In yesterday's Politico Peter Pomerantsev laid out the inside of Russia's information war against all who disagree with it, in an article called Inside Putin's Information War. [http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/putin-russia-tv-113960.html#ixzz3NyZHPLPY] His own book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia is an example of how Russia uses its media as weapons of the new Information War.
Pomerantsev was actually part of this war, writing for some of the same places we find infuriating, like Russia Today. He quotes people he knows and worked for who published bizarre and inaccurate reports about what Russia was doing in the Ukraine.
"Information war is now the main type of war,” says the Kremlin’s chief propagandist Dmitry Kieselev, 'preparing the way for military action.' And Putin’s Russia is very good at it, having combined the dirtiest mechanisms of PR, brainwashing techniques pioneered in cults and a rich KGB tradition of psy-ops into a sort of television Frankenstein with which it controls its own population, conquers neighboring countries and attacks the West."
In an unusually direct attack against the Russian press, Pomerantsev described how it used the downing of a civilian airliner in Ukraine as a way of providing made up stories of how it occurred even when those stories proved incredible to the readers. Apparently, Russian readers are used to being lied to and don't look for the truth in their news. When it comes to Russian media, we might consider the source before repeating their stories in our own press.
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