At moments when something substantive is about to happen, a bill tabled, a policy announced, a negotiation concluded, something loud appears. A scandal. An accusation. A question asked not for information, but for disruption.

The room turns. The cameras pivot. The substance disappears.

This is not a coincidence. This is a tactic.

Communication researchers call it strategic noise injection: the deliberate introduction of high emotion content at moments designed to hijack public attention. The goal is not to inform. The goal is to displace. When attention is filled with scandal, there is no room left for policy. The tactic is old. Bread and circuses. Manufactured controversy. Divide and distract. What is new is the speed. A single disruption can reach millions in minutes. Algorithms reward outrage over accuracy. The infrastructure of modern media has become, often unintentionally, infrastructure for strategic chaos.

The question to ask is never just “Is this true?” The question is: “Why now, and who benefits from the timing?”

Sometimes the beneficiary is domestic. Sometimes external. Sometimes the person delivering the disruption is the architect. Often, they are simply the instrument, useful, ambitious, asking no questions about why a story arrived on their desk at that particular moment.

The damage is not only to a single news cycle. It is to governance itself. Bills fail without scrutiny. Officials spend energy on defence rather than on delivery. Citizens disengage, exhausted by noise they sense is manipulated but cannot name.

This is why naming it matters.

Once a pattern is visible, it loses power. The noise becomes recognisable as noise. The signal patient, consequential, can be heard again.

So, the next time something loud appears at a critical moment, pause. Ask what it displaced. Ask who benefits.

The disruption often reveals more than the story itself.

*Dr Penny Uukunde is a Regional Development Economist. She writes in her own capacity.