Offline with Jon Favreau - Are Russians Buying Putin’s Propaganda?

Episode Date: April 24, 2022

Russian propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev is a journalist and former Russian television producer who talks to Jon about the distortion of truth and reality inside Putin’s Russia. Jon asks Peter about his recent interview with Ukrainian President Zelensky, how Putin’s propaganda apparatus is reaching a crossroads, and how the Trump/Murdoch propaganda machine mirrors a lot of what he’s seen in Russia.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

if you were to switch on Soviet television, and there are only two TV channels, you would have seen this kind of like single, very boring male head telling you how great everything was, that there's one truth that the Communist Party controls, and there would have been no debates and no entertainment of any real kind of worth. If you were to switch on Putin TV while I lived there,

it would have been the opposite. You would have seen debating shows, which were really quite influenced by Jerry Springer. They were like full of like, there'll be some crazy right-wing dude, you know, screaming about, you know, the need for ethno-nationalism and some old sort of red-faced communist guy

going, no, no, the working class is all that matters. And some always either very ugly or a feat liberal who was saying, no, no, we should be more like the West. And it took you a while to work out that actually all these parties were controlled by the Kremlin, in some cases created by the Kremlin, or definitely given very, very strict ways that they could operate by the Kremlin. I mean, it sounds like when Fox News has liberals on. So the way Tucker Carlson does that, by the way, is very similar.

Tucker Carlson is very interesting in that sense out of the Fox panoply in that he does welcome a debate. He just has an idiot, sort of a very foolish, easy to defeat caricature of a liberal on who then, yeah, becomes the enemy that you want to define yourself against. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is journalist and Russian propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev.

Some of the central questions about Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine are also the most difficult to answer. What do the Russian people actually know about the war? What do they think about it? What do they think about Putin? And perhaps most importantly, what would it take for them to turn on him? Peter has been thinking about the answers to these questions a lot lately. And he has a pretty unique perspective.

He was born in Kiev, where his parents were political dissidents. When he was just a year old, they fled Soviet-occupied Ukraine after his father was arrested by the KGB for proliferating anti-Soviet literature. Peter would go on to grow up in West Germany and then the United Kingdom. But in 2001, Peter moved to Moscow, and over the next 10 years, he made a name for himself as a reality television producer. It was at the same time that a former KGB officer was quickly consolidating power as Russia's new head of state. Peter would realize, in the stories he put on air and in the offices of his network, that Putin's propaganda apparatus reached far beyond what he could imagine. He went on to write two books about his experiences.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which details his time in Russia, and This is Not Propaganda, which is about the ways that autocrats like Orban, Bolsonaro, and Trump develop their playbooks from Putin's Russia. Today, Peter lives in the U.S. and teaches at Johns Hopkins, where he's one of the world's leading experts on Russian propaganda. Peter and I met over Zoom this last Wednesday to talk all things Russian propaganda. As you'll hear, he was a bit jet-lagged for this interview, because the day before, he had returned from Ukraine, where he joined a team with The Atlantic as they interviewed President Zelensky.

Peter and I talked about his interview with the Ukrainian president, how Putin's propaganda apparatus is reaching a crossroads, and how the Trump-Murdoch propaganda machine mirrors a lot of what he's seen in Russia. We also talked about how to pierce Putin's information bubble and communicate directly with the Russian people. And we tried to answer one of the most important questions of our time. In the global struggle between democracy and autocracy, how do we win the information war? As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. And please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Peter Pomerantsev.

Peter Pomerantsev, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. I know you've just come back from a very long trip. You have a fairly unique background. You're the son of Ukrainian refugees who fled the KGB in 1978 when you were a year old, spent 10 years as a television producer in Moscow, wrote two books about Russian disinformation and propaganda. And now you're a journalist who's just returned from Kiev, where you were born, and where you just met with President Zelensky. How have you been processing what Putin and the Russians have done to your homeland over the last two months? It's been two months. Oh, my God. It feels basically like one long nightmarish day. It really doesn't feel like two months. My God. So the way to process it, and I guess it's the same for anyone who's in a sense of, you know, quite a lot of tension is just to focus on action and actually i've stopped

asking people involved in this in this conflict how they're doing i just asked them what they're doing so as long as you focus on action then you're fine and thankfully my slightly bizarre skill set is actually quite well suited for me convincing myself I'm doing something useful whether I am I don't know but but definitely planning a lot of large projects in the kind of intersection between media policy justice and um and bringing down Putin what made you take this most recent trip to Ukraine? So there's two reasons. One, I was actually going with the Atlantic. So Jeff Goldberg and my colleague Anne Applebaum

were interviewing Zelensky, and I basically gatecrashed. I'd been to Kiev a couple of weeks before that, so I kind of knew the best way to get in and out. I have a lot of friends who've ended up working in and around the presidential administration, former journalists largely. And also, I speak fluent Russian, and Russian and Ukrainian isn't perfect. So they decided it was useful to have me along. So I was like the third person in the room room and I will get to do my own essay based on bits of the interview that I asked about propaganda we asked them a lot about propaganda and what to do about it so all

of your listeners have to read the incredible interview write-up that Anne and Jeff Goldberg did um it's fantastic also like that was a turnaround of 24 hours. I mean, I'm an okay journalist, but seeing Anne and Jeff at work, you're like kind of humbled. You're like, oh my God, you just went into the country, did that interview, turned it around into beautiful narrative prose within, you know, the time it took me to sort of have a few beers and nurse a hangover. So seeing them at work was just like, wow, I'm still like working on the first paragraph of my piece. It's like, boom, it's out there. So, but my one will hopefully be sort of out soon as well.

