Document:Novara Media and the Integrity Initiative

A critical review of Novara Media and their unlikely connections to the Integrity Initiative

 article  by Phil Bevin

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Subjects: Novara Media, Integrity Initiative, Aaron Bastani, Anne Applebaum, Ben Judah
Source: Patreon (Link)

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Novara Media and the Integrity Initiative

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When I began investigating the UK's supposedly “adversarial”, “independent” media, it was to understand their tendency to be timid in circumstances when we might expect them to be strong, at times when strong counterpoints were needed most.

Previously, my research revealed that the likes of Novara Media are not so much alternatives to the mainstream as extensions of it, which serve to gatekeep what is generally considered as legitimate sub-mainstream journalistic discourse. The term that describes these entities - mostly private corporations – best was coined by Aaron Bastani’s own PhD supervisor Andrew Chadwick in his actually very good book: The Hybrid Media System]. The term is of course “hybrid media”, which Bastani himself applied correctly to the role of his friend and Novara Media contributor Owen Jones.

More concerning than this gatekeeping role though, is my discovery of Novara Media links to individuals and organisations that are known component parts of the so-called “deep state”, including the infamous “Integrity Initiative”.

Aaron Bastani’s interview with Anne Applebaum, published on 8 September 2024 helps us to see how extensively the Anglo-American national security state, most specifically the Integrity Initiative and aligned networks, has penetrated via the “alternative media” space.

There is a reason that Aaron Bastani interviewed Applebaum and nodded in agreement throughout most of his interview with her. Equally, there must be a reason Anne Applebaum chose the supposedly alternative Novara Media as the vehicle for her message, which was at no point seriously challenged during her interview with Bastani.

A big fish in the transatlantic pond: who is Anne Applebaum?

According to the blurb on her website,

“Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute.

She was a Washington Post columnist for more than fifteen years and a member of the editorial board. She has also worked as the Foreign and Deputy Editor of the Spectator magazine in London, and as a columnist at Slate as well as the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs.”

In addition to her journalism, Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). CFR describes itself as follows:

“The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries. Founded in 1921, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.”

However, the truth is rather murkier.

According to Wikispooks,

“the Council on Foreign Relations is a long established deep state milieu. Although perhaps the most public of all such groups, it is nevertheless highly influential within the US deep state and is often mentioned in conjunction with the Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission. Its influence may extend to de facto control of the US State Department.[1]”

The true nature of the CFR is best explained through an account of its origins.

According to Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley – an associate of the Round Table Movement, and a mentor of Bill Clinton, who claimed Quigley’s work “clarified” his “calling” – the Council on Foreign relations was established as part of a network of institutions designed to lobby for the aims and objectives of the British imperial elite:

“As governor general and high commissioner in South Africa, in the period 1897-1905 [Lord Alfred] Milner [an associate of Cecil Rhodes and organiser of the Round Table Movement] recruited a group of young men, Chiefly from Oxford and Toynbee Hall, to assist him in organising his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and finance and became the dominant influence in British imperial affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner’s Kindergarten until 1910 and largely supported by Abe Bailey’s money. In 1919, they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were sir Abe Bailey and the [ MI6 associated ] Astor family (owners of the Times). Similar institutes as of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations), 132.”

These Round Table institutions helped to ensure that countries within the British Empire’s sphere of economic influence and governance (yes, this included the United States) pursued the British Empire’s strategic foreign policy interests. As intended, they quickly developed into centres of coordination and oversight supported by British established state intelligence infrastructures, such as the CIA in the United States, which ensured and continue to ensure that officials toe the correct line. Financed by a network of international Anglophile oligarchs holding significant leverage within the international foreign exchange markets, these institutions are not simply academic “think tanks” but are a part of the Empire’s core infrastructural nerve centre. They play an important role in influencing foreign policy outside of democratic structures, ensuring continuity of governance regardless of domestic electoral outcomes. Policy formation is therefore informalised and the preserve of discreet personal and professional networks, as opposed to accountable democratic decision-making. The Round Table hubs are probably amongst the key loci of decision-making and cross-coordination in the empire, they ensure that, while there is a limited amount of leeway within imperial states’ domestic policy-making, foreign policy continues to follow transatlantic – i.e., British –objectives.

