In far-off Finland, the prime minister of just two months, Anneli Jaatteenmaki, has been forced to resign over a disinformation scandal. The cause of her resignation is not so much that she used a secret, confidential report to spread damaging disinformation about her political rival, Social Democrat leader Paavo Lipponen, it is that she lied about it in the subsequent, attempted cover-up; she was caught red-handed when she quoted the report on her website.
In other countries, politicians get away, all the time, with the sort of disinformation and deception that brought down Jaatteenmaki. Perhaps that is because disinformation is as old as politics itself; it has always been an arm of government, and not just in countries where political parties need to sway public opinion to get elected or stay in power. Even tyrants have to bow to public mood, which means anything from twisting the truth to outright lies. Yet, old as the practice is, modern governments have taken it to new depths, with spin doctors at their right hands to explain away every uncomfortable development.
But times may be changing. The desire to expose disinformation and bring to book those who practice it has never been stronger. The reason it has never been stronger is because it has never been easier. The march of technology means that the public in every corner of the world is getting wiser to the dealings of those in politics and big business who control their lives. What they cannot get from their local press, they get from the Internet and satellite TV. Exposure is only a mouse click away.
A mouse click was all it took to leave Jaatteenmaki’s career in ruins. There is a lesson here that the rest of us need to learn. Just as criminal investigations have been revolutionized by advances in forensic science, so too the lies and cover-ups practiced by politicians and big business are increasingly easy to detect. Three decades ago, it took an age to expose the Watergate scandal and force Richard Nixon’s resignation as US president. Jaatteenmaki’s humiliation took just few days.
In the US and in the UK the issue of the moment is whether the secret services, and by extension the Bush and Blair administrations, deliberately deceived the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and therefore the need to go to war. Maybe there is nothing to these allegations. But those who pursue them, whether they be other politicians out to make a name for themselves or editors hoping to sell more newspapers, are right to do so. This is too serious a matter to ignore. Lies may have been told; lives may have been needlessly sacrificed.
Jaatteenmaki’s humiliation is a stark reminder where these investigations might end up.
