Media Needs to Wise Up about Russian Propaganda
If the press wants to be an antidote and not a tool, take a closer look at the motives at work.
Updated Sept. 6, 2024 The Wall Street Journal
The Kremlin is terrible at keeping secrets. That was demonstrated again in Wednesday’s federal indictment of Russian officials for alleged U.S. election-interference-related activities, resting partly on internal meeting notes by a midlevel Kremlin aide.
Then again, Vladimir Putin might want to prosecute his own agents for so fecklessly exposing his secret propaganda efforts—unless exposure was the aim.
They allegedly registered and created websites like washingtonpost.fm and fox-news.in that were destined to be embarrassingly unmasked the moment they posted their first fake stories. Intoned Attorney General Merrick Garland at Wednesday’s press conference, Russian disinformation is “a bigger threat” than ever. Yet the 2,000 videos he cited, allegedly viewed 16 million times on YouTube, were a drop in the bucket next to five billion YouTube videos watched every day and 155,000 new uploads every hour.
Too, Mr. Garland said the Kremlin-influenced U.S. influencers were unaware they were benefiting from Russian money as they went about their normal activities. Hence his carefully hedged statement (emphasis added): “The subject matter and content of many of the videos published by the company were often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”
Nobody was charged except two Russians, and then only for failing to register as foreign lobbyists. The case will never be tested in court because the two defendants will never be extradited.
A day later came charges against the longtime U.S.-based Russia analyst Dimitri Simes and his wife for money laundering and sanctions violations in relation to his very public role as commentator for Russia’s RT channel.
It all lands two months before a U.S. presidential election, on the eve of the likely sole debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, in a manner unpleasantly reminiscent of the intervention of 51 former spies just before Joe Biden’s only 2020 debate with Mr. Trump.
It’s a little late but we’re going to need an increase in media IQ if the press is to be an antidote rather than a tool in today’s shadow wars.
As Obama intelligence officials testified in 2017, the “loudness” of Russian efforts is intentional, aimed at stirring up the desired hysteria about “Russian interference.” Problems of interpretation therefore abound. If Russia conspicuously sponsors pro-Trump content, is Russia trying to help Donald Trump or his opponent—or simply aiming at the known erogenous zones of Western media and enforcement agencies?
There’s the unavoidable fact that the Russian activities described in the indictments had virtually no effect on the American public yet the actions of the Justice Department certainly will.
In short, the U.S. might want to understand what Russia is trying to accomplish and stop colluding with it.
A place to start is a Harvard group’s painstaking reconstruction of meme-trafficking in the 2016 election, which showed that Russia’s main success was getting U.S. partisans to exaggerate Russia’s success. Lesson one.
A 2023 NYU study found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship” between exposure to Russian propaganda and U.S. voting behavior. A co-author, Joshua Tucker of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, added that exaggerated talk of Russian influence in 2016 may well have fertilized “Americans’ willingness to accept claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.” Lesson two.
If Russia’s goal is to exploit U.S. partisanship to destabilize our political system, a serious person then can’t ignore Obama intelligence leaders’ amplification of Russian propaganda efforts by insisting on TV that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent. Or the FBI knowingly trafficking in fabricated collusion evidence. Or 51 top intelligence veterans knowingly lying about the Hunter Biden laptop.
The latter episode, if we’re being honest, deliberately courted the risk of serious international fallout by falsely blaming Russia unless the liars presumed a certain connivance on Russia’s part. That connivance was forthcoming: Mr. Putin not only publicly echoed Biden claims about Hunter’s innocence but conspicuously refrained from complaining about the false allegations against Russia.
As warned here, the collusion horse is now out of the barn for 2024, with Justice fanning undoubted Kremlin efforts to create controversy and distrust greater than any Russia could have created on its own. The department’s accompanying affidavit in the YouTube-related case plays up the role of the FBI’s Philadelphia office, prompting stories in the Philly press about Russia targeting a key Democratic electorate in the key swing state of Pennsylvania in a way that, inevitably, makes something out of nothing.
Which returns us to an insight this column has hammered away at for months. In our new era of active disinformation, the deliberate propaganda efforts of, say, the U.S. government, deliberately transmitted by an unanalytical domestic press, will have an almost infinitely larger effect on public attitudes than anonymous dribblings governments secrete on the internet via social-media posts.
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Appeared in the September 7, 2024, print edition as 'Media Needs to Wise Up About Russian Propaganda'.