Pro-Kremlin
media have bombarded the world with reports of fascists,
crucified children and beheaded pro-Russian militiamen
throughout the conflict in Ukraine. Many of those stories
were proven to be fictions, or else peppered with facts that
serve an extremely tendentious interpretation of events.
However,
some Western analysts believe that at least a few of those
Russian arrows — however bent and untrue — have
reached their target, and that Moscow has managed to impose
its vision of the conflict in Ukraine on the rest
of the world. Seeing the apparent success of Russian
propaganda, political scientists and media analysts sounded
the alarm with the result that the West now takes
Moscow’s “information war” very seriously.
The European
Union’s foreign affairs department announced that it was launching
a rapid response unit to combat the misinformation
spread by Russian media, and BBC announced plans to expand
broadcasts to the Russian-speaking audience.
Reporters
Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev have written in numerous
publications about the information war and warned that
the Kremlin is waging an attack against the West.
And in a separate paper they write: “Feeling itself
relatively weak, the Kremlin has systematically learned to use
the principles of liberal democracies against them in what
we call here ‘the weaponization of information, culture
and money,’ vital parts of the Kremlin’s concept
of ‘non-linear’ war.” But is the threat to the
West emanating from the Kremlin really so great?
According
to some analysts, improving Russia’s image abroad has barely
been the primary goal of an information campaign. Vasily
Gatov, a Russian media researcher based in Boston, suggests
that instead of promoting a positive image of Russia
abroad, the actual goal of RT is to implement
an “armed response” in the West and the Russian
liberal media. Their goal is to create anti-Russian hype in the
American and European press, and to use such
an “anti-Russian narrative” in Russia’s domestic
policy.
Gatov
argues that since 2007 Putin’s Russia stopped trying to promote
Russia’s image internationally, instead using soft power wherever
possible for the personal gain of the Kremlin elites. Other
researchers, however, point out that Russia kept investing in its
image abroad up until recently.
Russia
has had an advantage over the West right from the
start in prosecuting the information war. Any democratic
government has far less opportunity to deliberately use
information as a weapon. But just the same, Russia is
losing its information war in the West.
One
of Russia’s main tools of influence in the West is
the state-owned channel Russia Today. Founded in 2005,
the channel was initially quite successful in winning
a Western audience. In his book “Kremlin Speak: Inside
Putin’s Propaganda Factory,” Wall Street Journal correspondent
Lukas Alpert explains that RT attracted the American left
and right by using strategies that combine skillful use
of the Internet, conspiracy theories and a willingness
to address issues that major U.S. media ignore.
The channel’s
popularity continued to rise up until the outbreak of the
conflict in Ukraine, after which many viewers criticized RT
for its biased coverage of the war. For example,
in Britain in 2014 RT was found four times to be
in breach of the broadcasting code for impartiality
by the media regulator, Ofcom.
The result
is that Russian news channels reached only 9 percent of all
Ukrainians in 2014, down from 19 percent in 2012.
Two-thirds of Ukrainians are skeptical about the objectivity
of Russian news programs, and even in the country’s
south and east, less than one-third of respondents believed
that Russia’s role in the crisis was “mostly positive.”
In the rest of Ukraine that figure was less than 3 percent.
The RT
strategy is probably focused more on selling its alleged
“success in the West” to the Kremlin than on truly
impacting Western public opinion. The low overall quality of the
information campaign is also a contributing factor.
Why
is the Russian information campaign in the West so
unsuccessful, despite lavish government funding? Because Moscow has
not managed to equip its effort with any new form or content.
Its disinformation campaign concerning Ukraine is based on distorting
information that is freely available to the “enemy,” denying
obvious facts, disseminating false or unverified information
and generally following the principles of a Soviet-era
military disinformation campaign.
Sources:
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/kremlin-is-losing-the-information-war-op-ed-49642
https://toinformistoinfluence.com/2017/08/28/moscow-times-kremlin-is-losing-the-information-war-op-ed/
