Today I saw a question on Quora, “How is Russia winning the information war against Ukraine?” This makes me laugh but it is also a point of personal bitterness for me. Because this is exactly what I said on 27 March 2022. “Information wars are won by the truth” was my exact statement. Basic propaganda is about hyping your successes, downplaying your failures, and everyone does this. But every military spokesman has to be careful to speak only the truth. If he speaks nonsense, then he will be discredited like the boy who cried wolf and will never be taken seriously again, even when what he says is truthful.
My statement about bitterness takes some explanation. Early on the SMO, my humble writings got “big.” Some big western pro-Russian outlets shared what I said, my blog got tens of thousands of views overnight and hundreds of comments. Very cool. But was short-lived, and started going downhill right around when I said this.
The thing about most “pro-Russian” commentators is that they’re not actually pro-Russian. They’re pro-Western and see Russia as a magic bullet that’ll solve all of their problems without them having to do anything.
So right around this point in late March/early April, the “pro-Russian” guys started to get upset that Russia wasn’t immediately winning, and there was a huge amount of whining that there was basically zero Russian response to NATO information ops. My statement that Russia just doesn’t have to do anything wasn’t interesting to them. It made some people angry, actually.
Then the whining shifted to how Russia was conducting the actual war itself. Why doesn’t Russia “take the gloves off,” obliterate Kiev, obliterate Lvov, blah blah blah. My statements that this is pointless, counter-productive, and morally-questionable hysteria just wasn’t interesting either.
Perhaps the single most outrageous thing I said was that the USA is not mind-controlling the entire media to be pro-USA. What I meant by that is the majority of journalists aren’t writing pro-Ukraine stories at gunpoint. If Ukraine is very obviously losing, media outlets will start to look stupid by not reporting it, and they’ll also miss out on sensational click-bait stories they need to stay in business. If CNN refuses to report on a mountain of dead Ukrainian soldiers, then another media outlet will, and CNN loses money. It’s that simple.
So now there are a bunch of western journos sitting in Ukraine and, as far as I can tell, things are going poorly for our favorite NATO puppet. Than we expect a bunch of sleazy Twitter mafia from the NYT, CNN, and CBS to ignore a sensational story unfolding in front of their noses? Of course not. So next time you read a mainstream article about Russian artillery outgunning the Ukrainians, please don’t be astonished. It’s not Big Brother losing his grip on the media. It’s just a bunch of paparazzi-grade journalists seeing a good story and running with it. Yes, they do want to stick with the “Ukraine Good/Russia Bad” narrative, but these people are soulless ghouls with no values they wouldn’t immediately betray if it benefited them.
But my idea was not interesting, it wasn’t shared anywhere, and the “pro-Russia” commentators continued rambling and trying to speculate what the US strategy was in reporting Ukrainian losses – when in reality, there was no strategy it was just for-profit media reporting Ukrainian losses just like they would Russian losses.
So here’s that CNN story I predicted almost two years ago:
I told you so, not that the big-league “pro-Russia” guys care how many times they’re proven wrong. I also find it amusing that over the last six months or so, big-league American talking heads are comfortable enough to visit Moscow one after the other. I’ve been here since the beginning. I think none of these big tough talkers came to Moscow earlier because they were scared of the consequences. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is more than a little hypocritical to not even acknowledge the shifting attitudes.
Ian Kummer
Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty
All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
Absolutely agree with you. This “war in the information space” was always a distraction. I had had zero trust in Western sources but what they did during the SMO was unprecedented (especially the first few weeks). Such amount of bs had never been seen.
That said, I have to tell you the Russians are kinda inept in the information space, or at least they used to be. They have often been inconsistent. Like this and this governor says something about an incident and later on the MoD spokesman says something else. The governor honestly says what he knows that time, he doesn’t lies but the whole thing comes out badly. Paradoxically, these incidents showed clearly how a centrally controlled propaganda machine, that was always assumed (“Russian propaganda”) didn’t exist.
Nowadays I can see that the Russians are much more disciplined in this sense, they rather don’t say anything before they actually know it. These (usually very slight) inconsistencies used to be the bonus for the enemy.
It’s true that Russians in general don’t consider the iNfOrMaTiOn wAr terribly important or interesting. Putin doesn’t hold meetings for TikTok influencers to tell them what to say, like Biden has repeatedly. It’s also true that, despite claims of being an “autocratic dictatorship,” the Russian Federation is barely centralized at all.
They’re going to spin this as Republicans are traitors because they delayed funding. They don’t have guns to their heads because they don’t need them
Sadly I don’t remember the details, even the gentleman’s name, but there was an officer in the British Army who had served in Afghanistan (this century) and who was disturbed at the way Press coverage of the war was failing to describe the situation adequately. He left the Army, returned to Afghanistan and used his contacts to set himself up as a free-lance journalist.
His main gripe was that main stream journalism was failing to explain what drove local communities to back the Taliban or the NATO supported government. He realised that the main driver was not the ideological or religious tendencies of local leaders but their rivalries with other local powerholders. If your clan was in a feud with a neighbouring one and they had the backing of NATO, then the most sensible thing to do would be to declare your love for the Taliban and get them in to help. If the shifting sands of politics elsewhere led you to decide that plumping for NATO was now the best option, then there’s a fair chance, if the inter-clan conflict was very active, that your local enemies would suddenly declare for the Taliban.
He sent his articles to a number of newspapers and websites that he believed had the most thoughtful coverage of Afghanistan, but they all turned him down. When he was able to get feedback as to why, it was invariably because although his work was acknowledged as being well-written and accurate, it simply didn’t fit “the narrative”.
So I am not entirely in agreement that there is no conspiracy – the “conspiracy” is not at the level of the rank-and-file journalists, it’s at the top of the organisation. It is the editors knowing that putting the unvarnished truth about a story into their newspapers will cause them no end of trouble; their political columnists may stop getting leaks and interesting information from their sources in government. The budget for public information or government job vacancy advertising may “inexplicably” drift to competitors. The sort of smart, networked people who get editors’ jobs probably don’t need telling this: they learnt the rules of the game years before. The rank-and-file journalists who want to get their work into the paper will soon learn, or leave.
In the UK, journalists are often pressured to produce huge amounts of content for use in a number of formats. In theory, they are supposed to check its accuracy but, in practice, if it is copied from a “reputable” wire agency like Reuters or Associated Press, or from the BBC, they don’t need to check. The newspapers pay for the wire agency content but the BBC effectively allow journalists to plagiarise their news content because it gives the BBC enormous influence over the news agenda. The BBC is supposed to be “impartial”, but nobody seriously believes that.
So if the BBC is pushing an agenda in its foreign coverage, it is almost certain to be one supported by the bulk of the British foreign policy establishment (not necessarily the Foreign Secretary) and the rest of the British media will follow, because it makes life easier for the editors to not fall out with their contacts in the FCO, and for the journalists, because they can just paraphrase whatever the BBC wrote about it and dress it up with a couple of quotes they made up.