March 16, 2015

Russia Gives Up On Burnishing Its Image in West

The "information war" against Russia makes any efforts to improve the country's image in the West futile, a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday after the U.S. public relations firm Ketchum said its contract with the Russian government had ended.

"The current situation of information hysteria and what is essentially an information war against Russia does not facilitate the activation of image-building efforts," Dmitry Peskov told the Interfax news agency.

Ketchum Inc., the top spin doctor employed by the Kremlin in the West, has ended its work with the Russian government and will no longer lobby for its interests in Europe and the U.S., the company said in a statement.

"Ketchum no longer represents the Russian Federation in the U.S. or Europe with the exception of our office in Moscow," the company's statement said. "Our partner in the consortium, GPlus, continues to operate under the terms of the contract."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/news/article/russia-gives-up-on-burnishing-its-image-in-west/517368.html

March 16, 2015

Russia Vows Support For Syria's Bashar Assad

SOCHI, Russia, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it would support President Bashar al-Assad to combat "terrorism" in the Middle East, indicating there was no new room for compromise on one of they key contentious issues in the Syrian conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks with Assad's foreign minister, Walid al-Moualem, on the Black Sea as part of Moscow's renewed diplomatic push to restart peace talks on Syria.

"We share the view that the main factor driving the situation in the Middle East is the terrorist threat," Lavrov told a joint news conference with Moualem. "Russia will continue supporting Syria ... in countering this threat."

Russia has been the key international ally of Assad in the conflict, which is in its fourth year and where the situation on the ground has deteriorated as Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot, grabbed large swathes of land.

The last round of talks between Damascus and the opposition collapsed in February over rifts over Assad's role in any transition out of the conflict. The main Syrian opposition in exile and its Western and Arab backers want him to go.

But Moscow says advances made by Islamic hardliners mean fighting "terrorism" should be the top priority for all "healthy" forces now and says that is not possible without cooperating with Assad.

Lavrov criticized the United States for refusing to do that.

Moualem told the news conference his meeting with Vladimir Putin earlier on Wednesday was "very productive" and that the Russian president confirmed his resolve to develop ties with Damascus and Assad. (Reporting by Denis Dyomkin, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska; editing by Ralph Boulton)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/26/russia-suport-assad_n_6226464.html

An older piece, but some people need reminding, evidently

http://abcnews.go.com/International/analyzing-russias-support-syrias-bashar-al-assad/story?id=22534530

March 16, 2015

How the Kremlin and the Media Ended Up in Bed Together

Editor's note: This is the longest text ever published by The Moscow Times. We've decided to publish it because it describes in detail a key Russian narrative, of how the Kremlin rules the country with the help of the controlled media. It is a bitter story of how the Russian media, with very few exceptions, have abandoned, sometimes through coercion, but mostly voluntarily and even eagerly, their mission of informing the public and have turned into creators of the Matrix-like artificial reality where imaginary heroes and villains battle tooth and nail in Russia's Armageddon.

After enjoying a brief interval of freedom, it seems that Russian media are now returning to the conditions of the late 1980s, when editors stood outside the door of the censorship office waiting for approval to go to press.

However, the "new censorship" that has emerged in Russia is not merely a tool for controlling the media from the outside. The new censorship is like a cancerous tumor that attacks the not-so-healthy body of the media from the inside and supplants everything of value or vitality with diseased tissue.

The president and senior officials now use the media as a tool for forming public opinion, forcing citizens to accept a false agenda in place of the real one.



http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article.php?id=517323

Won't be seeing self-appointed media critic Glenn Greenwald acknowledging this story, no fuckin' way in hell...The critical thinking DUer would do well to ask themselves "Why?"

March 16, 2015

EU Leaders to Fight Russian Media's 'Disinformation' on Ukraine

European leaders will ask their foreign policy chief next week to draw up a plan to counter Russian "disinformation campaigns" over the conflict in Ukraine, draft conclusions of an EU summit showed.

EU leaders, meeting on March 19-20, will give the High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini three months — until their next summit in June — to work out how to support media freedom and European values in Russia.

"The European Council stresses the need to challenge Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns and invites the High Representative...to prepare by the June European Council an action plan on strategic communication in support of media freedom and EU values," the draft said.

Russian government-funded TV stations, like RT, broadcasting in English, Spanish, Arabic, German and French have been steadily expanding their operations. Many Western broadcasters cut back their Russian-language services after the Cold War.


http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article.php?id=517340

March 16, 2015

There are chinks in Russia’s armour

Last week, Russia’s opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed near the Kremlin. Independent commentators, politicians and the thousands who took to the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities in protest on Sunday hold no illusions as to the motive behind his shooting. Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the Yabloko party and a veteran of the pro-democracy movement, said: “The political responsibility for the murder lies with the regime and personally with President Putin — all those who started and waged the war [in Ukraine] along with the hate propaganda.” The columnist and radio host Yulia Latynina said: “We have entered a new era — the era of physical annihilation of political opponents of the regime.”


Yes, this murder is an important demarcation in the degradation of politics of Russia, which are linked organically to Russia’s foreign policy. Two trends are particularly alarming, especially bearing in mind that Russia remains a nuclear superpower:


First, aggressive anti-democracy and anti-Western propaganda is being elevated to the level of a state ideology guiding domestic and foreign policy. It is not only the regime but also all kinds of supporting political forces and even militias that are inspired to act in accordance with this creed. It is within the realm of possibility that a zealot pulled the trigger of the weapon aimed at Nemtsov.