A very different sort of beast. Just really drilling down into like, how do we reach the Russian population? Which we asked him a lot because, you know, Zelensky was a medium successful sort of celebrity in Russia. Not super successful, but medium successful. Definitely thought that he understood Russians and now just finds that this country, which he thought he knew is murdering his people. that really stuck with me, where Zelensky talks about how Russian citizens are processing this war. He says, it's the North Korean virus. Putin has invited people into this information bunker, so to speak, without their knowledge, and they live there. It is, as the Beatles sang,

a yellow submarine. To what extent does that characterization reflect your experience living and working as a reality TV producer in Russia, I think, from 2000 to 2010? I'd just love to go back and start there before we get to the present. I think Zelensky said a lot of things, and he said things which I thought were actually more interesting than that. That's kind of the classic interpretation, that people live in an information environment that's getting more and more shrunken, and therefore their kind of worldviews are changing with pace, you know, due to that change in the environment. And obviously, look, that's a huge factor, you know.

But there's other bits in the interview when he talks much more about choice, which I thought was much more interesting when he talks about what Russians, a lot of Russians are doing is pushing responsibility away. They're doing that classic thing, which I think is kind of called splitting. When you push out, push away doubt, push away the bits in your head which are saying, oh, there's something really bad going on. Because it's dangerous to take those thoughts on because it would mean you have to do something and that is directly dangerous. It's unpleasant. And for many other reasons.

And he talks actually in a way that I think pretty much a psychoanalyst would about the need for Russians to admit their responsibility. So there it's much more about choice. So I don't know if North Korea is the best parallel, but definitely can make a parallel with the Soviet Union because that's a more obvious reference. Compared to the Soviet Union, you have access to media. Even the internet shutdowns around Facebook and Instagram are pretty poor at the moment. You

can get around it with mirror sites, let alone VPNs. So there are plenty of ways around. There have been for many, many years, plenty of ways around to get good information. So it's much, much more important, I think, than the technical barriers are the psychological barriers. And that's much, much more important. And look, I live in the US at the moment. I'm based at Johns Hopkins University. I mean, look at America. I mean, you have 30, 40% of this country where people choose to live in an alternative reality where the election was stolen. So we shouldn't be that amazed that Russians are, so many Russians are in denial about what's going on in Ukraine. And in that sense, the challenge that we face in communicating with the Russian

people is just another version of the challenge we face in America, communicating with people who think the election was stolen or that pedophiles, um, you know, TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country. It's the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism far subtler than 20th century strains. Can you talk about why you believe that to be true about television and get into how that subtler form of authoritarianism actually works in practice? Sure. So listen, my book is very much about, it ends in 2014. So it's really much, it's kind of a portrait of Russian society under Putin in the first iteration of Putinism, which I think has really become a model for, I don't know, what do you want to call them, like hybrid authoritarians anywhere. So whether it's talking about Modi or Erdogan or Orban or Vucic or Bolsonaro, all these guys, I think, looked at what Putin managed to do then with a lot of admiration. Because what he managed to do was preserve the veneer of democracy. They were from parties and there was a certain amount of media pluralism.

And it was a relatively free society, certainly in terms of travel, it was completely free. And your private life was left up to you, nobody trying to crawl into your bedroom or your friendships. But at the same time, it was a centralized authoritarian system. So getting those two things balanced is a real trick. And I see kind of replicated all over the world. Putin's now doing something else. Putin's now trying to flip into a sort of Stalinism 2.0, and we'll see whether he manages it. I don't think he will actually, but he's in a different place now. So I was kind of describing Weimar, Moscow, and there's a lot of references to sort of 1920s Berlin in my book and Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret, the movie, and all that kind of stuff.

So that's why I was describing the kind of, you know, the Baroque morally decadent fun bit that precedes the really evil totalitarian bit um so i mean i mean to summarize i suppose let's put it into one image if you were to switch on soviet television there are only two tv channels you would have seen this kind of like single very boring male head telling you how great everything was that there's one truth that the Communist Party controls, and there would have been no debate and no entertainment of any real kind of worth. If you were to switch on Putin TV while I lived there, it would have been the opposite. You would

have seen debating shows which were really quite influenced by Jerry Springer. They were full of like, there'll be some crazy right-wing dude screaming about the need for ethno-nationalism and some old sort of red-faced communist guy going, no, no, the working class is all that matters. And some always either very ugly or a feat liberal who was saying, no, no, we should be more like the West. And it took you a while to work out that actually all these parties were controlled by the Kremlin, in some cases created by the Kremlin, or definitely given very, very strict ways that they could operate by the Kremlin in order to, A, make society more interesting.

They wanted there to be the sense of a bit of pluralism. They also wanted various desires in society soaked into the process. But at the end of the day, the parties were always loyal. When it came to any important decision, they always went with the government. And most important, even though they soaked up various sort of minority interests in the country, they were all kind of there to, in the words of one of Putin's spin doctors, show that there is no alternative to Putin. So you look to these guys and you're like, yeah, I don't want any of these in charge. You know, they, you know.

