The former head of the BBC News World Service is ringing an alarm bell about Putin’s pet propaganda network, Russia Today. The Guardian reports: “As the World Service has pared back, Russia Today has expanded spectacularly. The network, which broadcasts a pro-Kremlin interpretation of world events in English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian, launched a UK-focused channel based in Millbank, central London, recently and plans to launch German and French channels next year. Putin will next year increase its global budget by 40% to 15.38bn roubles (£183m), up from 11.87bn roubles this year. The channel boasts of a worldwide reach of 700 million – while never disclosing the actual size of its audience – after expanding its Spanish service across South America.
Well, color me unsurprised. For months, all I’ve been hearing from normal, well-meaning people is “separatists in Ukraine,” “there is a civil war going on in Ukraine,” and “I don’t support Putin but.” These poor folks have no idea that what they are so faithfully reproducing is Putin’s propaganda. They actually get upset when I ask them why they love Putin so much.
It would be great if people tried to trace the origin of these implanted beliefs in their own minds. If you are so convinced there are separatists in Ukraine without ever talking to a single Ukrainian and barely knowing where the country is located, how did the word “separatists” come into your mind? Did you read it or hear it on TV? And how do you know that the journalist who first wrote or said it has not been paid to do so by Putin’s agents or (which is much more likely) isn’t a lazy arm-chair loser who is reluctant to do the work and is very easily fed this information by those who are paid to do so?
A week doesn’t pass (well, now it does because I’m on vacation but before that it didn’t) without me meeting a seemingly reasonable academic who regales me with a speech that I have already heard on Russian TV. When I gently point out that this is an almost verbatim translation of Putin’s propaganda of the week, my interlocutor gets upset and always – and I mean absolutely without exception – responds, “Of course, I don’t support Putin but you’ve got to agree that he has reason to be upset with the West.” I have no idea who first came up with this line or how much money went into implanting it in so many people’s heads, but let me tell you, it’s creepy when one person after another delivers it with robotic precision.
These days, it’s very easy to spread propaganda. Many people don’t have a developed capacity to think. What they consider thoughts are actually snippets of things they saw on Facebook, heard on the radio, glimpsed in the check-out line at the grocery store. Take any idea, no matter how outrageous it is, repeat it enough times and through enough media, and you will soon hear people repeat it verbatim as if it were something they came up with on their own.
Clarissa's Blog 
You may be interested in reading Sharyl Attkisson’s book Stonewalled. Although she does not deal with the Russian media, she presents a compelling case for an argument that the American “legitimate news media” suffer from deficiencies similar to those you ascribe to RT. She also explains why the American media behave as they do.
LikeLike
I managed to wean people in my life off of RT by pointing out a very glaring omission in one of their pieces. RT was really keen on covering the Idle No More movement back when it was active, and they posted a couple of articles/interviews with Indigenous people, and talked about how Russia had never colonized Native Americans before, unlike those big bad Western Europeans. I got a little snippy about it, so I just pulled a map of Alaska up on my phone and said “What, this doesn’t count?”
Then I learned that most Americans actually don’t remember from 7th grade history that the U.S purchased Alaska from Russia, so…
LikeLike
As for this comment:
“These days, it’s very easy to spread propaganda. Many people don’t have a developed capacity to think. What they consider thoughts are actually snippets of things they saw on Facebook, heard on the radio, glimpsed in the check-out line at the grocery store. Take any idea, no matter how outrageous it is, repeat it enough times and through enough media, and you will soon hear people repeat it verbatim as if it were something they came up with on their own.”
How dare you program my mind like this by informing me of something negative? Now ;look at what you made me go and do. I’m going to downvote everything you say from now on.
LikeLike
“How dare you program my mind like this by informing me of something negative? Now ;look at what you made me go and do. I’m going to downvote everything you say from now on.”
LikeLike
You wait until someone sets about programming YOUR mind and see how you like it. That’s gotta hurt.
LikeLike
Nobody can stand above ideology. It has an effect in all of us. But at least we can strive for a little distance from it.
LikeLike
Actually, with shamanic destruction, you don’t get to stand so much “outside of” ideology, but under it. You dissove everything and it becomes a flux. Or like melted candle wax. That’s why so many people who go this deep and become shamans even lose their gender, at least temporarily. It all becomes melted candle wax.
Then, after that one’s sense of reality has to be rebuilt.
A real source of shamanic insight comes from this capacity to realize that how one had been previously living had been under the force of ideology — that is, in a sort of hypnotic state.
To know this, from experience, is to have the basis to stand outside of ideology and to notice the extent to which others are still susceptible to ideology.
It’s not that standing outside of ideology puts one in a superior position, per se. To have moved out from its hypnotic control might mean one cannot perform the same roles in the same ways anymore. What if one’s capacity to earn money was dependent on staying under the hypnotic sway?
Shamanism is definitely not the path to moral superiority, but to self-knowledge. It’s a very painful means to this, as well, because nobody likes to be dissolved into so much melted candle wax. The rebuilding stage can be hard. But what one does get, eventually, is an enormous capacity to distance oneself from ideology. Eventually.
LikeLike
Both of you need to watch this …
🙂
LikeLike
It’s not all dross at RT, but you have to look at specific feature programmes for something different …
Edward Harrison of the Credit Writedowns blog produces a show with Erin Ade called “Boom.Bu$t”. If you’re in finance, you’d mostly see the programme as entertaining rather than informative, but for most people there’s a reasonable transfer of information.
Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert’s “The Keiser Report” can be amusing at times — Max is crazier than a rat trapped in a portaloo, and some of his guests are even crazier, but there are a few interesting guests who also provide reasonably good information.
Russell Brand, however, was not one of them. 🙂
“The Underground” isn’t horrible if you have a British RT feed, and “Technology Update” that replaces it on the American RT feed is also not horrible.
However, it’s when RT gets away from finance, technology, and hard subjects that it resembles being dragged through a mud pit by an angry pig.
Sometimes that’s entertaining for all of the right wrong reasons.
Most of the time, however, it’s horrid background noise.
LikeLike
To preserve the success of his propaganda inside Russia:
The Russian president has ordered a freeze on vodka prices amid an escalating economic crisis.
During a meeting Putin told government officials that high prices were encouraging the production of bootleg spirits which can be lethal.
http://www.euronews.com/2014/12/25/putin-orders-freeze-on-vodka-prices/
LikeLike
“The Russian president has ordered a freeze on vodka prices amid an escalating economic crisis.
During a meeting Putin told government officials that high prices were encouraging the production of bootleg spirits which can be lethal.”
LikeLike
“… stop queuing for vodka and should start queuing for admission to ice-skating rinks …”
Why does this idea seem very un-Russian …
MOAR VODKA MOAR BUTTER MOAR GUNS
[ahem] 🙂
BTW, is that Stolichnaya I saw on your Thanksgiving table still actually made in Russia? I thought the company relocated to Luxembourg … 🙂
LikeLike
No, we didn’t travel back to Russia to stand in line for this vodka. 🙂 Actually, I have no idea why anybody in Russia should stand in line for anything, let alone vodka. It’s a capitalist country now. There are more goods than anybody can consume .
LikeLike