EU aims to parry Kremlin message
Media machine pushes Russian worldview west
MOSCOW — Larry King’s back on the air, beaming his high-octane brand of talk to households around the world. Where can you catch him? Kremlin-backed TV.
Moscow wants you to pay better attention to what it’s saying, and to better reach your eyes and ears it’s spending around a halfbillion dollars a year and carrying top-name talent like King and former governor and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura.
Worried that the Russian message is getting through, Western countries are pushing back, including with a proposed “action plan” that European Union leaders have been discussing.
As relations with the U.S. and some of its allies become more publicly fractious and at times openly hostile, Russia’s government has assembled a gigantic media machine not only for its own people, but to target a foreign audience from Warsaw to Washington with news items like these:
“CIA Director Admits: US Foreign Policy Causes Terrorism”
“US wants to make Ukraine a base to attack Russia”
“NATO breaks treaty to establish permanent forces in Baltic”
The Kremlin’s ultimate goal, President Vladimir Putin has said, is “to try to break the monopoly of Anglo-Saxon media over the global flows of information.” To that end, and in spite of the pounding Russia’s economy is taking from the slump in the price of oil and the West’s Ukraine-related sanctions, government funding for RT has grown by 30 percent since 2014, to the ruble equivalent of $289 million.
Western governments have disseminated their own brand of news and information for years, as has Russia. The United States, Western European countries and some Latin American and Asian ones sponsor media that broadcast their particular worldviews around the globe.
What sets the new Russian effort apart, experts say, is how comprehensive, sophisticated and unrelenting it is.
“The West is playing 19th-century Victorian boxing while Russia is using karate,” said Ben Nimmo, a former NATO press officer who writes about security issues.
On the shows carried by the Russian governmentfinanced, English-language television channel RT, King does the same thing that made him a legend on CNN: interviewing newsmakers, showbiz figures and “celebrities” of all calibers.
Themes chosen by Ventura, a former Navy SEAL and one-term governor of Minnesota, are typically harder-edged. RT shows with Ventura in June featured “torture whistleblower” John Kiriakou, quoted as saying the CIA “is run by lunatics,” and scrutinized the U.S. Federal Reserve, dubbed an “illegal institution” in an RT promo.
RT management did not respond to Associated Press requests for interviews, and AP got no response to requests through the station for comment from King and Ventura.
On her blog, RT Editor- in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has said she is determined to offer overseas audiences an alternative view on events, and is driven by love for Russia.
“I realize why I keep working at a channel which is alone facing thousands, tens of thousands of Western media outlets, telling the other side of the story, finding itself in the cross-hairs of those media and struggling to fend off their attacks. Because it’s my Motherland,” she wrote.
The Associated Press provides text, photos and raw video footage to RT, and its commercial arm provides production services to some RT shows.
In the eyes of Lt. Col. Simon West, a British Army specialist in strategic communications, RT’s programming lineup is a canny move designed to achieve both audience share and trust.
Polish parliament member Witold Waszcyzkowski said it’s part of a strategy that leaves many viewers unaware that they have tuned in to a Kremlin-bank rolled information source, since the typical RT newscaster “sounds like your neighbor.”
Indeed, in the view of many Western analysts, Moscow’s new brand of information for export has dropped the Soviet-era pretension that the Russians were building a workers’ paradise, and appears focused on discrediting U.S. and European leaders and institutions in the eyes of their own citizens.
Britain’s ambassador to NATO told AP, Russian media may not be trying to persuade foreign publics, but to confuse them.
“They aren’t concerned to prove they are right, but to muddy the information space so much that it’s hard to get the truth through,” Sir Adam Thomson said.