Throwing a Wrench In #Russia’s #Propaganda Machine. In our Watching Russia column, we have been writing analysis of RT’s media coverage. We’ve been focusing on the guests who appear on RT as experts. Who are these people, what is their expertise, and do they have any facts to support their arguments? With each article we have discovered that many guests have little expertise and champion conspiracy theories that are not supported by the facts. In one article we point out that Karen Hudes, whom RT calls the “World Bank whisteblower,” has never presented any evidence of the fraud that she reports. And the economic collapse that she has predicted for years has never happened. Instead, Hudes has spent much of her life explaining that the Pope is really a part of a species of cone heads that helps rule the world. Manuel Ochsenreiter, a guest who often represents the German point of view on RT, is actually the editor of a neo-Nazi magazine — something which is problematic as RT used Ochsenreiter to defend Russia’s invasion of Crimea, an invasion which the Kremlin said was done to defend the peninsula against neo-Nazis. The column has similarly discussed more than ten different members of RT’s propaganda machine, exposing their conspiracy theories, distortions, and lack of facts, and pointing out that RT often gives these guests a different title each time they appear, assigning non-existent expertise to back up whatever anti-Western theory RT wishes to propagate on any given day. Searching for RT guest Ryan Dawson comes up with even more extreme results. The man, whom RT describes at one point as a “human rights activist,” and at another as a “political blogger,” and at another as a “journalist specializing in Asian affairs,” is really a Holocaust denier who routinely blogs about anti-Semitic ideas. Dawson is associated with a man who is actually convicted of a hate crime for assaulting Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. The media landscape is far too polite at this current junction to call RT out for most of its lies and distortions. This is unfortunate since RT’s main narrative is that the rest of the media is hiding or distorting the truth. By picking away little parts of RT’s narrative, at least for now we have exposed holes in RT’s armor — and now it looks like they’ve begun to take that threat seriously. interpretermag/throwing-a-wrench-in-russias-propaganda-machine/
Posted on: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:23:37 +0000
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