Al-Qalam 
By Imraan Buccus
There is a lot of discussion about media and social media disinformation today. Much of this debate assumes that disinformation is produced only by the enemies of the West. This has long been the logic of Herman Wasserman, a South African academic working on media disinformation.
But the idea that only the enemies of the West engage in disinformation is simply not true. Two of the most consequential disinformation events in a generation came from the United States and Israel, and both were taken up uncritically by major Western newsrooms.
The first was the claim that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction”. This lie, driven at the highest levels of the US government, was carried into the world by powerful Western media institutions such as the New York Times. It played a central role in legitimising a war that destroyed a country at the cost of more than a million lives and destabilised an entire region.
The second came in October 2023, when Israeli officials claimed that Hamas had “beheaded forty babies”. Again, the New York Times and other outlets repeated the allegation without verification. By the time it was disproven, the damage had been done and the stage was set for genocide.
Israel’s own propaganda and public diplomacy infrastructure, known as Hasbara, has been a major source of misinformation for decades. It operates through coordinated government messaging, media partnerships, influence networks and online campaigns that promote Israel’s political line and delegitimise criticism. During periods of intense violence, it frequently circulates claims that later collapse under scrutiny.
Despite this history, Western governments and donors aligned to them have poured enormous resources into building the idea that only the enemies of the West engage in disinformation, while the West itself stands for reason, democracy, justice and freedom. This narrative has been pushed through an ecosystem of initiatives, including fact-checking outfits, academic programmes on disinformation, investigative journalism units, donor-funded media projects, training schemes and high-profile conferences. The aim is to entrench a worldview in which Western information is assumed to be neutral and trustworthy while critical voices in the Global South are treated with suspicion or dismissed as foreign-backed disinformation.
South Africa is deeply embedded in these structures. A web of Western-backed organisations plays a major role in shaping what counts as independent journalism, which topics are prioritised and how disinformation is understood.
Journalists who toe the Western line are treated as respected professionals, while people making principled and independent criticism of the West and Israel are mocked, slandered and smeared as proxies for Russia, China, Iran or Hamas.
The extent of direct US involvement in South African media is well documented. Research into how the United States has penetrated our mediascape shows that organisations such as the US State Department, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy have long funded journalism initiatives in this country. These funds support newsroom partnerships, training schemes, reporting fellowships and “capacity-building” programmes presented as neutral efforts to strengthen journalism. In practice, they promote a liberal pro-Western frame as the standard of professional reporting. This influence shapes editorial assumptions and determines which voices are elevated as authoritative, narrowing the space for independent analysis. Over time, these pressures shape newsroom identities. Western positions come to be treated as common sense.
One of the newer developments in this global donor ecosystem is the New Lines Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that presents itself as an independent authority on disinformation, extremism and international security. It publishes New Lines Magazine, a high-profile platform that projects an image of rigour and neutrality. In reality its work sits firmly within the orbit of US foreign-policy priorities.
The institute emerged from the same networks that produced PropOrNot, the anonymous initiative that falsely branded a large number of independent and left publications as Russian propaganda during the 2016 US election cycle. While New Lines has adopted the formal language of a policy institute, its reports consistently target governments and movements viewed as hostile to Western power, while never examining Western disinformation or the major failures of institutions such as the New York Times. As the critical media scholar Alan MacLeod has noted, New Lines “constantly attacks genuine alternative media who stray from Washington’s official foreign policy line, all while employing many spooks, spies and other figures at the heart of the national security state.” Yet its material circulates widely in donor-funded journalism trainings, fact-checking programmes and university courses across the Global South, giving it significant influence over how journalists are taught to understand disinformation. New Lines has also sought to intervene directly in the South African mediascape, and the liberal media here often treats it as if it were a neutral and credible project.
The National Endowment for Democracy is actively involved in trying to shape South African politics. In November 2023, it hosted the 12th Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in Johannesburg, presenting the gathering as a neutral forum on democratic renewal. Instead, it sparked immediate controversy. Major civil-society organisations, including SAFTU and a number of social movements, criticised the event as an attempt by a US-funded body with a long record of regime-change operations to place itself at the centre of South African political life.
Two South African institutions that had initially agreed to co-host—the Ronnie Mamoepa Foundation and the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA)—withdrew after public pressure.
These dynamics were also evident at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference held in Malaysia last month. The event was presented as a gathering to strengthen investigative reporting, but its political orientation was clear from the outset. The keynote speaker was Maria Ressa, a central figure in the Western-backed democracy-promotion world. Ressa has long been embedded in networks close to US foreign-policy circles, including serving as chair of the World Movement for Democracy, whose secretariat is housed in the National Endowment for Democracy. Her leading role at the conference signalled the wider political frame in which the event operated: a view of disinformation that focuses on the conduct of non-Western states, domestic populists and critics of Western power, while treating Western information systems as inherently trustworthy.
To understand why this matters, it is necessary to look at the NED itself. The NED was created in the early 1980s during the Reagan administration, when senior figures acknowledged that it would take over many of the political influence operations that had previously been carried out covertly by the CIA, but would now operate in public through a “democracy promotion” mandate. Since then it has become one of the most influential funders of media initiatives, civil-society organisations, journalism training programmes and academic centres across the Global South. Its grant-making almost always aligns with the strategic interests of Washington. Through fellowships, conferences, investigative journalism hubs and fact-checking bodies, the NED helps to frame Western foreign policy as the standard of democratic virtue, while portraying independent or dissenting views as vulnerable to manipulation by foreign powers.
This is the political ecosystem in which the Malaysia conference was situated. It was not a neutral space. It belongs to a wider infrastructure through which Western donors and governments decide what counts as credible journalism and what is dismissed as disinformation. It is an architecture that avoids serious examination of Western disinformation.
Much of our liberal media continues to reproduce a worldview in which the West appears as the guardian of truth, the guarantor of democratic norms and the main victim of manipulation. The long history of Western disinformation, from Vietnam and Central America to Iraq and Gaza, is rarely brought to the centre of public debate.
If we are serious about confronting disinformation, we have to start by recognising that Western governments and media institutions have shaped global narratives for decades. Their interventions do not only distort public understanding. They have repeatedly helped to create the conditions for large-scale violence. The genocide in Gaza and the misinformation that has surrounded it show how quickly Western states and their allies can construct a story that protects their interests and shields them from accountability.
South Africa needs a media culture with the confidence to question every source of power, including the West and the states it supports. This cannot happen while Western governments, Western media and Western-funded institutions are treated as if they stand outside the demands of scrutiny. A democratic media must serve the public. It must insist that all actors, without exception, are held to account.
