Donald M. Bishop, publicdiplomacycouncil.org
Aron image from article
Extract:In an important essay published by the American Enterprise Institute, Leon Aron, Resident Scholar and Director of Russian Studies at AEI, discussed “the Kremlin’s worldwide propaganda offensive.
Aron cited David Remnick’s evaluation of RT, the state-funded media channel that says it “brings the Russian view on global news,” as “darkly, nastily brilliant, so much more sophisticated than Soviet propaganda.” A “shadow army of Kremlin-paid Internet ‘trolls’” is ready to “pounce on critics of the Kremlin.” Aron goes beyond providing examples of Russian propaganda, however. He believes that some intellectual trends in the West have “weakened its moral defenses against propaganda.”
The aim of the Kremlin’s messaging, as one expert put it, is “not to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) or earn credibility but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods.” These outlets echo Kremlin narratives, while using conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric to appeal to segments of their audience that are skeptical of official narratives, notably the far left and the far right. ...
1 comment:
As a researcher and analyst I from time to time got involved in discussions with local students of journalism, philosophy, arts, and law, especially when working on projects of their interest. To a scientist, “truth” represents “material fact”, supported by evidence of forensic quality. In case of patterns and causal relationships, truthful interpretation requires observation and reproducibility.
When discussing matters how a journalist should approach conflicting points of view in a documentary form, I was astonished to learn that “The truth is always somewhere in the middle”. The concept says that the “truth shall be sought somewhere in the middle of conflicting points of view” without any attempt to verify quality/truthfulness of individual items included in the final assessment.
The result is bizarre conclusion that the sum of vectors of individual statements (including lies) somehow results in truth.
Therefore, the phase of initial source assessment that should exclude all irrelevant, misleading and untrue information from further processing is completely and purposefully missing. Instead of extensively verifying or even disregarding information coming from sources that have provided untrue information in the past (RT and its proxies), these are included as “alternative point of view”. The more prolific this journalistic junk is (i.e. unsubstantiated hypotheses about the downing of MH17), the more likely it is to skew public opinion by simply being mentioned as relevant by mainstream media.
I probably expect too much from local journalists. Truth means different things to different people and cultures. Truth does not always equal material fact.
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