Guy Hatchard: The Web of Government-Backed Confusion

Two days ago I wrote that last year’s government Covid advice about disinformation, when read today in the light of recently published science, was itself disinformation. That night I watched Web of Chaos, an hour-long TVNZ government-funded documentary compiled with the help of main players from our very own Disinformation Project.

Web of Chaos is deeply anti-intellectual, anti-religious, against medical choice, and politically biased. Is this just a lone wolf director giving us his opinion? No. It is funded propaganda. As such, it is part of a wide-ranging on-going government campaign to control the New Zealand public narrative.

Karl du Fresne: The pleasure of having one's prejudices confirmed

I forced myself to watch Web of Chaos, Tuesday night’s state-funded TVNZ documentary that promised “a deep dive into the world of disinformation”.
It’s sad that I should regard it as a chore to watch something I helped to pay for, but that’s the way it is. I wanted to satisfy myself that Web of Chaos was exactly what I expected, and so it turned out. There are few things more richly satisfying than having one’s prejudices confirmed.

The first clue was in the name of the director: Justin Pemberton. I vaguely recalled the name from somewhere else, and it soon came to me. Pemberton made Capital in the 21st Century, which I described in 2019 as a masterpiece of the propagandist’s art.

I wrote then that “The film uses every trick in the documentary-maker’s book to dramatise its message, which is that contemporary capitalism is overwhelmingly rigged in favour of the ultra-rich and basically rotten to the core”.