So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like when Fox News has liberals on. So the way Tucker Carlson does that, by the way, is very similar. Tucker Carlson is very interesting in that in that sense out of the Fox panoply and that he does welcome a debate he just has an idiot or sort of a very foolish easy to defeat caricature of of a liberal on who then yeah becomes the enemy that you want to define yourself against yeah i mean one of the reasons i'm so interested in what it was like when you were there is because you mentioned this sort of shift that putin is now making from authoritarianism to totalitarianism. And you also mentioned that what the U.S. is like, and I'm sort of wondering how likely this shift is to succeed by trying to figure out what the baseline was before this war. And like, when you were there, what did the average consumer of Russian television

generally believe to be true about the Russian government, Russia's place in the world, the West, the US, like what were some of the worldviews at the time? So here you've used a series of words, like the word belief, which are deeply rooted in our idea of the individual and our education. So in a democracy, you're asked all the time from a kid, what do you think? What do you think? It's really important. Like, you know, the top schools pride themselves in America and Britain, top universities to get someone to think for themselves. You know, that's our idea of the self and of the individual and the idea of a public sphere

where you have strong opinions and you represent them in the soviet union and in putin's russia that is a not the way the education system is structured you know firstly you learn things by rote and repeat them back there is no idea that you should have your own opinion that's bizarre and that is certainly not something that will get you very far in society. So this idea of a coherent self that has strong public opinions is not something that's like a functional sort of like model to survive by, let alone valued in the education system. You're, you know, the way to survive is to adapt. So you can think one thing in the morning, if that helps you get by another thing in the afternoon, you might well have private beliefs, but they're stowed away very, very, very far away. So all those things that you just said, they're not really relevant in dictatorship generally,

and certainly not one where people grew up in the Soviet Union, where you lived in a sort of double thing, was what Orwell called it. You said and believed, I say that in inverted commas, one thing when you went to the Komsomol meeting and you lived in that, and then you came home and said the exact opposite and you lived in something else. And you kind of lived with two or three selves permanently. And a lot of Russian literature is around this. A lot of, a lot of kind of sociology talks about this as well. And then that sort of intensified in many ways over the nineties and two thousands where people who had been communists became liberals, then became kind of almost kind of representatives of the mafia state, then became nationalist conservatives, then became imperialists and all that sort of thing. However, one thing that is constant is a conspiratorial worldview. Anything that's conspiracy has kind of replaced ideology. And it is very much the vision of a dog-eat-dog world

where there are powers on high that you can't see who are controlling everything. And that therefore you have very little free will. You can't change anything. If there's a meta-narrative to the Kremlin propaganda, it's that. It's this conspiratorial worldview. And like all propaganda, that works really well because it resonates with people's sense of the world. It resonates with living in a country where there really are secret decisions made behind closed doors, but where historically you are quite helpless and where change can be so dizzying and so disorientating, you cling on to conspiratorial explanations, and also where conspiracy serves to give a sense of us and them, a sense of community. So that is a constant, and that was definitely there when I was there.

I suppose what's changed now is that it's become much, much more aggressive. And that, again, is a product of a propaganda move. When I was in Russia, the idea was still very much that Russia is a part of Europe, is a part of the West, but also you should aspire to that. So again, let's bring it down to simple things. On TV, the most popular TV presenters dressed in a very Western way. They were very sophisticated. They spoke languages. They were aspirational. Obama, basically. Inspirational idea of what you're meant to be.

From around 2012, 13, when the protests started against Putin, 11, 12, and then the invasion of Ukraine, a different type of TV presenter is elevated. They'd always been there. It's just a case of who becomes elevated by the system. And it's ones whose method of speaking is very, very angry, who are full of sort of latent or often not latent violence, who speak in ways that are very recognisable to Russians. They speak like the colonel in the army

humiliating his soldiers, or the boss humiliating his underlings, or the husband bullying his wife. The way they dress is out of the kind of the dark side of Russian fairy tales. There's one Solovyov who dresses like an evil sorcerer from Russian fairy tales in a very, very kind of, that's a very thought through way. So, and there the whole point is to legitimize your most sadistic and aggressive emotions and to say, it's okay to feel them and it's okay to do them. Same time, the Kremlin passes laws legitimizing domestic violence against women. It's a real kind of aggressive step. Let's legitimize the nastiest feelings people have. So again, some people say that was the point of Trump as well, that he lets you be the violent narcissist that you'd always wanted to be. I know, John, you've worked in government. It's very interesting looking at the polling, the inside polling that the Kremlin does. It's all about emotion. There'll be four questions about opinion and everything else is an emotion

battery. They're trying to always find out, and a resentment battery. It's a big battery of like, what are your resentments? What are your feelings? And then a little bit about, are you for or against this policy? It's all about emotion. They're completely fixated on being able to manipulate the emotional kind of swells in society. I find it so interesting that you talked about sort of the conspiratorial worldview. It also sounds to me like an extremely cynical view of the world that sort of the game is rigged. And so we might as well not even try to change anything. And it sort of leads to a disengagement. But as Putin is trying to shift to a more totalitarian state, it seems like you wouldn't want as much disengagement.

