the judges and refreshes the format. In cricket, if you don’t like what they do, they tell you to fuck off.

During the last few weeks, everyday life has calmed down. England’s exciting ODI performances, an opiate for the masses, have soothed the sceptic-hack relationship, at least for the time being. Victories are very difficult to disagree about, and the side’s upturn in fortunes since the removal of Cook and Moores has provided an (unacknowledged) vindication for the legions of BTLers who’d argued the duo’s inadequacy all along. Test cricket is another matter, though, and should Cook fail in the Ashes, trouble will flare up again.

In each of English cricket’s three estates – the administrators, the press, and the public – there is a decreasing appetite for conflict and strife, although this must not distract us from the vivid scrutiny the ECB’s conduct still demands. Contrary to what many journalists probably think, readers desire a positive relationship with the mainstream press. After all, we largely rely on them to provide our news from the front. They have access to people and events which we don’t. And ex-players will offer technical and experiential insights we may not spot with the naked eye.

But the relationship can only work if it’s bi-directional. In return for the vitals provided by journalists and pundits, we bring crowd-sourcing: millions of independent minds, views, and critical faculties, borne of millions of lifetimes spent watching cricket, playing cricket, and thinking about cricket. It’s a win-win. And to lay the first stone of this new Jerusalem, I suggest a little job-swap. A random punter should be granted a week in the press box, with all the trimmings. And during the same test, a Fleet Street correspondent should buy their own tickets and watch every ball from the stands, in the crowd. A change of scenery is good for the soul.

It's all upto Morgan

For much of his career, Eoin Morgan has had the door opened welcomingly wide for him. No longer

Ed Smith

February 29, 2012

As two dazzling, attacking shot-players, Eoin Morgan and Kevin Pietersen are often talked about in the same breath. Indeed, they are the two top batsmen in the World T20 rankings. But there the similarities end.

I am not referring to their diverging current form. Pietersen has confirmed a spectacular return to form, with two ODI hundreds and a match-winning 62 not out in the deciding T20. Morgan, in contrast, has struggled this winter and been omitted from the England Test squad that will play Sri Lanka.

No, the deeper differences are more revealing. Pietersen is a natural outsider who has had to make his own way; Morgan has always benefitted from the smiles and support of the cricketing establishment. Pietersen forced his way into international cricket through sheer weight of runs; Morgan was hand-picked as a potential star. Pietersen's critics have always been waiting for him to fail; Morgan's many admirers have always made the most of his successes.

Pietersen came from a great cricketing culture, South Africa, where he never broke through. Even in Natal, he was not earmarked for future greatness. In coming to England to pursue a better cricketing future, Pietersen made himself doubly an outsider - the foreigner determined to achieve greatness among an adopted people.

Morgan, in contrast, is the lauded favourite son of Irish cricket. He has always been the brightest star in a small galaxy. Not for him the waiting and wondering if he would make the grade. Irish cricket has been spreading the word about Morgan - that he was a phenomenal talent - from his teenage years.

In 2007, Middlesex played Ireland in Dublin. Ironically, two of Middlesex's best players were Irish - Morgan and Ed Joyce - so it was a homecoming of sorts for them. Though Joyce was the older, more senior figure, it was Morgan who bestrode the scene. He was a different man in Ireland; he was top dog and he knew it. In time, Middlesex and England fans also came to know and admire that cocksure character.

But if we dig a little deeper, the Morgan story is less conclusive that it first appears. When he was first selected for England in 2009, Morgan had already proved certain things in county cricket. We knew that few players (if any) have a greater natural ability to strike the ball with immense power derived from timing rather than brute strength. We knew that he had an instinctive feel for one-day and T20 cricket, a hunter's thrill of the chase and a showman's love for the stage. We knew that his outward demeanour was apparently confident and yet hard to read.

We also knew - if anyone cared to look at the numbers - that his first-class record was unremarkable (he averaged in the mid-30s) and that his temperament had rarely been tested in circumstances that didn't suit him.

Now, three years later, our knowledge of Morgan has not advanced all that much. Yes, we have learnt that he was not phased or overawed by international cricket. But few thought he would be.

In more substantive terms, Morgan has succeeded at things he was always good at, and struggled at disciplines that do not come easily to him. Morgan's instant successes in international T20 and ODI cricket reflected his dominant reputation in those two formats in county cricket. In the same way, his relative lack of success in Test cricket reflects his track record in all first-class cricket.

	Sport gets harder in many respects, and the sportsmen who thrive in the long term are those who have the personality to take more of the weight on their own shoulders. Ultimately a great player must be his own problem-solver, therapist and coach

We are about to learn a lot more about Morgan. This is the first time in his cricketing life that he has been on the outside. Until now, he has been the beneficiary of a never-ending fast track - the path ahead constantly being cleared for him. At Middlesex the coaching staff fretted about anything that might "hold Morgan back", even when his first-class numbers did not demand selection. One coach used to begin selection meetings by asking, "How are we going to get Morgan into the team?" As though Morgan himself shouldn't have to worry about the troublesome details of getting runs and making his own case. England, too, picked him at the first available opportunity.

Well, the era of fast-tracking and "how are we going to get Morgan into the team?" just ended. For now, he is on his own, armed with just a bat and his dazzling skills. He will have to make his own way back. The door is far from closed. But nor is it permanently wide open.

Great players in every sport will tell you that it is much harder to stay at the very top than it is to get there in the first place. The same point can be phrased differently. As sportsmen get older, they have to become ever more self-reliant. The support systems drop away, one by one, leaving you standing alone. Adoring coaches who were once enamoured of sheer talent become frustrated by the failure to convert talent into performance; team-mates who once sensed a star in the making begin to expect games to be won, not merely adorned; fans are no longer thrilled by what you can do, but increasingly annoyed by what you cannot.

Sport gets harder in many respects, and the sportsmen who thrive in the long term are those who have the personality to take more of the weight on their own shoulders. Ultimately a great player must be his own problem-solver, therapist and coach. That revolves around character, not talent.

Many people - including me - believe Morgan is one of the most gifted cricketers in the world. In my new book I wanted to explore the careers of a couple of athletes - drawn from all sports - who had been blessed with truly remarkable talent. The two examples I used were Roger Federer and Morgan.

Morgan has already proved me right about his talent. Now comes the interesting part: what is he going to do with it?