Russian Propaganda – How They Do It

RT (formerly Russia Today) is funded by the Russian government. They produce a wide variety of material, from apparently straight news through the discovery of sea monsters. The New York Daily News through what you see at supermarket checkout stands, more or less.

Last week they published a story supposedly on a report from the Rand Corporation for the US government on plans for Ukraine: internment camps and executions. Several people on Twitter noted an obvious forgery in the logo. The story took off on Twitter anyway, thanks to the Kremlin’s army of trolls and those who are frightened about events in Ukraine.

And then it disappeared. It’s still on Google as I write, as in the screen capture above, but clicking the link gives a 404 error. Jeffrey Lewis brought the disappearance to my attention on Twitter.

There’s another story on RT now, the second one in the screen capture. Blithely, it begins:

Even if the leaked plan of ‘handling’ Ukrainian crisis was not produced by the RAND corporation, events on the ground very much resemble the shocking points of the memo and the “guidelines for genocide” exported by the US, Don Debar from CPR News told RT.

It doesn’t matter we forged the document, it’s true anyway. 

That’s not journalism. And who is Don Debar? An expert on government advisors? On genocide? On Russia?

No, just someone RT got to say the things they wanted to print. He’s got a talk show on CPRmetro.org (autoplay).

Mission accomplished. Some number of people will believe that the Rand Corporation has advised the US government to commit genocide in Ukraine. Many of them would have believed that anyway, but now they have a link to wave at others. And some may have been convinced.

That’s how propaganda works. You don’t have to convince everyone at once, just a few at a time.

Yeah, I have screen grabs of this latest article.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.