You'd want more the type of feeling that I can sort of let my darkest impulses run wild because you sort of want to engage people in some sort of totalitarian mission. And I do think you made the parallel to Trump. There were two sides of Trump, right? That Trump makes people think that everything is rigged, that everyone's a crook. So it's not even worth it. You might as well be disengaged. But he also lets people's darkest impulses take hold. And I wonder how those two different feelings and impulses sort of play on each other. So brilliant. I think we've got right to the dilemma that Putin is facing.

So the way the system works before was that it was a pyramid of mutual interest based around corruption. So from the traffic cop taking his bribe on the street corner through to the minister right at the top everyone got to organize their own corrupt schemes you had a lot of freedom to do that and once a week you said putin is great hurrah um that was the system in 2014 that system got more unpleasant and tighter and there was less money. So the corruption got nastier, actually, got bigger, because before the tax guys would come around and take 50% of your profits and then you didn't pay any tax.

Now they take 70%. I'm giving an idea. But there was still enough money circulating in the system for most people to not want to rock the boat too much now it's going to be a lot harder i mean we don't exactly know how the sanctions are going to play out but a lot of the air is going to go out the system putin is going to have enough money unless we do an oil and gas embargo to pay off the security services however to just keep them going so he can rely on them as his dictatorial

crutch but overall he's going to have to shift from this pyramid of corrupt mutual interest to a kind of a neo-totalitarian model where people are following his captaincy should shall we say, based on the mix of fear and inspiration. And it's like, I don't know how much fear and how much inspiration. The moment there's a bit of inspiration, I don't know how much depth that inspiration has. Firstly, we do see these sort of attitudes to the war, 80% support. I mean, look, polling in a dictatorship is very dodgy. But again, I don't even know if that's the right polling. So when you match the feelings to the attitudes, that's where it gets interesting. The stuff that I've seen in a few weeks old showed that the feelings people had in support of the war were quite thin. They were kind of based on pride and something else.

Like, it's quite thin feelings. When you look to the people who opposed the war, they had this cocktail of feelings like shame, disgust, rage. I mean, you know, emotional polling, you're looking for a cocktail of emotions. So the people were approving of the war, but in a really, really superficial way. And as you say, you know, there's no spontaneous demonstrations in favor of the war. There's two big ones that they organize themselves at stadiums in Moscow, which is people bust in and probably having a good time. I'm not saying they're against being there, but they didn't organize it.

There is nothing in the system that shows people spontaneously coming out into the streets and cheering. This is not, you know, the launch of the First World War in Berlin or something. And that's always been their Achilles heel. I think you put it very, very well yourself that by building a system on conspiratorial thinking where the aim was to keep people passive and at home and drinking beer and feeling they can't change anything and therefore they needed Putin to take care of them. They now need people to motivate themselves around the ideology or this whatever you know thing you want to call that they're pushing um and that's hard that's really like trying to switch to a different system

and then you know once the inspiration goes and i expect it'll start going over the next few months then the fear kicks in and you know it's equal parts inspiration and fear and then they'll have to start increasing the fear and then the question becomes do they actually have a repressive machinery that is going to be up to the task because the moment they have no space in their prisons there's literally no space in the prisons they can't arrest a million people because they don't know where to put them so what are they going to start building gulags? They might, but I don't know if that's going to go down very well. You know, you know, if he wants to do Stalinism, he's gonna, he's gonna have to like, arrest and kill a hell of a lot of people. And it's completely unclear whether the system can actually pull that off.

Well, that then makes the central question, how Russians are interpreting the information they're getting about this war. I won't use the term beliefs, but views about the war. And, you know, it's interesting you said earlier that as much as they're trying to shut down social media, there's still ways for Russians to get good information. What line from the Kremlin do you think is most effective in getting people to support this war? Do you think it's, these are all Nazis in Ukraine? Do you think it's, we had no choice but to do this? Like, what's the propaganda line that seems to, you know, keep most people on board here? So two things, John. One, it's clearly the one about we had no choice.

The Nazis thing is just like, what the hell do Russians mean by Nazis? I mean, it's like Nazis just anyone Russians don't like. It's like, it's whatever. It's not about that. It's the other one because that takes away responsibility.

It's not our fault. Yeah, we had no choice. It basically shows that there's some sort of weird global conspiracy that we have to fight, which is vague and you don't understand it, but it's scary. So it plays into all those things and it gives people an excuse. I've been looking at the Google searches, looking at data analytics and search engine analytics is much more worthwhile than attitudinal polling.

And in the days after Buccia, and this is open, anyone can check this, the top searches, I think it was the second top search on Google in Russia was what happened in Buccia. People are looking. So it's definitely that one. It's the... And that taps into what we were just talking about, that sense of passive acquiescence. However, and this is tough for me as a kind of, I don't know, emigre Ukrainian, but at the end of the day,

just as a human being to admit. But sadly, because imperialism is so sort of hardwired into the Russian tradition, another bloody war is not a big deal. And frankly, opinions about the war are not the important question. Now, that's very, very hard to take, but I think that might be the brutal truth. The question, the polarizing issue that Putin has created for himself is whether Russians are happy with his version of splendid isolation. Now, officially, they are officially saying we don't need anyone. We don't need anyone in the world. We don't need their football. We don't need that tennis. We don't need that technology. We don't need that films.

