Who said: “There is no truth, only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible”? If you answered 1984’s Big Brother, Friedrich Nietzsche or the ANC, you’d be wrong, but only in the detail, not the spirit. The purveyor of this declaration of ideological convenience is none other than the editor of the Russian propaganda TV channel RT, Margarita Simonyan, elevated to head President Vladimir Putin’s very own Truman Show at the age of 25, in 2005.
When Simonyan says “as many different voices as possible’’, the emphasis is on the number and not what they actually say. In the shadowy make-you-believe world of propaganda and hollow political forms, quantity obscures quality. To give a local perspective, this numbers approach is to freedom of speech what the ANC government’s “public consultations’’ are to participatory democracy – a sham, allowing for the conspicuous ignoring not of a single informed voice, but of a choir of intelligent dissent.
Yes, yes, I know we’re all meant to stand trembling in something resembling serious respect for RT. We’re enjoined to employ the spirit of liberal freedoms in assessing a creature of authoritarian dictatorship. It’s our duty as modern cosmopolitans to see the opposing point of view and to take it for granted that it’s as good as one’s own. Better if your sense of charity stretches to giving the benefit of the doubt.
We are lectured that there are always two opposite points of view and that the truth is to be found halfway between them. Why one would apply the laws of electromagnetism to political theory escapes me. In any event, the West has its own propaganda, in the form of CNN. There’s an obvious symmetry. Or not.
The world in which Putin launched his murderous assault on Ukraine on February 24 is arguably very different from the bleak landscape that now occupies the gaze of the former KGB spy, forever aggrieved at the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin no doubt thought (and how could he have thought otherwise and still proceeded with his fratricidal campaign?) the moral relativism that has immobilised independent thought in the West since World War 2 would once again allow him to get away with it.
After all, aren’t the Western democracies founded on the principle of seeing the other person’s point of view? On intelligent self-doubt? On fear of strength? Surely the West’s strength, its attempt at tolerance amid unity in diversity, would ensure the necessary division in its ranks to prevent it speaking out with a single voice? How misinformed he has been, with Russia now buried by sanctions. Only in Pyongyang, Beijing and Pretoria does Putin find a sympathetic ear. Oh, and in Washington too.
This war more than any other is a war of information and a hint towards how wars will be conducted in the future.
There, conservative talk-show hero Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who propagated Covid-19 conspiracy theories, said before the invasion: “Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin? Has Putin shipped every middle-class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?” All harmless enough, but to the opposition propagandist this is manna from heaven.
According to the US nonprofit investigative news site Mother Goose, a leaked memorandum from the Kremlin to Russia’s state media outlets highlights Carlson’s comments and encourages their being referred to generously. The memo apparently offers “talking points’’, saying the “hysteria of the West had reached the inexplicable level” of people calling for killing dogs and cats from Russia and asks: “Today they call for the killing of animals from Russia. Tomorrow, will they call for killing people from Russia?”
This war more than any other is a war of information and a hint towards how wars will be conducted in the future. This is all the more so given the ubiquity and reach of social media, so that we’re able to hear the voices of Russian soldiers, lost in Ukraine, pleading with their loved ones back home. The immediacy, the real-time effect, puts war on your phone.
In what universe Putin’s strategy of blanket and brute censorship and manipulation of the news is to be considered the Russian “alternative’’ to the “propaganda’’ of CNN is difficult to locate on any credible astronomical chart.
The idea that the media freedoms taken for granted in Western democracies and other free societies (like ours) are just a local franchise of the propaganda racket is empirically fallacious and easily contestable.
You can blame CNN for getting it wrong and for promoting a sense before the invasion of Iraq that the US aggression was justified, even necessary. Big difference, though, is that those reporters who whipped themselves into a righteous frenzy about Saddam Hussein did so entirely voluntarily, not at the threat of jail time. Such hegemony as they may be criticised for reinforcing was for self-benefit, be it fame, jobs, more money.
In Putin’s Russia it’s official policy to lie, to distort, to withhold, to create a nonexistent reality. And ignoring this is punishable by law. This is a fact too.
Why else, by the way, would it be necessary for Russian TV editor Marina Ovsyannikova to gate-crash Russia’s Channel One propaganda channel with a placard reading: “Stop the War! Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” You don’t have to do these types of things in a free society.
RT editor Simonyan’s remarks on the TV studio protest action were telling: “Marina Ovsyannikova is indeed the ex-wife of one of our directors. They have been divorced for a long time and live different lives. Quite different, as it turns out.” And she said of the invasion: “This is a standard practice rehearsal. It’s just that this year we decided to hold the parade in Kyiv.”
Covert bias in the Western media is a subject of constant study and scrutiny, but such open and indeed proud bias and bigotry from the head of a major news agency is unusual, to say the least. Who can blame one for being unable to resist the temptation to describe her as a Russian with a chip on her shoulder?
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