A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories

I can't judge that by myself, but my external impression that if there is such thing as Western propaganda, it must be incredibly subtle and seamless, omnipotent and omnipresent to be real. Russian propaganda is not a thing you are not aware of as a Russian, it's just that it gets you emotional and grows a self-protection from external believes.

Many Russian medias start to claim "look at the others, they are not better" when confronted with a clear evidence of their lie. Even more, it grows a kind of double-speak: I have an impression that the majority of Russians understood who the Crimean "polite green men" were, but they were still supporting the official narrative in public.

I strongly advise against believing in "all these media are sides of the same coin", it's a well-known instrument of propaganda.

The idea that the media in the US is pure government propaganda. There is vigorous debate on innumerable issues. Think for instance of the climate change debate, or Middle East policy. In Russia you don't have that at all.

One of the basic tactics of pro-Russian propagandists is to not deny that the media in Russia is all propaganda, but try to persuade people that the same is true everywhere else.

The idea is that people won't know what ideas to trust, and will become cynical and apathetic. Once that happens Russia can simply expand unopposed.

I think the US has a slightly different problem, and it's much scarier than an external opponent alone.

http://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trump-and-the-walter-winc...

Absolute nonsense. There are occasional biases in the media and some level of circular information flow, but that is not even remotely comparable to the Russian shill factories and the absurd and abstruse stories created and pushed by Russian government and linked media. If you don't believe in the shill factories (which are indeed real), think of that: the Russian foreign minister going on TV to criticise a supposed rape of a young girl in Germany, days after it has been forcefully debunked and state media reporting it as a fact still. All with the intention to get people angry/scared of refugees, rile up the Russian community in Germany and overall sow distrust and conflict.

There's media manipulation, but it's more by private companies than the state. Which is definitely also troubling, but at least we get three or four different pushed narratives to choose from, instead of the true Russian reality distortion field.

Yes, it's different.

Ask former classmates or relatives who went into journalism. You may hear they are reluctant to pursue some stories because they don't have enough proof to protect themselves against powerful people the stories could be construed to be slandering, but it's almost unheard of for western journalists to be worried about being assassinated at the rate journalists are assassinated in Russia and the territories it dominates.

Watch talks given by Russian journalists before they were assassinated or after they fled. Even compare them to American journalists who died in uncertain circumstances, or whistle blowers like Edward Snowden.

It's an entirely different ballgame.

It only works when media have been monopolized. All media in Russia that have not enjoyed full government editorial control have debunked these stories quite spectacularly, but now they're almost non-existent.

This would never work in a media world with a Daily Show, for once.

It's hard for me to guess, maybe centralization of media makes it so attractive for governments to distort information. When there are at least two sides loudly confronting each other, the general picture gets much better.

A curious example: Ukrainian media channels are mostly funded by local oligarchs, but each of them has different agenda and interests, so they often fight each other, and that produces an external assessment of "partly-free" for Ukrainian media space.

That's actually a nice example of the very propaganda we are speaking about. It's hard to find someone farther removed from being a "nazi" than Parubiy. And yet, here this comment is, coming from a freshly registered account.

And the Azov insignia is just a stylized state emblem of Ukraine. Seeing swastikas everywhere is an important part of the approach, I guess.

I did not dismiss the notion that Russia produces propaganda; Russia produces propaganda.

Generally, I expect that those alleging wrong doing are not engaging in the same; and so it appears ironic when an exposed agent of state propaganda alleges that a state is engaging in propaganda. It's a, "well yes, and you would know" sort of humour.

Let those without sin cast the first stones, and all that.

It's not just a matter of the moral equivalence of propaganda, but of credibility. When a major media outlet is pushing a narrative that supports a government agenda, skepticism is warranted.

This is in references to illogical comparisons.

"How long does it take a soviet to earn enough to buy a car?" "Well, you lynch black people."

This is not that situation; it is one's state propaganda and another's state propaganda.

The NYT admits in this death notice for a spy that it was it manipulated by the CIA: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/us/austin-goodrich-spy-who...

In 1976 George HW Bush declared that the CIA wouldn't manipulate the media anymore but this NYT article from a couple months later shows the feds backpedaling on that promise, along with some specific examples of media manipulation from the time: http://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/27/archives/cia-will-keep-mor...

I haven't found any evidence of post-Cold War media manipulation of this sort, but I don't think American trust in the media has ever fully recovered since those days.

I have gotten the exact opposite impression. Maybe 25+ years ago when many Westerns on the hard left naively celebrated communism and the Soviet Union, but the only people who seem to sympathize with Russia are those on the alt-right who wish that the POTUS had the chutzpah of Putin when dealing with foreign adversaries.

