Western leftist conspiracy narratives: or, the devil in the details

23 06 2014

An article is circulating in the western left that alleges that Ukraine’s new president Poroshenko has been a “mole” for the U.S. State Department since 2006. The article is just one example of the kind of narrative I’ve seen circulating widely in the western anti-American left that overstates the U.S.’s role in Ukrainian affairs. Notably, the writers of these narratives tend to eagerly swallow up the “information” being spread by an authoritarian, right-wing state — Russia — in order to prop up their theories.

Here are some comments in response.

(For the record, plenty of articles circulate that have propaganda value but little factual value. I have previously shared, on this blog, some of those produced by Russian propaganda sources. One that seems to be produced by Ukrainian propaganda sources, or at least that seems to be spreading among anti-Russian bloggers, claims that the recent UN human rights report alleges that Russian security services, or Russian special forces, were behind the Odessa deaths of June 2. The UN report says no such thing.)

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More media war techniques

5 06 2014

While this web site is in Russian, the videos and images don’t require much translation. It’s a catalogue of examples of Russian state media “recycling” of images from other times and places — dead bodies, mutilated children, bombings, downed UN planes, et al. — in order to discredit Ukraine’s (former) opposition or its (current) interim government.

The sources include Syria’s current civil war (several images), Belgrade in the 1990s, Mexico’s drug war, the African Congo (that UN plane), and even a fire from Quebec’s Lac Megantic train derailment. All are presented as if these depict victims of “Kiev’s fascist junta” or on-the-ground images from eastern Ukraine.

See here for the article.

Then there is the army of internet trolls. Media studies dissertations can be written about this stuff.

 

 





Where next in Russia’s propaganda offensive?

29 05 2014

In the Moscow Times article “Russia’s Propaganda War Will Backfire,” Mark Lawrence Schrad, author of Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy and the Secret History of the Russian State, argues that the Putin regime’s media offensive against the Maidan revolution and the interim Ukrainian government will backfire on Russian-Ukrainian relations for years to come.

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Russian infowar

11 05 2014

I drafted an op-ed piece a few weeks ago that I failed to oversee to publication, because it was quickly overtaken by events that I didn’t manage to incorporate into the piece.

I’m sharing it here for what it’s worth, as it includes some useful links to materials I have not posted to this blog. It’s more opinionated than my posts have usually been, but that’s the nature of an op-ed. The general idea remains quite relevant (as my “Right Sector vs. United Russia” post shows). A brief update follows.

 

Manufacturing reality: The Russian infowar over Ukraine

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More Odessa observations

6 05 2014

The comments by the Left Opposition observer whom I quoted in the last post have now been translated into English here.

And here is a rich trove of images from the May 2 events. (The captions provide somewhat of a pro-Ukrainian unity slant.) The first link is particularly helpful. The last two links are not recommended for sensitive viewers.

 





Russian media bloopers

14 04 2014

Economist Paul Gregory has been keeping track of some very funny Russian media bloopers — funny except for the fact that they are intended to be true and serious.

Here he recounts three stories told by three Russian media outlets — Rossiya 1, NTV, and the National Independent News of Crimea — each about a very different character: an “ordinary citizen” protesting the Ukrainian “neo-Nazi government,” a German EU spy who hired a group of 50 European mercenaries (!), and a pediatric surgeon tending the victims of neo-Nazi gunmen.

The catch is that each is clearly the same guy lying (in both senses of the word) in the same hospital bed. These “news stories” are played by the same actor. The videos are below.

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Russian media

6 04 2014

While the source of this analysis, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, could be expected to be somewhat critical of Russia, the critique offered in “The World Through the Eyes of Russian State Television” is supported by several lengthy video segments from Russian state controlled news Channel 1.

As can be seen there, the news provided on Channel 1 is wildly at variance — frighteningly so — with what the rest of the world sees and knows about Ukraine. Either one state-controlled media industry (and a handful of western outlets) is correct and everyone else is in the dark, or there is a great deal of consent being manufactured here (as Noam Chomsky would likely say, if he lived there).

That does not mean there are no alternative views available in Russia.  Read the rest of this entry »





Media frames of Ukraine crisis

28 03 2014

Below is a link to the presentation I gave at a teach-in on Ukraine and Crimea at the University of Vermont this past Wednesday.

My presentation focused on the dominant media frames of the crisis, with “ground-truthing” based on my research of the events over the last 4 months. (The other speakers dealt, respectively, with social media use, geopolitics, and Russian media perspectives.)

The slides were just a starting point, and much of my commentary (not included) consisted of critical and contextual interpretation of the images. But there are some minimal explanatory notes below the images (if you open the file in Power Point), and the fifth last slide provides a brief summary of my comments and analysis.

http://www.uvm.edu/~aivakhiv/Ukraine-2014.pptx

 

 





Snyder: The haze of propaganda

2 03 2014

Historian Timothy Snyder reviews the “haze of propaganda” surrounding the crisis in Ukraine in the New York Review of Books:

“Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s newsletter through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist, or even Nazi coup d’état.”

See the entire article here.








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