Angry Planet - ICYMI: In Russia, 'fake news' is the norm

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

America’s 2016 election was plagued by fake news. Online, it’s easy to fake authority, and millions of Americans fall for the stories. It may seem new to Americans, but Russians have lived with a strange, conspiracy-driven media for years.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. I thought one Russian professor who appeared very well to me. He said, like, if Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% percent propaganda and 25 percent violence.

Hi, we're college producer Bethelhabdei here. The end of the year has our team pretty busy, so we're rerunning an episode we think you'll enjoy. A few months ago, Jason and Matt talked to author and former Russian TV producer Peter Pomeranzov. And if you thought Americans were plagued with fake news during the 2016 election, wait till you hear how it works all year round in Putin's Russia. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.

Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at War is Boring. Today, we're speaking with Peter Pomeranzov, a journalist and former Russian TV producer. His book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which, by the way, is a fantastic type, explores the Kremlin's weaponization of information. So thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me. So Peter, I want to open with a quote from your book and then a question. So you say that TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country, referring to Russia. It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism, one far subtler than the 20th century strains. Can you explain to us what this new type of authoritarianism is and how is it more subtle than its predecessors? predecessors? Sure. I mean, the big difference between, well, there's two or three big differences between contemporary authoritarianisms. And it's not just Russia. There's several, there's several ones we could focus on. And that was one Russian professor who very well to me.

He said, like, if Stalin was 75% violence and 25% propaganda, Putin is 75% propaganda and 25% violence. You know, in a world where there's just so many more information mechanisms, new authoritarian can use them to a much more sophisticated degree. I mean, the way it was more sophisticated, and it is shifting now, was that if the Soviets would basically suppress any kind of descent and try to hammer home sort of one big message, Putin's tebocracy was much more cunning. It would allow sort of pockets of freedom. It would allow, sort of, pockets of freedom. It would allow liberals to exist, but then it would fray and manipulate them in a certain way to make them, at the end of the day, strengthen Putin in the Kremlin. I mean, in a world, there are so

many media resources, you can't censor everything, you can't suppress everything, but you can be subtle and sort of play it. I mean, so I'll give you a few examples. So you do have talk shows in Russia. I mean, if you've sort of debating shows, political debating shows, they're actually very, very good. But they're centrally scripted. So there's a sort of face. left-week party, which is created in the Kremlin and run by the Kremlin, and there's a fake right-wing party, which is created and run by the Kremlin. And they kind of debate with each other. Both of them are so absurd, they make Putin look sensible by contrast. One of the institutions I worked for in Russia was something called snob media, which was run by, created by Russia's

richest man. And it was meant to be like the Russian version of the New Yorker, plus there's going to be a TV channel, which never materialized, but there was a publishing house. And there It was a website, sort of an elite Facebook, sort of a closed Facebook. And anyway, so it was dedicated to creating a new type of Russian, what we called global Russians. And you could tell everyone how awful Putin was. Mashi Gessen, you know, the great Mashi Gesson, I'm sure you know, was one of the editors. It was, it was, you know, an arc, a noz arc of liberalism in many ways. But at the same time, we were all really aware when we worked there that, my God,

God, you know, this is being funded by Russia's richest man. There's no way he couldn't have done this without the Kremlin's kind of, you know, permission. And that was kind of the point. So, I mean, the point was to give liberals a place to breathe and sort of bend their frustrations. But at the same time, you know, it was called snobb. It was funded by Russia's richest man. The Krebrenner could easily go, look at these liberals. Look at their global Russians.

Look at the lifestyle they promote. I mean, their politics, liberal and their lifestyle that promote a sort of holidays in Europe, which is inaccessible to the 19-19, the vast majority. of Russians, so the Kremlin could go, look at our liberal oppositions, funded by these sort of, like, the westernized, spoiled oligarchs. And sure enough, the guy who funded it then became the pseudo-liberal candidates at the elections. He got very respectful, 14%, soaked up the liberal vote, and then promptly disappeared from the political seat. He kind of done his job. So it's a much, much subtler and much more kind of system than just like, you know, stupid old Soviet rule to suppress

dissent and thus created a really sort of like strong anti-communist movement. So who's behind it? Who's thinking in such a, I don't know, a sophisticated, smart way? Well, I mean, look, it developed. You know, we can look at the way it developed through the 90s. Actually, the first people who let it happen were Democrats. So in the mid-1990s, it looks as if Yelton, who was a more kind of pro-Western president, would lose the elections to the communists, who'd really become social democrats by then. And so all the oligoths got together, because they were really scared of this. And in order to save democracy, they hired a sort of a new type of political consultant called a political technologist, sort of a 21st century propagandist,

