Propaganda: Can you tell the difference between al Shabaab and al Jazeera?

Imagine a university undergraduate student asking a professor how to know which sources to trust for his or her research paper.  In today’s world you may also have to imagine that the professor won’t be able to help that student distinguish the difference between the BBC, CNN, Pravda, Huffington Post, Russia Today, or an al Shabaab recruiting video.

Now imagine that the research topic is the Kenyan struggle to protect its people from al Shabaab’s campaign of domestic terrorist attacks, drive-by slayings of pastors, Muslim youth crime mobs, and al Qaeda-backed recruiting networks using local mosques to send Kenya’s young men to the battlefront in Somalia.

In recent years al Jazeera, after much investment, has achieved the look, feel, and interface of a western media conglomerate.  Clearly mimicking Reuters, BBC, and Bloomberg, al Jazeera produces a body of mundane and normal journalism by western standards.  Over time, younger minds acclimate to the normalcy of al Jazeera.

Then there is this.  Two videos.  One is an al Jazeera ‘documentary.’  The other is an al Shabbab recruiting video that shows slaughter of Kenyan citizens in the small town of Mpeketoni.  The moral and ideological message of both are the same.  They each claim that the corrupt Kenyan government is an oppressor and that the soldiers of Allah are justified in the killing of innocents.

In the Shabaab version an execution of a christian in the street of Mpeketoni is juxtaposed next to images from a Nairobi mosque raid where al Shabaab recruiting clerics were hiding weapons.  Kenyan security forces have indeed been heavy handed and well criticized by racist European media with a double standard that cannot account for the nature of war.

The al Jazeera version focuses on making the case that the conspiratorial Kenyan government is the driving moral catalyst for all the violence.  In fact, the only key difference between these two propaganda pieces is that the Mpeketoni version makes clear that claiming Muslim lands for Allah is the only justification needed for the killing of unbelievers.

Both are sensationalist, cheesy, and certain of their moral superiority.  This is the new normal.  Where clear propaganda was once recognized by an older generation, cartoonish media puppets of evil dictators will teach the next generation of Americans that they deserve to be taken as seriously as a legitimately elected government.

Take former Russia Today personality Alyona Minkovski.  Minkovski now hosts an online television show for the Huffington Post.  If the anti-gay pro-Putin editorial guidelines of Russia Today is a resume builder for Huffington Post then we know that Huffington Post is uninterested in the distinction between Russian state narratives and the regular news.

In modern warfare, actors like Russia and al Shabaab are now on equal footing with the West in the media battlespace.  In this short list of diverse manifestations, the idea that Russian TV hosts expect to be taken seriously may make us laugh.  The seriousness of al Shabaab should give us pause.  In the long war, we are raising a generation that recognizes neither for what they are.