We are Russia. We are different. But I'd be very interested to see their Google and Yandex searches right now and their Netflix downloads. So he has set up a new idea of the country based on isolation. Officially, people are going on along with it as the months go by. I would be focused on that if I were doing clever polling in Russia, I would be asking questions about that. How do you feel about this isolation? Do you want Russia to be part of the world? And then actually getting into behaviors rather than attitudes. I mean, now, where do you really want to go on holiday? And what trainers do you really want to wear? And what do you really want to do with your children's futures? And that is what he set up. And there, I think his percentages are not going to be very strong.

And it's not even about travel and superficial things like that. It's really about identity and a kind of self-perception. So if people might approve of the war, I mean, war is just such a big part of Russian history. There's another war, big deal. It's not about that. It's about where he's taking Russia. And I don't think people are anything as happy about it as as he thinks they are as he transitions from

propaganda to outright censorship social media you know uh canceling talk shows with hosts who've spoken out against the war how much of a risk internal risk, do you think he's taking being this blunt and obvious? Or is the point simply to send Russians a message that they should be afraid of their government? Very good point. So propaganda isn't just about messaging, it's about signaling, especially in these sorts of systems.

It's a way of saying, these are the new rules. If you want to in in my russia you've got to follow these rules and by the way they're still saying like you know i mean the internet firewall is very very leaky and that might be because a lot of russian businesses depend on instagram and they you know they've officially sort of like blocked blocked Instagram, but you can use mirror sites to get to it. So it's almost like these are the rules. You can maybe do your little Instagram business. We're not going to get too involved, but we need loyalty at the top. And don't you dare, you know, start supporting Navalny on Instagram, the opposition politician.

So a lot of it is about signaling. And yeah, no, I think I think a lot of it is about saying exactly that a question i keep asking myself every time i see these mass graves or or read about the horrific rape and tortures like what kind of sick deranged information environment leads a russian soldier to carry out those atrocities have you thought about about that? So I have thought about that, and I'm actually doing a lot of thinking about that, because I wonder, John, whether we should ask the question, when we look at war crimes and crimes against humanity and atrocities, are the propagandists legally to blame? That's a really tough one. I mean, historically, there's the case of Rwanda, where you did have, you know, a radio

presenter literally saying, take a gun, go to this place, shoot these people. That's like, it wasn't even incentive to violence, it was instruction to violence. Then if you go back to Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, the most kind of the vilest of the anti-Semitic magazines, was found guilty of crimes against humanity. Most propagandists get off because it's very hard to do that link between the crime and the propaganda. But I wonder whether we have to start thinking about this again. To what extent is there actually a direct connection, especially as Russian propagandists describe themselves as part of the military machine,

get medals from the military for their role in the operations and see themselves as part of military operations. So that's, you know, I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I would love to sit down with some lawyers and really start thinking through those issues. When we're talking about these atrocities, the rape and murder, I'm actually not sure that's directly where you tie it to the propaganda. I've just come back from Ukraine. I went from village to village to village, which have just been liberated from Russian occupation. And it's very clear that while you have the same mix

of alcohol, violence, and really just, you know, some of the soldiers have a past in rape and pillage. I mean, that's, you know, they're people who've done this before at home. You know, now they've just been put into the army. So it's very clear that in some villages, a commander said, go for it. And in others, the commander said, no. Because it's the same people in one village, they didn't do it.

They only shot 12 or 13 people. I mean, I'm saying that's where we're at. They shot people who they thought were a danger to keeping hold of the village. They didn't go about doing mass rapes. That means a commander said, don't do it. And if in another one, there's a systemic thing, there must be an order. It doesn't just happen. It means a commander said, we're doing this here to humiliate them, to scare the hell out of them. So that would tell me actually that without a doubt, the propaganda sets up the frame that this is an existential conflict and everything is possible, there is still someone

taking a very, very specific command. The propaganda plays a huge role, but I actually think here there's been a command. The propaganda plays a role, I think, maybe in something else, and that is in pretty much more specific things like, you know, Russian propaganda is constantly doing these stories about there being chemical weapons in Ukraine planted by the US. That's a way to set up a situation where the Russians will use chemical weapons. So that's a shaping operation that is leading to the use of chemical weapons, which is obviously illegal. So I think that's when we can start getting into their direct involvement. But look, having said that, of course, there's nonstop framing of

Ukrainians as somehow as fascists, as Nazis, as subhuman in some way, all that classic stuff is happening. Whether that is how you're going to describe what happened at Bucha as the main cause of it. I don't know, having been there, my sense is that there's a more direct command. But I don't know. Look, we have to investigate it. You know, this is just speculation. You wrote a second book, This Is Not Propaganda, and you spent a lot of time talking about the Russian disinformation apparatus in the wake of the invasion of Crimea. You wrote about internet and social media a lot in that book, which I think is relevant today. There was one line in particular, you said, it was meant to take us further into the future.

Instead, it brought us back to the past. Misogyny, we thought we conquered. Regimes, thought laid to rest. What do you think it is about social media that brought us back to the past? So I think it's worth thinking about, you're talking about the past, so I think it's worth thinking about you're talking about the past so i think we have to sort of think about this question of time which in my extreme jet lag is a concept i'm really struggling with because as far as i'm concerned it's 8 p.m and time for a glass of wine and a and a really nice uh steak but apparently it's only 12 30 so i'm really it's 8 p.m. somewhere. Yeah, exactly. So you mentioned time. I think media helps us shape time. So I grew up in a world

where newspapers still existed. Physical newspapers shaped time. They came out every day. You know, there was a new, here is today's news. They shaped space as well because it was very clear. Here's the national news.