Anne Applebaum is associated with several of these “deep” institutions, including acting as an Expert for the National Endowment for Democracy, which is often regarded as a CIA intermediary and she reportedly a member of the “inner core” of the MI6 anti Russia propaganda operation known as the Integrity Initiative, whose official purpose was to counter “Russia disinformation”.

As I explained in a previous piece, which briefly discussed leaks that exposed the true nature of the operation, “rather than simply countering “Russian disinformation”, the Integrity Initiative distributes its own briefings to politicians and media organisations”.

From leaked documents, including a 2016 document titled “Combatting Russian Disinformation” we know that the Integrity Initiative characterises its own operations and strategy as follows:

“As open democracies cannot undertake massive propaganda efforts and we believe that this is in any case an inefficient way to promote ideas, the optimal counter-strategy should take a smarter approach: choosing credibility over dubiousness, accuracy over distortion, facts over falsehoods, subtlety over ham-handedness, independence over partiality, both for content and for the platforms on which this content should be published. Sniping and chirurgical strikes instead of carpet-bombing. This being said, this implementation of this sniping approach should be as systematic as the Russian one is.

This is where we come in: deploying a multi-pronged strategy to

• investigate sources of disinformation, perform threat assessment, and identify opportunities to combat false narratives

• debunk fake news and black PR operations

• discredit and intimidate the platforms broadcasting fake news

• promote democratic principles and criticize the Russian illiberal model in the public debate, online

This plan should be implemented in every targeted country and language, including Russian.”

The Integrity Initiative is therefore a very extensive anti Russia propaganda operation and we know who its leaders are. Again, according to Wikispooks:

“The Inner Core Cluster of the Integrity Initiative was leaked in the first Integrity Initiative Leak. As of 2022 its operational function within the group remains uncertain although its importance is suggested by the fact that several of its members have senior positions in groups believed to lie close to the heart of the UK Deep state such as NATO, Chatham House and RUSI.”

Anne Applebaum is a member of this “Inner Core”.

Applebaum’s membership of these powerful organisations, and her place at the heart of one of them, means that she is no simple political hack but an important player within the Anglo-American deep state. It is hard to imagine a small, genuinely independent news outlet having the reach or the network to net a big fish like Applebaum, so how did a nominally “alternative” relative media minnow like Novara Media manage to reel her in for interview?

Novara Media and the Integrity Initiative

As it turns out, Novara Media swims in the same waters as Applebaum, and others within, or close to, the Integrity Initiative school.

The most obvious of these links is former Novara Media contributor Paul Mason, whose conversations with MI6 officer and Integrity Initiative “inner core” member Andy Pryce –who was, at the time, heading up the DCMS Counter-Disinformation Unit – were published by the Grayzone in June 2022. According to the Grayzone, in this correspondence, Mason expressed support for Pryce’s plan for a state-backed propaganda operation pitched as an “International Information Brigade” . The Grayzone described this as “a pro-Ukraine propaganda shop backed by NATO states “through cutouts” ”.

At the time, Novara Media distanced itself from Mason, even ridiculing him as “paranoid”.

Interestingly, Novara Media was also included by Mason in what the Grayzone described as

“the barely coherent, racially-tinged chart connected the Russian government, Russian state broadcaster RT, the People’s Republic of China, and Beijing-based tech millionaire-financier Roy Singham to the “Muslim Community,” “Young Networked Left” and “Black Community” through a series of leftist outfits and UK Labour figures”.

The idea that Novara Media is or ever was part of a Russian disinformation network targeted at the UK left is obviously nonsense, as even a cursory glance at their content demonstrates.

Novara Media’s publications on Russia actually follow the Integrity Initiative’s representation of Russia as “illiberal”, a term used in the article “Is Russia Now Fascist?” by Volodya Vagner, published in April 2022. Around the same time as Mason’s correspondence with Pryce was taking place.

