Was that journo added deliberately to White House bomb chat?

Wake up and smell the hamster

As you probably know, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeff Goldburg was added to a White House group on the app Signal discussing a bombing raid in Yemen, two hours before it took place. Goldburg sat in his car in a supermarket carpark, watching Yemen on Twitter to see if the bombs dropped - they did.

I have just been listening to the World at One on BBC Radio Four. Like many media outlets today, it gave a load of airtime to this story, with the production team somewhat unconvincingly reading out phrases from this supposedly top secret chat like “European freeloading - it’s pathetic”.

Was this a ‘deliberate mistake’?

I came across the PR strategy of the deliberate error only quite recently. In the world of PR, everyone is in pursuit of messaging that can go viral.

We live in an attention economy where people have a huge choice about where to put their eyeballs. It is as if you were playing a computer game in which your character is fuelled by attention - if you don’t get enough of it, your campaign will shrivel up and die.

The “covfeve” pot

So dragging those eyeballs onto your content is an increasingly competitive and desperate game. If you write a message with a creative spelling mistake, as Trump did back in 2017 when he tweeted “Wake up and smell the covfeve” - it can shoot right round the world and back.

Your opponents share it because they think they are making a fool of you - but they are giving you the attention you need.

This PR strategy could be called “the covfeve move” because it may have been a real mistake that sparked the idea because it went so viral. I remember the Edinburgh Fringe that year even had a Covfeve stall. The word has a Wikipedia entry and is in many dictionaries.

Strategic Lying

The covfeve move is close cousin to another successful political strategy of “strategic lying”. That is when you make an eye-catching claim - for example that leaving the EU would mean £350 million a week for the NHS. Whenever that claim is refuted, it is also repeated and that has the effect of adding weight to it in the minds of people who are not completely paying attention.

As the second Trump administration unfolds I have become increasingly sceptical of mistakes that play to their advantage.

“$50m in condoms were sent to Gaza”

Elon Musk claimed that “$50m in condoms were sent to Gaza” in the Middle East. He admitted his error after a journalist said they were in fact sent to Gaza in Mozambique to protect people against HIV.

But people sharing the error - even if they did so in the belief they were mocking Musk - added their efforts to spreading the message that DOGE is cutting overseas aid spending.

“$8 million on ‘making mice transgender”

In Donald Trump’s speech to Congress earlier this month he claimed that Joe Biden “spent $8 million on ‘making mice transgender’. That is not true and it is simply not credible that the highly educated team who worked on that speech made a genuine mistake.

Research involving sex hormones is carried out on mice in an effort to understand certain common conditions such as prostate cancer and polycystic ovary syndrome.

“Let’s make the Atlantic do our PR work”

Apart from lots of cheap insults aimed at Europe, the thread that was shared with Goldburg contains explanations of who the Houthis are and why the US is bombing them, all faithfully reproduced in the Atlantic and copied by news outlets across the world.

Like this: “At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account“I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

A few minutes later, the “Michael Waltz” account posted…“Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.”

Is it really credible that this conversation was happening so close to the actual bombing? Is it credible that Goldburg was added by mistake? Or was the thread potentially crafted and sent to Goldburg, long after the decision had been made and the bombing set up, with the idea that the Atlantic could be used to spread this messaging?

They may have reasoned that it was unlikely anyone at the magazine would share this information publicly in advance of the raid.

Freddie Starr “ate my hamster”

This strategy has its forbears in the PR stunt. PG Wodehouse novels often feature artists who stage “thefts” of their work to make it seem more valuable, or actresses who let exotic pets escape. The recent TV series of the Jilly Cooper book ‘Rivals’ has an out of work actor in a fake sextortion scandal.

This sort of thing has happened in real life too - the famous Sun headline of 1986 about the comedian Freddie Starr was an invention by his publicist Max Clifford,

I have no idea whether or not Goldburg was accidentally added to this top secret grop chat or whether it was a deliberate error - but I do think it is worth considering that it may have been intentional.