Here's the international news. Here's the celeb pages. You know, they ordered both our space, but most importantly, our sense of time. And my father was a broadcaster, a radio guy, but, you know, he had to do the news reviews. And so we'd have all these old newspapers at home, which would discolor with time. They'd go yellowy. So you'd almost have like an archaeology of time stacked up in newspapers. And newspapers gave you that, that sense of time and chronology, and I suppose of heading somewhere as well. The first thing to say about social media, it completely destroys our sense of time. I mean, on Facebook, you can't tell is the news now? Is it yesterday? Is it tomorrow? You get news from two years ago swimming up at you. So instead of time,

everything is actually ordered, not around geographical space, but around you. You're kind of the center of everything and the algorithm is swirling around you and your psyche and your desires and your habits. So it's completely distorted or changed. It's changed our sense of time and our sense of where we are in the world in relation to other things. And it's broken them. So I think that's very, very important. And I guess part of that then is, you know, when we had time, we had an idea of progress and we had an idea of things that we'd left behind. And as time has broken, social media also becomes the place where, you know, time becomes disordered and all these things come back.

I mean, misogyny is an interesting one, but the really interesting things are something like ISIS. I mean, ISIS is something that is sort of meant to be a medieval caliphate that swims up through the internet and then bursts into reality. You know, we're full of, in this world where we have all these, a sort of, is this the right word? I mean, asynchronous, I don't know if that's even the right word, sort of like, you know, these strange phenomenon, like ISIS, the other one is the DNR, the Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine, where they try to recreate this kind of Soviet dismal land, this weird theme park of the Soviet Union in contemporary form. Again,

kind of like symptomatic of a world where time is broken. And I think social media is part of that. I mean, I think media reshapes a lot of our sense of the world generally. Yeah, I wonder if it also, I mean, it tends to flatten really important stories and and sort of distort our sense of proportion and and our attention i mean i was thinking even when this war started like how long are we all going to be able to pay attention and make this the biggest story in the world as it should be and then you know you go on social media yesterday and images of horror from ukraine are you scroll through those and right next to them are everyone yelling about some TikTok story or some, you know, celebrity thing, or everyone's

talking, you know, a couple weeks ago, everyone's talking about the Oscars and a slap. And you're like, what does it do to people to have all of these really intense, big, horrific stories next to fluff and garbage. Yeah, no, completely. It's completely, we had a hierarchy of meaning. This is important. This is less important. Here's the silly pages at the back of the newspaper.

And now it's all together. Yeah, it's broken time. It's broken a hierarchy of significance, a hierarchy of expertise. I mean, we should be much clearer. Here is an expert who knows what they're talking about. And here is Glenn Greenwald. And now they're all kind of together in one smorgasbord. Right. I wonder if dictators like Putin use this

to their advantage. We talk a lot about disinformation, but in some ways you see authoritarians and, you know, Trump did this as well, sort of flood people with too much information. There's too much crap that they're peddling. Yeah. And I think that's done with a lot of intentionality. Look at it from the point of view of the propagandists or the wannabe or real authoritarian. Back in the day, you could censor stuff. You could just literally say like, you know, you could just block off the radio and jam it. Nowadays, you can't censor stuff. Stuff is going to get through. So your only way to kind of censor it and control it is by flooding it.

I think it's a very conscious tactic. The Chinese do it in their own way as well. I mean, I think that's very, very deliberate. And it's not necessarily the leaders who are thinking of it. It'll be the propaganda apparatus who's like, how do we deal with the situation? People like Tim Wu,

who's a professor at Columbia and is now an advisor to Biden on these matters, calls it censorship through noise. I think that's obvious. And the problem is, what do we do about it? Because when there was censorship, you could call on the Declaration of Human Rights and say, censorship is stopping my right to freedom of expression. Nowadays, when you have people like maria reza in the philippines saying hold on i'm being censored through noise through this like attack of trolls and bots and static where does that fit philosophically and legally because you know

there is no law against that uh there is no like all our idea is about constricting information is the problem but here's there's an overabundance of it. And we don't have the legal kind of the philosophical arguments to really compete with that. Yeah. And the social media platforms also tend to do that as well. It's the amplification of the information that sometimes is the problem, not just the free speech itself. How much have you thought about whether it's possible to break through Putin's information ecosystem and reach the Russian people with competing messages? Are there vulnerabilities in the system he's built? So I've got to sort that out by Monday, because I've got to file my story by Monday. Well, we can talk it through now. We could say. I'll tell that to the editor.

It's like, hi, Joni, Jon says I should write this. Such a good question. It's such a good question. There are many, many, many, many, many vulnerabilities. Let's start with one thing. There's no infrastructure to do this through. Even before we get to the methodology and what we want to do or try to do, for better or worse, in the Second World War and in the Cold War, America had the US Information Agency, a very faulty being, but that was its job. And it funded independent media and not so

independent media and different cultural things. And look, we can argue about was it all ethical or good but at least there was a sense that you had to do it and and the guy who ran the u.s information agency had access to the highest levels of power now that doesn't exist that architecture doesn't exist these institutions don't exist um so that's that's a real problem that architecture doesn't exist, these institutions don't exist. So that's a real problem. That's a real problem. Our theory of change, to use the language of kind of that sort of bit of the world, is sort of, if it's anything, it's like, let a thousand seeds bloom. Let's just, you know, donors will help some independent Russian media and maybe one day some of that will get through and one day it'll help the public sphere. If we have a public sphere in Russia, it's that kind of approach.

