Reader NG asks a crucial question:
How is a consensual bias arrived at? I don’t have the answer but what are your thoughts? Did a whole lot of folks wake up one morning and decide that the Ukraine would now be referred to as a “former soviet vassal state”?
This is a great question. A great, great, REALLY GREAT question. What many people don’t realize is that the Kremlin employs an army of propaganda workers who – for years and years – go from one website to another and so on and so forth, repeating these same ideas, many many times, and then repeating them again. There are specific set phrases that they repeat, copy-paste, repeat some more. Gradually, after you encounter these set phrases several times in different contexts, you just automatically adopt them.
This all works on the level of basic language acquisition: first, the passive knowledge is created; then, it becomes active through repeated use.
One example is the expression “sphere of influence.” Putin is a great admirer of Stalin, and he came up with this philosophy that the two global superpowers (Russia and the US) should have their spheres of influence, just like Stalin agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt during WWII. Ten, fifteen years ago the whole thing sounded completely bizarre. Russia was needing American handouts to survive, it was barely managing to handle day-to-day operations, what sphere of influence could it hope to have?
But the Kremlinbots kept working, copy-pasting their “sphere of influence” argument time and again, and what do you think? Russia is doing worse than ever by every measure, yet the belief that “Russia deserves to have its own sphere of influence” has colonized the minds of an enormous number of American reporters and even professors of Slavic Studies. And then you see these fools passionately defend the idea of “the spheres” because they heard it several times and, for them, this is a prompt to accept it as their own.
Never underestimate people’s willingness to be manipulated. There is so much that new technologies are permitting us to do in terms of propaganda, and so very few folks are actually making use of these opportunities.
Clarissa's Blog 
“What many people don’t realize is that the Kremlin employs an army of propaganda workers who – for years and years – go from one website to another and so on and so forth …”
How the whole “sphere of influence” thing works on American readers is that it meshes with the American idea of the Monroe Doctrine.
The principle that keeps the Venezuelans from claiming most of the maritime rights in the Caribbean Sea, for instance, because there’s a larger force available to keep the peace in the region, is being used to sell Americans on the idea that Russian tanks arrive for the purpose of peace and unity within the region.
If you’d like to contribute your own catchphrase to this, I suggest doing as the Finns did with Molotov cocktails and Molotov bread baskets, but do be careful with this: your turn of phrase might by accident be something that Americans find acceptable.
I strongly suspect why the Kremlinbots aren’t very good at their work is that the people aren’t being paid enough to care — they’re being paid between the amount where they’d have to justify to themselves the taking of “chump change” and the amount where they’d fully agree to being co-opted by their masters. Hence they’re easy to spot, easy to document, and quite frequently easy to profile as individual actors being paid by the Kremlin.
This tends to mesh with your statements that the Russians don’t really have the funds to conduct warfare of an ordinary nature, and thus they need Kremlinbots to act as a rear guard action through cut-rate propaganda …
Another more cynical take on this is that Americans are agreeing in principle to echoes of the Monroe Doctrine out of laziness: it’s easier to let someone else do the heavy lifting, especially when it’s being done on another continent.
[points out to the Kremlinbots that you are not competent enough to be Secret Squirrels, and we do know who you are …]
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The Russians are winning the propaganda war, though. And in the age of the technological revolution, that’s the only thing that counts.
Americans, what’s the use of having invented the Internet if you can’t put it to work for you?
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