Winning hearts and minds

Maxime Audinet, April 2017

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RT, Russia’s voice to the world

The concept of ‘public diplomacy’ is bound up with the ideological battle of the cold war. Broadcaster Ed Murrow popularised the term in the early 1960s when he was director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which coordinated the US’s cultural diplomacy and ran the fiercely anti-communist Voice of America radio station. The concept provided a way for US diplomacy to disassociate itself from the notion of propaganda, with its overtones of totalitarianism. During the same period, Soviet officials came up with the similar notion of ‘popular diplomacy’ (narodnaya diplomatia) to refer to cultural activity abroad by ‘Soviet friendship societies’ and Radio Moscow’s multilingual output. Both the US and the USSR communicated directly with foreign populations through the media and other educational and cultural channels to promote their interests, core values and national culture. Influencing popular opinion like this also offered a better means of controlling the actions of foreign governments.

The idea of public diplomacy resurfaced in the 21st century after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration needed to win hearts and minds in a Middle East that was increasingly hostile to the US. From a range of diplomatic options, the State Department chose to prioritise its international broadcasting and increase its support for those NGOs whose activities were in step with its policy. Subsequently, many countries implemented similar policies to boost their soft power, a concept defined by political scientist Joseph Nye as ‘the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’ (1).

Russia’s foreign ministry later formalised the concepts of public diplomacy (publichnaya diplomatia) and soft power (myagkaya sila) in 2008 and 2013. Its foreign broadcasting underwent a two-stage revamp: RT was set up in 2005 and Sputnik, which replaced the RIA Novosti international news agency and The Voice of Russia, was established in 2014. Broadcasting became the preferred tool in the quest to influence foreign audiences, necessary in the increasingly competitive international market for news. Since the late 1990s, Al Jazeera (founded in Qatar) had attempted to ‘break the western media’s monopoly in international news coverage’ (2), targeting in particular America’s CNN, which had been the main source of images from the Gulf war in 1991. Other countries have followed suit this century: China, with China Central Television (CCTV), which became China Global Television Network (CGTN) at the end of 2016; countries in Latin America (Telesur); and Iran (PressTV). All have tried to take market share from their main rivals: CNN, the BBC, Sky News, France 24 and Deutsche Welle.

What distinguishes the Russian approach is that it aims not only to exercise soft power but, as the Kremlin sees it, to respond to security requirements. Russia’s security services have emphasised the defensive potential of the media, which, along with its cybernetic capabilities, could protect against threats (biased news, cyberattacks etc) to Russia’s ‘sovereignty in the informational sphere’, as set out in the ‘information security doctrine’ passed by presidential decree in December 2016. The head of Russia’s armed forces has announced he wants to assimilate the tools of soft power and develop ‘hybrid methods’ of responding to modern asymmetrical conflicts (Kommersant, 1 March 2016) on the ground as well as in the media sphere and online. For the Kremlin, too, information is just another battlefield.