Freedom House
Chapter 2
Propaganda at Home and Abroad
The following propositions have all appeared in the Russian media over the past few years:
¢ The United States hired Islamic State terrorists to sabotage the Russian commercial airliner that was destroyed after takeoff in the Sinai in 2015.
¢ A three-year-old boy was crucified by the U.S.- backed Ukrainian army in Slovyansk in 2014.
¢ The United States is planning a major war in Eu- rope to enable Washington to cancel its national debt.
¢ The downing of the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014 was in fact the central ingredient in an elaborate, American-driven plot to place blame on Russia.
e American policies will lead to a global “homosex- ual sodomite tsunami."
This is just a small sample of similar claims or conjec- tures that have made their way into Russian news cov- erage, especially in the wake of Moscow's occupation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. They stand as areminder that under Vladimir Putin, the Russian media environment has been transformed from one marked by vibrancy and diverse opinions (if not high professional standards) to one dominated by blatant propaganda on the most sensitive international topics of the day.
The basic regime narrative of U.S.-led conspiracy is applied to a broad set of themes: depression in oil prices, downgrading of Russia's credit ratings, political change in Ukraine, Russia's Olympics doping scandal. Every problem, Russians are told, is due to American plots and maneuvers.
Press freedom and democracy
A free press ranks among the most critical institutions of liberal democracy. Among the reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in his campaign to modernize the Soviet system, glasnost, or openness, played the most important role in challenging the decades-old system of Soviet totalitarianism. Something similar can be said of press freedom initiatives in other new democracies during the latter part of the 20th century,
“If the 20th century was defined by the battle for freedom of information and against censorship, the 21st century will be defined by malevo- lent actors, states or corporations, abusing the right to freedom of information for quite other ends.”
—Vasily Gatov, media analyst
“Information wars have already become standard practice and the main type of warfare. The bombers are now sent in after the information campaign.”
—Dmitry Kiselyov, chief Russian propaganda strategist
particularly in postcommunist societies where strict press censorship had prevailed for years. Even if the professionalism and ethical standards of journalism in those countries were not always up to the highest levels, the fact that the press spoke with different voices, different opinions, and even different biases was a huge step toward a world in which democracy was the norm.
Authoritarians push back
lt is precisely because of press freedom’s central importance to democracy that the new generation of authoritarian leaders has made its annihilation a top priority. However, modern authoritarians recognize that the methods of the print and analog broadcast era—prepublication censorship and stilted, formula- ic propaganda—were no longer viable in the age of digital media and globalization.
At a minimum, governments that sought involvement in the world economy found it advisable to tolerate a measure of openness about budgets, economic data, and those aspects of social life that are critical for international business. Authoritarian leaders thus face the dilemma of retaining domination over the political story while permitting a degree of accurate informa- tion about economic affairs.
www.freedomhouse.org
15
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019249