While Russia sees this as what it describes as information war, they have a lot of intentionality behind what they do. They have their troll farms and their state media and their corrupt assets. The Chinese have that and the Iranians have that. And increasingly the Saudis and the Emiratis have that and even the Hungarians have that now. And the big democracies don't. And I understand why we don't want to be like them. We don't want to create sort of troll farms or a state media that's like Russia today. And that's quite right. But we have to start thinking about what is the democratic alternative? What's our democratic communications infrastructure? You know, if they have troll farms, do we have online town halls

where American officials and celebrities talk to Russians online? You know, what is the democratic tech version? You know, what does our technology look like, which has democratic values baked in? And then what are the institutions that make sure it happens? So that's one piece of the puzzle. There is no one to do it. I mean, it's not that hard. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a video addressing the people that got, okay, can you please verify this number? I think 15 million views on Telegram in Russia. I mean, huge.

But it can't be one Arnie. It's got to be like nonstop. It's got to have feedback it's going to lead towards a dialogue with the russian people about you know the future of russia and the world do you guys really want to be this isolated neo-fascist um bunker or do you want to be part of you know the world as a great european nation that has to be non-stop that has to be institutionalized it can't just be like arnie doing something and and then that's it um and we used to be called public diplomacy this stuff or even celebrity diplomacy i don't know so something as simple as that um would already be a big step forward

because russians have this really schizophrenic attitude to the west into america it's kind of the thing they define themselves against but desperately want its attention i mean if i was getting psychoanalytical where you know you can look at family dynamics in russia sort of the strange role of father figures who are often absent and then violent maybe that's projected onto the west but let's not do that because you know you know doing doing amateur psychoanalysis is dangerous at the best of times let alone on jet lag but but it's really weird. They desperately want the West's attention. They still watch Western shows. They're going to hate this ban on Netflix. I'd love to get some data from

Netflix right now about what shows Russians are sort of using VPNs to access. So they're looking to the West all the time, even as they claim they don't need it. So that's a really simple one. Just go Western celebrities starting to talk to the Russian people. I mean, that's the, that's like, do that tomorrow. But then it gets much more detailed. I mean, of course we have to support, and we, I mean, largely sort of, you know, independent foundations and the rest have to support

independent Russian media. But a lot of that independent Russian media is in a bubble. It's preaching to the converted. It's really how do you reach the rest of the population? The sort of the very big economic middle class who's probably just upset about this war, but is very, very fearful. Various ethnic minorities, soldiers, you really want to be setting up media that engages all of these. And again, I hate these words like messages. I hate

all this stuff narrative which is the most overused word ever it's just talking to them it's just engaging with them and saying look guys this is the facts you know here's you know we have to think about how you communicate facts to people who are skeptical of them but you know that's a whole communications theory piece it's just saying like are you really sure that that this is the Russia that you want this is what your government is doing um and and building those relationships um uh like say work in media I'm very skeptical about its sort of magical powers you know you know I'm very skeptical about some of the claims made about Russian campaigns during the 16 election you know I'm not saying they didn't happen I'm sure they happened I know they happened But we have to be very clear about the limits of any kind of communications tools.

But it's a long, long term kind of engagement process where you start talking to people and start imagining a different Russia and imagining a different attitude of Russians to the countries around them and integrating Ukrainian voices into that. And it's a slow, patient, long-term process. But it's so doable. There are so many vulnerabilities to Putin's propaganda model. But as I say, you know, someone has to do that. That's long-term investment. And it's very unclear whose job that is. Yeah. I mean, as you point out, it's the infrastructure, but it's also what you say. And I think those two things are related because, I mean, democracies fundamentally are built on the belief that we can persuade other people as equals. And so we don't want to get into sort of the propaganda apparatus as some of the authoritarians do. But I think that the million dollar question

for the world right now is how do you sell democracies and what do you say to drain authoritarian governments of their appeal? And I know that that's probably, first of all, a very difficult question to answer. And it's probably a different answer for different countries that have different cultures and different histories. But I wonder, it seems like that's what we need to really figure out here. Sure. And there's not, you know, there's an even bigger question there that you're hinting at which is i think our idea about how media and democracy connects yeah is we had a lot of assumptions and myths which i think have been blown out the water for example the marketplace of ideas just put the good ideas out there and

they'll reach people through some sort of theory of rational choice. Again, you don't have to go to Russia to realize that's probably not true. And the idea that they can speak truth to power and the powerful are scared of the truth, and you're sure they are. They don't seem to be very care about the truth very much these days. So we have all these assumptions, which I think have been questioned by lots of disciplines, like behavioral economics um but also just by by the evidence of what we see around ourselves and i think as a sector media and democratic communication we have a lot of thinking to do about how you actually you know what's the connection between creating content and democracy um does pluralism directly lead to better societies or kind of just disintegrate into polarization?

