42
Katie Zavadski, ‘‘Putin’s Propaganda TV Lies About Its Popularity
The Daily Beast, Sept.
17, 2015. Matthew Bodner et al., Welcome to The Machine Inside the Secretive World of RT
The Moscow Times, June 1, 2017.
227
Ibid. 228
Ibid. 229
Ibid. 230
Max Greenwood, Russian Radio Takes Over Local DC station
The Hill, June 30, 2017. Comparing Russian and American government propaganda
Meduza, Sept 14, 2017.
Ben Nimmo,
Propaganda in a New Orbit Information Warfare Initiative Paper No. 2, Cen- ter for European Policy Analysis, at 6 (Jan. 2016). Ping ponging is a technique to raise the profile of a story through complementary websites, with the goal of getting the mainstream media to pick it up.
See Appendix H. most popular videos were of natural disasters, accidents, and crime.
225
The Moscow Times found that when RT reporters strayed from its implicit editorial line, they were told this is not our angle.’’
226
Former staff report that RT’s editorial
line comes from the top down, and managers, not editors, choose what will be covered and how. For example, when foreign staff disagreed with the way that RT was covering Ukraine, they were taken off the assignment and
Ukraine-related coverage was handled by Russian staff.
227
And those Russian staff are mostly apathetic or apolitical, with no prior experience in journalism’’—their primary qualification
is fluency in English, gained from either linguistic training or being the children of Russian diplomats.’’
228
All of which reveals that, while RT may have a large budget and growing reach, it also has several fundamental institutional flaws which limit its ability to operate as a professional news organization. In the words of one former employee, a combination of apathy, alack of professionalism and a dearth of real talent keep RT from being more effective than it currently is.’’
229
Sputnik is a state-owned network of media platforms launched in November 2014 and includes social media, news, and radio content in June 2017, it began operating an FM radio station in Washington, D.C.
230
With an annual budget of $69 million, the network operates indifferent languages and attracts about 4.5 million Facebook followers.
231
Like RT, Sputnik consistently promotes anti-West narratives that undermine support for democracy. A study by the Center for European Policy Analysis found that Sputnik grants disproportionate
coverage to protest, anti-establish- ment and pro-Russian members of the European Parliament from Central and Eastern Europe that it does so systematically and that even when it quotes mainstream politicians, it chooses comments that fit the wider narrative of a corrupt, decadent and
Russophobic West . . . making wide use of the protest potential of the legislature to promote the Kremlin’s chosen messages of disinformation.’’
232
Sputnik is also often used to ping pong a suspect story from lesser-known news sites and into more mainstream press out- lets.
233
One well-known example was the purported police cover-up of the Lisa rape casein Germany. After initially circulating on Facebook, the story was picked up by Channel One, a Russian gov- ernment-controlled news channel, and
then covered by RT and Sputnik, which argued the case was not an isolated incident. The following week, protests broke out, despite the fact the allegations had since been recanted and the police investigation had debunked
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43 Jim Rutenberg, RT, Sputnik and Russia’s New Theory of War
The New York Times, Sept. 13, 2017. Andrew Feinberg, My Life at a Russian Propaganda Network
Politico, Aug. 21, 2017.
236
‘‘Ex-French Economy Minister Macron could be US Agent Lobbying Banks Interests
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