The well integrated Anglo-American corporate and state media networks have been trying to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, using in house and state funded “fact checkers” (including AI engines) to confirm their own misinformation about independent nations. The aim has been to reinforce Western media monopolies in face of a push back by those same independent states, subject to the globalist propaganda wars.

Little wonder that the Latin Americans, Chinese, and Russians are sick of these media monopolies and are developing their own capabilities to counter the lies told about them.

• So Venezuela and the other Latin American countries who formed the continental media network Telesur twenty years ago, to “reflect our realities”, recently held a conference in Havana, Cuba, on the subject of countering imperial misinformation;
• China has so far relied on state agencies and state media to combat the infowars, alongside huge virtual armies on social media - but Beijing is growing uneasy about its perceived media disadvantages;
• Russia more recently set up its own  Global Fact Checking Network (GFCN)  to counter the propaganda war it faces.

To understand the deception of the raft of new Western ‘fact checkers’ we should start with some principles:

1. While responsible providers of information and analysis should check their own facts and correct their own errors, anyone else can impose scrutiny on particular reports;
2. Nothing is added by corporations or states pretending to “verify” their own stories;
3. Such “verification” is worse when it comes from the Western “colonial media,” which has a track record of promoting false pretexts for each new US war or intervention;
4. “Fact checking,” which relies on the discredited Wikipedia method (“authoritative” secondary sources and anonymous editors) is worse than useless, as it mostly presents summaries of Western media stories, dressed up as independent accounts;
5. Front groups and anonymous authorities are misleading - responsible sources will not hide their authors, but will rather take responsibility for their information and analysis, while using a wide range of mainly primary sources;
6. No source or country can be banned from debate, but we have to learn how to read interested parties and biased sources and make intelligent use of them.

The Wikipedia method (relying on secondary “authoritative” sources compiled by anonymous editors), shared by many “fact checkers” and AI engines, is utterly unreliable for anything that matters. Unlike traditional encyclopaedia, which follows academic conventions of authorship and attribution, Wikipedia is utterly reliant on Western secondary sources; thus presenting a pre-digested summary of the Western media. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that it is “not a reliable source” and carries a disclaimer: “Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here.” (Much the same should be added to these new fact checkers.

Fake news was first recognised as a widespread practice in the USA, where private companies paid media outlets to promote their goods and services. By the 2016 US elections, it came to be seen as a practice linked to political campaigns, including the new forms of hybrid warfare, designed to undermine independent states. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump correctly accused Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of covertly creating ISIS terrorism to pursue the regime change wars in Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

By then, the Western corporate and state media were already deeply embedded in liberal propaganda. They sold us persistent myths like the following:

• That the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a matter of Anglo-American self-defence, while the 2022 Russian intervention in SE Ukraine was “unprovoked” and had nothing to do with Russian self-defence;
• The repeated fake news about Syrian President Assad and the Syrian Army supposedly bombing and using chemical weapons against their own people, while shielding the NATO-backed terrorist groups from responsibility for these crimes;
• The slaughter in Gaza was not really genocide but a matter of Israeli “self defence” against terrorism, while promoting the fiction of a Chinese “genocide” against its own Muslim population in Xinjiang;
• Telling us that French and US troops were in West and North Africa to help “fight terrorism” and not to secure strategic control of natural resources;
• Selling us the big lie that successive unelected US puppets were actually the “presidents” of Venezuela.

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This rubber stamping of each and every Washington-led foreign intervention has led me to refer to much of the Western corporate and state media as the “colonial media”. They reliably defer to the official Washington line and move against the representatives of independent nations like attack dogs, all the while styling themselves as the guardians of democracy, human rights, and truth; indeed,d pretending to hold a monopoly of truth.

Their greatest damage is done in strategic claims, not particular facts, which can be more easily debunked. Anyone can check particular facts, not least by the use of historical online searches. We do not need biased ‘ratings’ agencies for that.

