Media cover-up in a state where the camera lies
LIES fed to the Russian people by the Putin-controlled state media are helping to fuel the Ukraine war, a communications expert claims today.
Russia is being fed a daily menu of untruths about the conflict that knows no bounds. We can reveal one report said a beauty blogger daubed in blood was paraded as a fake victim at a bombed Ukrainian maternity hospital.
Another showed charred Russian bodies after a “Ukrainian terror attack” – that a trusted website later revealed had been taken from a morgue and blown up.
Russia has also been accused of stockpiling the bodies of dead Ukrainians to stage a false flag attack at Chernobyl.
News outlets claim the rouble is not in freefall – and one Russian journalist compared Ukraine’s
Jewish president Volodymyr
Zelensky to Hitler. A TV station reported he was a drug addict.
Political communications expert
Joanna Szostek says she has been horrified by the lies from Russian
TV stations and newspapers.
Szostek, who has lived in both
Russia and Ukraine and revealed the latest bizarre claims, said: “It makes me angry. It’s a war fuelled by lies. People at the top have created this alternative reality for themselves. They swallow too much of their own propaganda.
“The term de-Nazification is everywhere and what we are seeing is the de-humanising of
Ukraine.” Szostek says most
Russians are duped by the misreporting. She said: “The majority will just see and believe what the state says. But there is a minority, generally younger people on the internet, not so taken in by the lies.” But they can pay a price for speaking out.
Nadya Tolokonnikova of anti-establishment rock group Pussy Riot said friends had ended up in jail after protesting against what the state insists is a “special operation”.
Szostek, who lectures at Glasgow University, added: “Right now you can get a prison term for referring to Ukraine as a war. There have been incidents of journalists being killed. But this parallel reality will crack because the state media can’t hide empty shelves. The economic collapse will break the propaganda war.”
Majority will just believe what the state says