to create sort of pseudo-scare stories and help rig the votes and help rig the election. And it's quite funny, it was a class of liberal political consultants who actually make this happen. A lot of them regret it now, a lot of them say openly that was the moment when Russia lost it in 96. So in order to save democracy, we used undemocratic means. But with time, kind of one of this class of political consultants emerged as, you know, as the most powerful one. A guy called Vladislav Sukhov, who's very much, you know, a tight guy's kind of figure. He was a bohemian and a dissident, kind of dissident in Soviet times. studied theatre, then became a PR guy, sponsors modern art festivals,

writes postmodern novels, which are okay about cynical PR men. And he kind of, he calls himself one of the authors of the system. I mean, he talks about it openly, and he ran him for a while, he ran TV and political parties. But I wouldn't say it's one person. It's a very, you know, it's a big state, it's a very fluid, reactive state. Sook came to symbolize it in many ways. I don't think anyone has total control.

Not even Putin himself? Yeah, Putin is the arbiter of all the decisions. I mean, nobody's, the system isn't, it is a postmodern system that way. You know, it can sort of like work in various ways. And like somebody in the provinces can be running their own mini projects or some of the oil and gas thing will be running their own mini projects. It's quite flexible.

It's not actually very rigid that way. All right, we've said the word postmodern a couple times here. and in your book you say a postmodern dictatorship is one that uses language in the institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends and you kind of talk about how this model of Kremlin propaganda takes kind of takes the West, digests it, and then perverts it. So could you explain how the Kremlin does this? How do they use the Western messages and twist them on television? And what exactly is, do you mean by a postmodern dictatorship? Well, so the key ideas of sort of postmodernity are the idea of the, you know, or Bodri article, the Simulacra, yeah, a thing which looks like something,

but actually isn't it itself and something quite different. Simulacra is maybe the most overused word in Russian politics, all the analysts use it. So we have pseudo-political parties, pseudo-independent media. It's all pseudo. It all looks free, but actually once you get into it, it works a completely different one. This was one of the great things of Khaha Bend of Kinsa, the great Georgian reformer, maybe one the most effective post-Soviet reformers, who was like, we live, and he used to quote Boudriard quite a lot, we live in a world where nothing is what it seems.

I mean, the police do not are not actually police, they're involved in racketeering, the tax agency, are not the tax agency, all the signs you see are something else. So that's what we mean. Also we mean by the loss, the lack of any one coherent narrative, many, many, many, many little narratives and the lack of a stable social. individuality and role. But just coming back to this idea of some alacra, because that's the most coherent one when we talk about policy. So take elections in Russia. Russia has, you know, elections with different political parties running against each other and competing, and, you know, there

are debates on TV. If you were to just tune into it, you would think, oh my God, it looks just like America. However, everybody knows who's going to win, at priori. Everyone knows that they will be rigged. And there's a great essay by Stephen Holmes about this, the New York University professor, that it's actually a ritual. It's actually a ritual where you go and pretend to sort of take part in the serious vote. Everyone knows exactly what's going to happen. The faking is quite transparent. The state is saying, we are so powerful, we can fake these results.

And the whole point is for the state to show its power. So even though it's authoritarian power. So through the ritual of a democratic vote, or looks like a democratic vote, you're actually reinforcing an authoritarian model. So that's one, I think, very, very good example of it, and a sort of a, you know, a fairly pointed one, because elections is always what we sort of associate with democracy. So that's actually taken from the West in a way, right? I mean, that's, I mean, the Western idea and ideal of democracy.

And you talk about how the U.S. is used. foreign media is woven into the Kremlin's version of the media. Right, you talk about Larry King quite a bit in your book and his RT show. Yeah, well, not quite a bit. I think Larry King has two lines in my book, but there are very important two lines. I apologize. You talk about Larry King as an example in your book. Well, Larry, look, so I mean, here we're talking about RT, which is Larry King had a show

in RTE, which is the Kremlin's Forum broadcaster. It's not in Russian. It's an English, Spanish. Arabic, a few other languages, I think. So RT is very interesting, again, for the same reason. So RT, when you switch it on, looks just like CNN on the BBC. I mean, down to the music, you know, it's like it's very, very similar. The presentation, everything.