Second, reliance on violence has an unambiguous tendency to become more brutal and unrestrained over time. The annexation of Crimea was praised in Russian propaganda for being carried out almost bloodlessly. But the mass destruction and death that accompany advances by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine are cheered on practically in real time on state TV.

— Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister of the Russian Federation from 1990 to 1996.

http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/there-are-chinks-in-russia-s-armour-1.1467281

March 16, 2015

Russia is hacking your social media news feed

Now that most of our information — and the information news organizations use as raw material — is delivered by technology platforms such as social networks, what we know about the world is potentially hackable.

Propagandists must no longer convince professional news organizations to spread their stories; they just embed them into social media news feeds. Employees of the Russian propaganda machine, in particular, seem to be focused on finding ways to game the modern news delivery system. And though their techniques aren't perfect, they're making progress.

In a recent post on Medium.com, John Borthwick and Gilad Lotan of Betaworks, the New York City-based venture capital firm, detailed two cases in which hackers, apparently originating from Russia, attempted to mess with the news flow in the West. One of the two operations succeeded; the other failed.


The first case can be called up with a Google search of the terms "ISIS France support." That will yield, near the top of the results, stories from Newsweek and Vox.com describing a poll carried out for the Russian state-owned network, Russia Today. According to the survey, 16 percent of French citizens, and 27 percent of those ages 18-24, have a positive opinion of Islamic State. This, of course, is utter nonsense: the 27 percent number, for example, is based on a sample of only 105 young French people. Yet reporters from Vox and Newsweek saw the numbers in a tweet and wrote pieces citing the poll, not realizing it was bunk.

http://www.tricities.com/news/opinion_columns/russia-is-hacking-your-social-media-news-feed/article_557821b8-c868-11e4-84df-4b666fe7be98.html

Sadly, the emoprog dudebros will ignore this story as usual...Maybe I should put "NSA" in the thread title just bait some of them in...

March 16, 2015

Concerns over Ukraine in Estonia’s Russian speaking community

Since the events in Ukraine, the Estonian government has pushed for an increased NATO presence in the north east of the country.

This small Baltic republic is nervous. Politicians and citizens are starting to ask some uncomfortable questions: will the Kremlin try to destabilize Estonia too? And will the country’s large Russian minority remain loyal to Estonia?

Those questions are particularly pertinent in Narva, a city just over the border from Russia.

The Estonian armed forces are made up not just of Estonians but also ethnic Russians, some of whom speak mainly Russian.


http://www.euronews.com/2015/03/06/concerns-over-ukraine-in-estonia-s-russian-speaking-community/

March 16, 2015

Stop The Presses: Moscow Cracks Down On Journalists In Annexed Crimea

KYIV -- One year after Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, the pro-Russian de facto authorities continue to crack down on independent journalists there.

This week, agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in the Crimean capital of Simferopol raided the homes of two reporters from the Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent journalism group that was forced to relocate to Kyiv after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014.

In a statement issued on March 13, the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nongovernmental organization based in New York, described the raids as "repressive actions" and said journalists covering Crimea "have been harassed, attacked, detained, and had their equipment seized" over the last year.

Journalist Natalya Kokorina said the FSB searched the home of her parents, where Kokorina was registered, on March 13. At 8 a.m., Kokorina received a phone call telling her to come to the apartment immediately.



http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-crimea-crackdown-journalists/26901125.html

March 16, 2015

Are Putin's Censors Stricter Than the Soviets?

A bold, 6,500-word opinion piece published this week in the Moscow Times details what it calls a "new censorship" imposed on the Russian news media by President Vladimir Putin and his allies, enforced by political power and Kremlin-friendly commercial interests.

Written by Vasily Gatov, a journalist and media critic, the piece charges the Kremlin with manipulation of the nation's news media that, "like a cancerous tumor ... supplants everything of value or vitality with diseased tissue." The headline is "How the Kremlin and the Media Ended Up in Bed Together." An editors' note at the top says the Russian news media "have turned into creators of the Matrix-like artificial reality."

Without a monolithic Communist Party in control of civic life as in the Soviet Union, Gatov writes, the Putin regime gives out favors in the form of money, property, and jobs. The tools of modern censorship, he says, include tying strings to government media funding, cultivating informants on media staff, and direct Kremlin calls to chief editors.

The piece, striking in its irreverence, is the longest ever published in the Moscow Times, an English-language daily based in the Russian capital. The newspaper, founded in 1992 by Dutch investors, is now owned by a company based in Helsinki that holds 50 publications that reach 12 million people, according to its website. Gatov, 49, is planning a second piece on the topic.


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/are-putin-s-censors-stricter-than-the-soviets-

March 16, 2015

Russian Professor Explains Media Manipulation

Russian state media has been skewered in the West for its often outlandish coverage of events in Ukraine.

The "misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and occasionally, outright lies," reverberate "hour after hour, day after day, week after week" on Russian TV, according to "The New York Times" on April 15.

But according to a poll, conducted in late March by the state-funded Public Opinion Foundation, some two-thirds of the Russian population trust government-controlled television more than any other medium. A lecture by a history professor, apparently recorded in mid-April, sheds some light on Moscow's media strategy and why it seems to work.

"Television determines the agenda," says Valery Solovei, in his hourlong talk at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). "The methods that I am talking about create a world view, something that's called a 'reality.' A reality is created for us. If we see this reality the way it is brought to us by television, then we act in accordance with this reality."




http://www.rferl.org/content/unspun-russian-professor-media-manipulation/25351952.html