In February 2022, Novara Media even published an interview with Michael Colborne – a journalist for Integrity Initiative partners and NED funding recipients Bellingcat, apparently before Mason’s correspondence with Pryce in April of that year. This article criticised “Russia’s propaganda machine” in terms that closely resemble Integrity Initiative rhetoric. This is hardly the stuff of pro-Russian propaganda! Rather, it is wholly in line with the framing and terminology purveyed by the Integrity Initiative.

Given Pryce’s role within the Integrity Initiative “Inner Core”, it seems very likely that his discussions with Mason were related to that project, but Mason himself may not have been aware of this. Notably, Pryce’s discussions with Mason appear not to be being undertaken as part of the Integrity Initiative umbrella, suggesting that, as is par-for-the-course in such operations, Mason was not briefed on the full scope of Pryce’s activities.

Whatever the truth behind Mason’s error regarding Novara Media’s role in relation to Russia “disinformation”, the media organisation’s connection to the Integrity Initiative is now clear.

In terms of the media group’s links to the Integrity Initiative, Mason is not an isolated case but part of a trend, the most recent and explicit example of which is Bastani’s sit-down interview with Anne Applebaum. I have already mentioned Novara Media’s collaboration with Integrity Initiative partner and NED funding recipient Bellingcat. But there are other important connections, too. A notable one is apparent Integrity Initiative asset Ben Judah, who was named by Integrity Initiative boss Chris Donnelly himself in a document revealed through December 2018’s Integrity Initiative Leak 3 as someone who would circulate the operation’s “product” if requested.

Judah is a journalist and “think tanker,” who spent part of his early career working for the European Council on Foreign Relations, which, as its name suggests, was established in 2007 with the intention of it becoming the equivalent organisation to the United States’ Council on Foreign Relations and the UK’s Chatham House for EU countries; it has significant overlaps with the Integrity Initiative.

In a 2018 article for the Financial Times, Judah suggested that he had been aware of Bastani since around 2011 and came to know of him through “other activists I knew from UK Uncut, the anti-austerity protest network.”

It was while studying that Bastani participated in UK Uncut and also met Owen Jones and Paul Mason, who he interviewed.

In 2022 Novara media published a series of articles by Ben Judah’s friend and collaborator James Schneider, based on Schneider’s book, Our Bloc, which Judah had endorsed as “Brilliant” (pictured, as I understand that the tweet was deleted some time ago). The book promotes the climate emergency agenda and the activism of Just Stop Oil, in which Schneider was involved from and early stage. Judah’s endorsement of this perspective is probably not coincidental, as in her interview with Novara Media, Applebaum – a fellow Integrity Initiative participant – suggested climate policy was a means of undermining the growing power of “dictatorships” like Putin’s Russia. Talking about the possible alliances between the (neo)liberal left and right in western societies against the emergent alliance of “dictatorships”. Applebaum notes:

“there's a pact to be made with greens and people who are interested in climate change as well because the world's autocracies notably Russia and Iran and Venezuela you know these are also Petro States you know all of them are – you know – a lot of the money that that subsidizes autocratic regimes comes from fossil fuels.”

And, of course, Novara Media has reported consistently positively on the activities of Just Stop Oil, which has its own links to the NGO intelligence complex via its funder, the Climate Emergency Fund.

Last but not least, and again touched upon earlier, is Bastani’s PhD supervisor Andrew Chadwick, who started the New Political Communications Unit at which Bastani undertook his PhD thesis from 2010. As I explained in my first article on Novara Media, this unit received funding from MI5 in 2009. More recently, Chadwick participated in the UK Government’s Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, which ran for six months until its conclusion in June 2021.” This appears to have been the precursor to MI6 officer Andy Pryce’s Counter-Disinformation Unit. Since then, Chadwick has served as an advisor to the Clean up the Internet Campaign, alongside academic and information warfare expert Emma Briant, who was included in Paul Mason’s email Exchange with Andy Pryce, where Mason complained about “rogue academics” and pro-Russia “Bucha denialists”.