Switching on and going, oh, look, it's just another sort of like international TV news channel. And its slogan is very interesting. The slogan is Question More, which is a really clever slogan, because, you know, that's very much the Western ideal of what journalism should be all about. I don't know if you saw their advertising in Washington, D.C., really nicely sort of drawn posters, Tony Blair preaching for the Iraq war, and below says, this is what you get, I said, the Iraq war, if you don't have a second opinion. And then Conan Powell as well, which is, you know, how can you possibly disagree with that idea? That's, you know,

the essence of the Western ideal of journalism is to question more and question power and have a second opinion. But then RT use that ideal to kind of do something very, very interesting. They sort of, well, basically they destroy, well, they destroy sort of the line between information and disinformation. Once you sort of get rid of the idea that there's any kind of objective truth out there, which is, you know, there probably isn't, they kind of take that to its extreme by saying, well, then it's fine for us to do disinformation. Or they'll have experts who aren't, who literally just not cases taken off the street a lot of the time. A neo-Nazi from Germany will suddenly be key German expert on European affairs or somebody from

Linda LaRoucher's organization will suddenly be key American experts on world development. Because once you get rid of, you know, once you take the very noble idea of questioning more, of undermining sort of hegemonic truth, and you take it to its absolute extreme, you can basically say there's no difference between a Cambridge University professor and a freak. And so they take that, so strangely, they take a very, very, you know, healthy idea, and they take it to kind of like a place where it starts to undermine sort of its own ideals. So again, a little bit like election. You take elections and you push them to a place,

which is the opposite of their original meaning. So that's why RT's very interesting. And Larry King, God bless his soul and God bless his conscience, had a show on this. And I really liked the advert for it because it was Larry King going, come and watch my new show on RT. And then it was like all the words that we associate with good journalism,

I don't know, you know, truth-seeking, research, you know, bravery, all these words sort of going very, very, very, very fast across the screen. And just visually, it was sort of taking all the cliches of Western journalism and sort of putting them through this kind of fast-forward effect, which in the end sort of makes the feel almost meaningless. You know, they just become just words. And it always seemed to be like a big FU towards Western journalism.

We can take your cliches. and we can destroy them from inside. I don't know if they meant that. You know, sometimes an advert says something deeper than it's the people who created it and intended it. I have this feeling that RT, or at least RT.com, used to be a little bit more subtle. And the reason I say this is a couple of years ago, I don't know if you remember there was an American, at least alleged American, spy who was a fairly low grade official in the Moscow embassy who was wearing at least according to the RTV footage a bad wig when he was caught I think that was true well it was it was absolutely

fascinating though because of course they broke the story and I remember sitting in a newsroom people wondering oh wow who is this RT and I think it at least at first it was kind of subtle and people didn't really recognize it as Kremlin propaganda. And I don't know. When I watched RTV not very long ago, it was right before the Russians stepped in and started bombing in Syria. And they were talking about the U.S. bombing in Syria. And on the television channel, one thing I noticed is exactly what you were talking about.

I mean, they did seem to have experts off the street. And they spoke about when they were talking about the U.S. bombing of ISIS, they refer to it very specifically as bombing civilians in Syria. And I don't know. Was it more subtle? I mean, was it always sort of this level? I mean, they had some prominent anchors walk out a couple of years ago saying things had gone too far. You know, it actually started as a soft PR project, quite classic soft PR project, just doing fluffy stuff about Russia.

And then nobody wanted that. And they kind of changed in 2008 during the Georgian War. But they go through peaks and troughs, you know what I mean? My sense is that maybe they've really decided to zero in on the kind of, on the viewer they feel isn't catered for in the US, which is the kind of fringe left and fringe right view. I think before maybe they were going for a slightly more, maybe PBSy sort of viewer. So I don't know, but listen, they occasionally do really good stories. I mean, they have a couple of, you know, it's all mixed in. It's the whole point.

You do a good one, then you do a crazy one. You do a good one, do the crazy one. So even now, you could switch it on and see a perfectly good story. So my sense is that after Crimea, it got really, really, really, really crass during the war in Ukraine. That's when they were told off by off-cock, the British regulator. And like in the US, we have regulators in UK. And they've been told off, I know, four or five times, which is, you know, a lot for just, you know, telling lies, basically. So I don't know.

