UKR-TAZ

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.

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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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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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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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 »