Maxim Eristavi, co-founder Hromadske International, tells what he has learned from being in the epicenter of the intense media warfare between Russia and the West:
First, word fights matter more than actual battlefields.
Propaganda is far worse than any usual media polarization. It ruins families, endangers lives, and starts and ends wars. I remember one Hromadske story from the epicenter of one of the biggest battles in the Eastern Ukrainian war. Our reporter went to the city of Debaltseve hours before it was captured by Russian and rebel forces. The town was shelled heavily back then. But, all interviewed locals were sure that the Ukrainian army was responsible, despite acknowledging that to do this they would have to shell their own positions in the downtown as well. The Ukrainian TV and radio was cut off here months ago.
Secondly, Russian propaganda isn’t designed to convince people.
What it does instead is radicalizing the society, pushing it to extremes and destroying the middle ground for any debates. And then you have a perfectly fertile soil for political manipulations on a grand scale. Let’s be clear: neither Russia, nor Eastern Ukraine are internet black holes like North Korea or Iran. People have access to almost all internet resources possible. In Russia an impressive 77% of the population have a stable internet access, and before the war Eastern Ukraine also had the biggest and most dynamic rate of new internet users after Kyiv. People are able to hear the other side’s point, they just don’t want to.
…..Fifth, the truth is never in between what Russian media and Western media report.
….Any educated person in the West knows that truth is always somewhere in the middle between two biases. So you would usually consume something from Russian media and then Western media and settle for the middle. This is well-understood by the Kremlin and they manage to use it perfectly by positioning their media as ‘an alternative voice’. So, by creating ridiculous parallel reality of lies and theatrics, they don’t expect you to believe in it. They instead create so much confusion that it shifts the middle further towards them.
The truth is always in between two biases, but never in between bias and pure lies.
Read more at Die Zeit: It’s propaganda, stupid! — Medium
“Any educated person in the West knows that truth is always somewhere in the middle between two biases”.
That does not sound like an educated person. That sounds like someone committing a fallacy of moderation.
“They instead create so much confusion that it shifts the middle further towards them”.
Agree – that is just what the humanist/socialist left do in Western countries.