by Peter Himler
Nearly six years ago, I penned a post titled “Leaders Who Lie,” mostly about the blatant misinformation campaign propagated by one Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I followed it up several years later with a similarly themed post titled “PR Rogues Gallery,” which broadened the meme to include Yasser Arafat, Syria’s Assad, Libya’s Qaddafi and Russia, which could give the others “a run for their money” on the media manipulation front.
That follow-up post prompted a sharp protest from an American ex-pat friend living in Russia who, like most Russian nationals, is a stalwart supporter of Mr. Putin and believes the former KGB officer could do no wrong. He wrote:
“I really fail to see how the Russian government could in any way be associated let alone in the same league as governments such as Syria and Iran. Indeed, in terms of public communications the Russian government’s problem is a lack of PR. They take almost no steps to mold their external image and the communications battle is left to their opponents who create the deeply flawed perception of modern Russian. And of course too they are a convenient ‘filler’ for the big bad enemy–an enemy only in words and not in fact.”
Flash forward to today when any semblance of a free press in Russia has been discarded like the stray dogs in Sochi. In March, The New York Times reported how Russia is mounting a “media war” unlike any other since the end of the cold war. Celestine Bohlin wrote:
“The scale of Russia’s propaganda effort in the current crisis has been breathtaking, even by Soviet standards. Facts have been twisted, images doctored (Ukrainians shown as fleeing to Russia were actually crossing the border to Poland), and harsh epithets (neo-Nazis) hurled at the demonstrators in Kiev — who President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia belatedly acknowledged had legitimate gripes against a corrupt and failed government”
by Peter Himler
Filed under: Information operations, Russia