It would be fair if the source of the allegations wasn't likewise tainted.

Russia engages in propaganda, and this is abundantly obvious; it would be nice if those claiming such were forward and honest about their own ethical deviancies and the actions of their own state. It is tiresome to hear but one side of the concern from the media.

No it doesn't, and in a scientific setting this approach would suffice. But in a social and political setting, implicature is also relevant. At the very least, there is an undeniable irony about the article.

It isn't even necessary here. The "propaganda" the article opens with can be rephrased as this: some people in the Swedish government wanted something controversial, and social media i.e. their citizens talking to each other reflected the usual mishmash of true, half true and not true things people often believe about more or less anything controversial.

However, because this time the controversial thing was to do with NATO, it's obviously all the Russian's fault. They have no evidence, and nobody is willing to put their name to such a claim (it's all "analysts"), but no matter, it's definitely the Russians.

Besides, whose word do we have that these beliefs were false? The defence minister!

From the WSJ we learn this: "Swedish lawmakers formally backed an agreement Wednesday that allows the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to more easily operate on Swedish territory during training or in the event of a conflict or other crisis."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/sweden-ratifies-nato-cooperation...

That doesn't sound so very different from the supposedly false claim that "NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval". thelocal.se says:

"Originally signed in September 2014, the HNSA with Nato would allow the alliance to transport helicopters, aircraft and ships across Swedish territory, but only upon Sweden’s invitation.

As the agreement involves changes to Swedish law in order to give Nato personnel privileges and immunities with regards to areas like tax and custom rules, it required parliamentary ratification."

http://www.thelocal.se/20160525/sweden-votes-yes-to-controve...

It's only a tiny step from that description (NATO soldiers have immunity from some areas of law) to the one apparently circulating (NATO soldiers have immunity in some other areas). Does this really require the invocation of Russian propaganda, or the Facebook telephone game sufficient?

True, one must not only remember differences in kind but also in degree, though frankly the difference between Russia and the US is historically one of kind, though certainly not to the degree that the Cold War high school history books would suggest.

It's entirely possible to be opposed both to US and Russia foreign interventions. And yet you chose to presume the opposite about berntb post. Why is that?

This was a coherent argument until it got to the "shameless media who attack Donald Trump on each word he spells" and then cited RT about Syria.

The last ones in Europe that made a habit to invade countries and appropriate area were Hitler and Stalin. So whom else could I compare with?

Are you willing to condemn Putin for doing similar invasions and annexations..?

As a non-American who follows US politics closely, the NYT might as well be run by the US Government: as far as I can tell the worldviews of the people who run the NYT are identical to those who run the USA and so it's not surprising that it's so often viewed as a mouthpiece. This specific story being a case in point.

Just look at how they handled GWB's "War on Terror", or NSA revelations etc. They just sat on them, despite how newsworthy they were. Too often it was foreign media that broke the stories.

Here is a different take on the subject tptacek.

It is unlikely that NYT is ordered to produce stories according to the current administration's liking. Broadly in the West we don't go in for that sort of thing and one hopes we never will.

We don't like being told what to think. The trouble though, is that all ideas have to come from somewhere.

The power of Western style propaganda is that the government does not have to orchestrate it as intensely as in autocracies. It happens automatically because they live and breathe the same air. The relationship is more symbiotic.

If you have real power, you can afford not to be petty. That is the same deal as with the Joker in the medieval court with the King. A government official only kills journalists were they a real threat to his power. If you punish people for a small degree of insolence it is because you are not secure in your power and any provocation could be used to coordinate an attack to displace you. Being 'above' that is a tacit demonstration of power and stability (a good thing!).

What is the practical difference between the information printed by the New York Times and the opinions of the State Department?

I cannot think of any. Any divisions I see are also expressed within the government itself. So they must be coordinated. But is it really from government to media?

The neo-reactionary take is basically the exact reverse of this:

"The New York Times is not in fact an instrument of the US Government."

That's not as whack-a-doodle as it at first sounds. The New York Times is the mouth of a much larger network they refer to as the Cathedral, just as Christianity is not just the physical Vatican City.

This is not necessarily an 'evil' to vanquish, but it does mean if the NYT is misguided on some subject, then it invariably also means the government too is running into the same dead end.

The long and short of it is that the press and the government sup from the same pool of propaganda while they generate it, they believe in their own manufactures. I hope this makes sense to you.

Correct. The NYT is an instrument of the Democrat party, just as Fox News is an instrument of the GOP. Journalism has abandoned the pretense of impartiality, and it is especially notable during this election cycle.