So what's a more well-thought-through idea of how pluralistic debate should work? And again, you know, we could take the example of how the US presidential debates are done. I think they're probably done in a way that's very bad for democracy, do them very differently. But with countries like Russia who are closed, I'll take some research that we did.

I don't think there's one silver bullet, by the way, but I do think we have to get into the discipline of understanding audiences better and how to engage with them. So we've done a lot of research at my little center at Johns Hopkins called Arena, exactly into this question. And one thing we looked at was conspiracy theories. Why do people believe conspiracy theories, pro-Russian conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe?

And it turned out it was deeply connected to a sense of disempowerment. We're not the only people to have thought this. So people who felt really disempowered lent towards conspiratorial mindsets. And so the solution to that probably isn't throwing the truth at them. It's actually thinking, okay, how can media do its small bit to help empowerment, to help people feel that they're being listened to and that they can control something. And there's a whole movement called, sometimes it's called engagement journalism, where you sort of start to engage people in the editorial process in the sense of, you know, allowing them to set the agenda,

allowing them to ask the questions that you then as a journalist answer. Sometimes not bringing them to the editorial process, that's too messy, but sometimes opening up the editorial process a little bit to sort of get their engagement throughout. So you're working on your story and you say, okay, what do you guys want me to ask this person? There's lots and lots of tools that you can use, but the main thing is that you're constantly thinking about how to make the audience more empowered in the process. Now that I think

is a much more strategic response to this empowerment people feel that results in conspiratorial thinking. But again, John, there there's no single answer the thing is we have to slightly change our thinking to make sure that we are answering those the challenges um i mean i always put it we're kind of in a race with the problem in this they do so much audience analysis they know all the audiences hang-ups and traumas and fears and and then they exploit them yeah they exploit them viciously um in britain we had this great slogan for brexit take back control you know people felt they had no control and so the the propagandistic manipulators came up with that slogan it was brilliant and and it should have been our job as journalists we should have been giving people

control and we didn't we ignored them so we have a real responsibility to understand people's anxieties and worries, and to bring them into public speech. You know, the propagandists will manipulate them. Our job is to kind of surface them and bring them into a dialogue. And it's the same with Russians. I mean, you know, there is no one Russian people. There's like the classic thing is five different segments. I think there's many more than that. And you've got to talk to each one about the things they care about and where they are. And,

and that probably doesn't mean immediately screaming to them about the war because they're avoiding that subject for a reason. You've got to understand those reasons. It's hard work, but neither is it impossible. Well, I will end where I began, which is the interview with President Zelensky that you sat in.

Was there anything he said that made you think, oh, this is why his communication has been pretty effective over the course of the war? Look, he is an empathy monster. He is constantly in dialogue with you, looking for your eyes, looking for the thing that resonates with you. In that sense, he's a very classical sort of student of the Stanislavski Mikhail Chekhov School of Method Acting.

And if you've met, even though he's from comedy, he's clearly been exposed to that. We spoke Russian to each other. I kind of even recognized the way he spoke. It was very much the way that a lot of Russian and Ukrainian actors I know speak. And it's a school of acting that puts understanding emotional truths at the core of it. And, you know, there are very serious actors in America who are like finding the thing, you know, finding the empathy with the audience and what this thing is about. When he talks about the murders that are being committed during the war, he lists not names, but social groups. And you can tell that he's imagining them like a good actor would,

you know, he's a monster of empathy. I mean, that's his lifeblood. That's what he is. And that doesn't necessarily make you a very good, I don't know, reformer of the judicial system. And his successes in that sphere were mixed, frankly the reforms but when it comes to really communicating with the nation and feeling its pain and channeling its courage i mean i mean talk talk about come at the time come with the man i, he's ridiculously good at it. And also like everyone looks down on him when they say he was a comedian. They say comedian in a bad way. I completely disagree.

I worked in mass entertainment and I learned more about sociology from doing mass reality shows than anything else. By making people laugh at 7 p.m., you understand their fears, you understand their vulnerabilities. And also he was a

political satirist so he understands something about politics and a very kind of political satirist like you know we have plenty in america whether it's colbert or or the other guy whose name i've forgotten because he's not funny anymore um jimmy stewart no no um john stewart john stewart jimmy stewart is always funny he's god um but um but but by doing that um you understand something about politics and the role that politics plays in society and people think about politicians i think actually being a serious serious comedian and a serious satirist which he kind of was um is actually excellent training for the top job you know yeah and i think it's also excellent training for puncturing the appeal of authoritarians in

a way as well, which I know Zelensky said in that interview. And it really, that stuck with me. Peter, thank you so much for doing this. I hope you can go get some sleep. No, I'm going to go and teach a class on propaganda for two hours at Hopkins. I'm on campus. Oh boy. Well, then I hope you have a coffee.

I think I'm in post-mortem. Maybe espresso. I grew up, I got Well, then I hope you have a coffee. I think I'm on post-mortem. Maybe espresso. I got up at 2.30 and started drinking coffee. I thought, okay, 2.30 is fine. I'm up, I'm awake, and I'm absolutely dying now. But anyway, yes, thank you for having me. And I'm sorry to sort of like sound so self-pitying, but as we know, there's few things worse than jet lag.

I hear that. Well, you were brilliant. I really appreciate it. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau.

It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez,

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