I mean, I think, look, it's a tool of Russian foreign policy. If the foreign policy is very sharp at the moment, at that moment, they'll really go for it. If the foreign policy is being friendly with the US, maybe they'll change their approach over the next couple of months because now Russia and the US are buzz and buddies again. You actually worked in Russian TV. You were a TV producer. How overt is the control from your bosses? Like when you wanted to tell a story that they didn't necessarily want to tell, would they

just, how did that work? How did they kind of steer the ship? Well, listen, I worked for an entertainment channel because when I arrived, when I saw, I was working with Russian channels, which is 2006 to 2010. It was already kind of dodgy to work for any news channels. So I was working for, you know, my background is entertainment. So I worked for a channel which brought the sitcom to Russia and bought stand-up comedy to Russia

and brought some reality shows to Russia and all that kind of stuff. There was very, I mean, they are actually, because they were an entertainment channel, they could do really risque stuff in their comedy. I mean, they did a Russian version of a British sketch. show called Little Britain where they could do really risque stuff without ever naming names. I mean there was a regular sketch about Russia's most corrupt Russia's only uncorrupts traffic cop and he refuses to take any bribes and he lives in Peña and his wife is

always he must become corrupt like everyone else and there was a sketch about a hospital where like you know there's a room where you pay a bribe and you know you get this incredible sort of like you get incredible health care and prostitutes and everything and then next door is the normal one where, just the sort of national health thing and the people just dying horribly. Well, I got to say, though, speaking as an American here, I don't know about the NHS, that is actually literally the case. Yeah, no, no, no, no, I mean, I think we know, the whole world knows about America's healthcare due to the excellent subjective and analytical reports to Michael Moore.

but the difference in Russia is you just give a bribe to the doctor, you just put in this pocket, you don't pay it to an institution, it's not, you know, they haven't got to the point where corruption becomes market capitalism, it's just corruption still. Maybe they'll mature into that. Actually, one of the big arguments for fighting corruption is just, why don't you institutionalise it, you know? Just make it exactly.

You have it like in the US, have it done it. But, so actually, being an insane channel, they could do a long, a lot of really risque stuff. But I also worked in their documentary department. And one of the things they wanted to do was stories about teens, because it was kind of youth-oriented. And when I started doing stories about teens,

I just found a lot of the stories had a political edge, because it was about teens being beaten up by the cops, which is a real problem. Teens, you know, being sent to the army is national service in Ukraine. And, you know, there's a terrible problem with hazing in Russia, like really bad. I mean, a lot of suiciders story about suicides

among cobscripts. And these shows rated well because they were about people's lives and people enjoyed them and young kids enjoyed them. But suddenly that made it political. And when I pitched the next one, they were like, go and do one about footballers' wives. So it's everyone kind of decide to themselves and everyone senses where the lines are. And it's much more a case of self-censorship than that sense, rather than anything else. People just instinctively know that they've gone too far. You were just talking about the compulsory or the military service.

That was another really interesting part of your book. You wrote, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that molds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service. And I wanted to see if you would speak to, like, explain to us what those rituals of avoidance are and how they shape those people's relationship with the state. Sure, sure. I mean, I always find this fascinating as well. It's a great question.

So, you know, compulsory national military service is one of the basic ways that many states build loyalty and identity. So Israel, clearly, probably the most obvious example of a state that people really become Israeli when they're in the army. So Russia has compulsory national service. Certainly in Soviet times, going through the army was a big, big deal and a big part of you. Really, you know, in a sense being broken by the states. That's where you were broken in and humiliated a lot, and you became a good Soviet citizen. Nowadays, there's still compulsory national service,

but everyone who can gets out of it. But some people, if you're studying, if you're a student at the university, that's one way of getting out. And actually, there's all these, again, there's some of lack of, all these pseudo, sort of higher educational institutions that get founded, that you just pay some money and say you're studying there,

and that gets you off. But not everyone can, you know, that's a lot of money. imagine like just buying a college degree. It's going to be pretty expensive. So a lot of people can't afford that. So what do they have to do? They have to pretend. They have to get like a letter from a hospital saying that they're physically unfit.

You know, that they, you know, you've got asthma or diabetes or whatever. And that basically involves both the young person and their parent, essentially kind of being sucked into a world of corruption. even if they never wanted to be corrupt. Because you firstly have got to find a doctor who's going to give you this false piece of paper. You've got to find it. You've got to pay him money. That it's not, I mean, this is where Russia is so much fun.

The doctor won't just give it to you. You still have to come into hospital and spend a week there pretending to be really ill. So already a young person of 18 is already learning how to survive in a society, he's going to fake it. A bit like later when he grows up, He's going to pretend to vote.

And everybody knows that they're pretending, but everyone kind of plays along, because this is the way society is formed over a long period of time. So you lie there pretending to be ill. Then you get out. And you still have to go to the military place where they will test you again. You'll give them the letter. They'll test you again. But, you know, they go along with it as well. You usually have to give another bribe there.