For example, former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, obsessed with the need to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, made 200 posts on Twitter over 2014-2015, many of them using images from the destruction in places such as Gaza and Kobani, to falsely suggest attacks on Syrian civilians by the Syrian Arab Army. Juxtaposition of photos can expose this deception for those who care to look.

We must admit their skill; even as the Anglo-American empire is in serious economic decline, its capacity to build myths is unparalleled, albeit with typical neoliberal blindness to conflicts of interest, not least of which is “fact checking” their own stories. They build fortresses of disinformation to advance Washington’s hybrid wars, which I have called ‘wars of hegemonic decline”. In so doing, they hope to support the pretexts for the next hot war, while attempting to isolate and demoralize any resistance.

This colonial media machine is not just the embedded corporate and state media, in lock step. It includes state agencies like the European ‘EU vs Disinfo’ and its (now disbanded) US state equivalent, the Global Engagement Center. Then there are the various EU and US state funded NGOs and “media activists”, particularly focused on Washington’s latest interventions. Knitting all this together, we have the ubiquitous Wikipedia, embedded social media like the Meta agencies, and embedded artificial intelligence and search engines (e.g. Google) which always take us back to the same embedded sources, like Wikipedia.

Into this self-referential, circular mess we have the latest “fact checkers” and online AI machines, most of which are set up by the same colonial media. Most Western ‘fact checkers’ are corporate and state media agencies, with the odd academic body. While some of these ‘fact checkers’ claim to follow the  International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) code - which includes a commitment to impartiality, disclosure of method and affiliation and use of mainly primary sources - most self-proclaimed fact checkers do not meet these standards and, even if they comply with some, most are set up precisely to amplify the message of their sponsors.

For example, AAP is a non-profit media agency owned by a shifting consortium of media companies which has its own “fact checker” arm called AAP FactCheck. In a misleading manner, AAP claims to be a “primary source” (journalism is normally only a “primary source” as regards interviews) and so does not require references or hyperlinks. It also hides its corporate ownership.

This network can cross continents. For example the Australian state media agency ABC recently cited a report on Russia by Check First, a software company in Finland which investigates online disinformation, and Reset Tech, in an attempt to discredit Russia’s new GFCN network. However, ‘Check First’ is funded by European states and the European Commission and is obsessed with Russian influence, including supposed Russian attempts to “pollute” Wikipedia. It is a state funded political agent and far from impartial.

Reset Tech Australia is the Australian branch of a US media company funded by various groups, including the US Internet Society Foundation. They specialize in promoting what they claim is “needed to mitigate the personal and national security risks that social media platforms and other digital platforms routinely generate”. In other words, they are a corporate lobby group.

This ‘Fact checking’ has not come close to resolving the info wars within the USA. For example, ‘Allsides’ presents a right aligned view of the problem they see as the domination of  left-liberal “fact checkers”, while on the left-liberal side, similar concerns are expressed about right aligned media.

Some new agencies have moved beyond ‘fact checking’ particular reports into pretending to rate the overall reliability of media bodies. For example, Newsguard, led by corporate media journalist Stephen Brill, claims to provide “transparent” ratings on media, "to help consumers identify reliable information online". However it relies on US government and intelligence sources, including CIA and NATO sources, and is heavily US-biased on international matters.

Media Bias/Fact Check is another media ratings company which follows the misleading “authoritative” sources rule, is also US centric, and produces similar results to Newsguard.

Artificial intelligence (AI) engines often suffer the same bias as Wikipedia and corporate ‘fact checkers’, they are set up by groups which control inputs. For example, you cannot hope to get independent or impartial information about Saudi Arabia from the Saudi agency SAMI AI.

In the end, the new wave of ‘fact checkers’ and AI machines is mostly an extension of existing media monopolies, which aim to reinforce key messages of the Western hegemonic cartel. Analysts have to look at the interests and methods behind their claims. Ordinary news consumers, who have no time for such things, will simply have to pick their news sources as before, paying little attention to the ‘bootstraps’ agencies.