This evidence of Novara’s place within a network of influencers operating within the orbit of the Integrity Initiative, of which the interview with Applebaum is only the latest example, heavily suggests that Novara Media was and perhaps is still one of the Integrity Initiative’s “product” disseminators, as does their content on Russia, which mostly reflects Integrity Initiative talking points.

Considering their shared milieu, it is not surprising that Bastani was able to get in touch with Applebaum. Nor is it surprising that she felt confident enough that she wouldn’t be roughly treated to grant Novara Media their interview.

The significance of Novara Media’s Interview with Anne Applebaum

Applebaum’s role in the Integrity Initiative has been clear to anyone who has cared to look since the first Integrity Initiative leak in 2018. Bastani himself published an article on the subject, titled Undermining Democracy, Not Defending It: The ‘Integrity Initiative’ is Everything That’s Wrong With British Foreign Policy. It is therefore, to my mind, implausible for Novara Media’s journalists and editors, most particularly Bastani himself, to have been unaware of Applebaum’s role in the Integrity Initiative. And yet Bastani gave her a relatively uncritical platform from which to explain and justify her agenda.

Also important is the fact that, during their interview, Bastani does not challenge Applebaum on any significant points and in fact agrees with much of her general framing. Applebaum’s broad premise is that “dictatorships”, such as Communist China, Nationalist Russia, Theocratic Iran, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela and North Korea” have, despite the ideological differences, begun cooperating to advance shared interests. Of these supposed shared interests, Applebaum emphasises what she considers to be their oppressive antidemocratic tendencies, or, in her words, “common tactics of oppression against dissidents”. She elaborates:

“The one thing that unifies them is their dislike of us, and by us I mean you [Bastani] and me and most people listening to your programme. People who believe in – it’s not even about democracy – liberal society: checks and balances, transparency, the rule of law, because those ideas threaten their particular form of power and also those ideas are used by their opposition movements, whether it’s the Iranian women’s movement, whether it’s the Hong Kong democratic movement or whether it’s the Navalny movement in Russia those are the ideas that they espouse and so those are the ideas wherever they are, whether it’s in side their own countries or around the world.”

While Bastani gingerly suggests that a multipolar world might not be such a terrible idea, and makes some effort to emphasise the role of the West in creating the conditions for the rise of these “dictatorships”, he does nothing to push back against her central premise of a world divided between good democracies and bad dictatorships or her characterisation of the countries she describes as “dictatorships”, a framing that is at best questionable. Instead, Bastani joins Applebaum in emphasising Putin’s “anti-liberalism”.

As is evident from Bastani’s apparent agreement with Applebaum’s basic underlying thesis, the interview is not a grilling, through which Applebaum’s views are seriously contested but a soap-box from which she is mostly given free reign to opine about anti-Western “autocracies”, and push the Integrity Initiative perspective to Novara Media’s audience at length.

Just as troublingly, even though it is extremely unlikely that Bastani is unaware of Applebaum’s role as member of the Integrity Initiative’s Inner Core, he did not challenge Applebaum on this in the interview or even ask her about it once.

The Integrity Initiative has now been formally closed down. That said, the fact that its (former?) participants are still disseminating propaganda “product” featuring its talking points – even Bastani acknowledges in their mostly cosy conversation that Applebaum’s book, which she is currently promoting, is a “polemic” – through intermediary outlets or “cutouts” like Novara Media suggests that the scope of the Integrity Initiative was wider than the specific individuals and groups explicitly identified in the documents leaked between 2018 and 2019. Moreover, the ongoing relationship between Integrity Initiative Inner Core members and their media intermediaries, such as Novara Media in this case, suggests that the Integrity Initiative, or parts of the operation, are still active in some form and operating through supposedly independent adversarial media organisations. Novara Media is just one example of what is probably a much wider project to manufacture consent for the empire amongst “progressives”.