And so, you know, to get out of military service, you've gone through this whole kind of sort of labyrinth. of faking it and bribery and corruption, which actually makes you the ideal citizen of contemporary Russia, because all your life you're going to be sort of faking your voting in elections, faking your taxes, you know, you're part of this game, but where you're actually very dependent on the state, because once you've faked it, firstly psychologically, you're really, you know, you're a little bit like that.

Corruption, always a great way. It always corrupts the person who's, you know, at the bottom of it, giving the bribe as well as the person demanding it. And you kind of learn to it. think it's normal. You know, if you're already faking it from the age of 18, then you know, it's no big deal to then kind of like go and pretend that you're, you know, voting in a real election or pretend your payable taxes when you're not. We had a guest just a couple of weeks ago, Mark Galiati, who was talking about the fact that Russian military conscription is only

for one year. And that, in fact, it's very, very hard to train anyone and then turn them into good soldiers and he said basically you have like three months of someone you can actually use on a battlefield before they're gone. So I guess what you're saying would actually almost explain that. It's about breaking people in. Mark is the world's biggest exeter on the Russian military. I mean I so I actually have no idea what happens on the battlefield. But it would definitely explain that it's much more about breaking people in. But the idea is very much to socialize people, make them part of the states, rather than make them part of the states.

Rather than make them integrate soldiers. All right, Peter, what do you see are the, what are the weaknesses of this system that you've described, and are the cracks kind of showing? The weakness is that it's got nothing to do of reality. It's a pseudo, everything is fake. Putin is like this Tori Ador,

this bullfighter with this red cape of corruption and propaganda through which you avoid reality. And that's why everyone in Russia says, like, when will reality catch up with Russia? Because this, like, world of, you know, truth is actually quite a useful thing. You know, there's a reason democracies allegedly try to stick to, you know, a real process. Makes us, you know, face up to the problems in the country. Elections make us sort of like checks, checks how well administration's action

you work and so on and so forth. And so it's just a based on pretence and fakery, at one point should hit the iceberg of reality. I'm really mixing my metaphor. So every time Putin comes near reality, he finds a way out there so far. So in 2012, there were mass protests calling for real democracy, a real modernization plan, and he looked in trouble. And he invented a fake war. He invented fake fascists in Ukraine and this kind of complete enough solution, but it was efficient to get his ratings back up.

Now, you know, that's kind of expanded into the war with ISIS. I mean, ISIS, of course, the very real enemy. It does need to be dealt with. But again, he's found a new story. narrative that distracts from the sad reality of the way Russian economy and society is going. There is no domestic policy anymore in Russian TV. I worked on an EU project recently about Russian TV and we did like an analysis of a content analysis of the news and stories on Russian news and current affairs. And there's hardly anything about social problems.

It's all, when we were doing it was Ukraine, it was all the global conspiracy against Russia, a civil war in Ukraine, the whole world is going to hell, only Putin can save it. It's like this movie about a world disintegrates into chaos with Putin as a sort of Batman-type hero to save it, not a mention of sort of like, you know, hospitals or anything like that. So every time we think he's going to hit reality, he thinks of something bigger and better. And there's still a little big stories that he can think of. You can still do a big missile crisis somewhere. There was the Arctic War, which they were playing with.

They go on and on and on, which when he runs out of stories, but he's like Shehrazada in the Arabian nights. Thinks of another story. As soon as we think he's going to get executed, no, he pulls another one out of the hand, which is very much based on TV, which comes back to our first thing. TV's obviously sort of the satanic machine that cooks up all these new stories. They don't need to be that related to reality. With ISIS, they are related to reality.

in Ukraine it was, you know, hallucinated a war into reality. So they just need to do good stories. So there you go. He's like a huge TV producer, a huge entertainment TV producer. Like I was a tiny entertainment TV producer in Russia. He's like the great entertainment TV producer.

Well, that sounds like a terrific point to stop. I don't think we're going to get much better than that. Thank you very, very much, Peter, for joining us. Oh, and let me mention the name of the book again. Again, I think the title's fantastic. The book is, nothing is true. and everything is possible. So check it out.

Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. Matthew Galt co-hosts and wrangles the guests and generally keeps things jugging. The show is produced by me, Bethelhab Day. If you like War College and want to support us, the best way is to go into iTunes and leave us a rating and review. It really helps other people find the show. You can also follow us on Twitter.

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