Russian influence campaignsThe Kremlin Weaponized News: RT and Sputnik
Russian government media outlets RT and Sputnik perform three functions on behalf of the Kremlin, its policies, and its preferences. The first is “damage control” function for the Russian state during incidents such as the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. The second is to project Russian strength and construct news agendas favorable to the Kremlin and its outlook. The third function is weakening Western democracies by discrediting democratic, free-market, liberal, and pluralist values.
Russian government media outlets RT and Sputnik perform three functions on behalf of the Kremlin, its policies, and its preferences.
The first is “damage control” function for the Russian state during incidents such as the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. The goal here is to sow confusion and division.
Example: RT and Sputnik published 138 separate and contradictory narratives about the Skripal poisoning across 735 articles in the four weeks following the incident, incorporating the views of a “parallel commentariat” and amplifying Russian government sources.
The second, achieved by deploying various media tactics, is to project Russian strength and construct news agendas favorable to the Kremlin and its outlook.
Example: RT and Sputnik cover Russian military issues extensively, providing compelling detail and multimedia content on advanced weaponry. Significant amounts of this content was detected in U.K. news coverage, particularly that of four of the U.K.’s most-read tabloids – Daily Mail, Express, Sun, and Daily Star – including a small number of instances of Russian news content on military matters being directly reproduced in these four tabloids without attribution.
The third function is weakening Western democracies by discrediting democratic, free-market, liberal, and pluralist values. Accordingly, RT and Sputnik coverage of European and North American democracies is unrelentingly negative, and is overwhelmingly focused on issues of social strife, ethnic acrimony, and dysfunction. Some of the stories RT and Sputnik distribute are fake; other stories are doctored; and some are extracted from local news sources and repackaged to add a negative spin.
The Policy Institute at King’s College London released a detailed report — Weaponizing News: RT, Sputnik, and Targeted Disinformation – of the methods, reach, and impact of RT and Sputnik. This is the first comprehensive study of how RT and Sputnik, systematically and methodically, sow confusion and division in the United Kingdom and beyond on behalf of the Kremlin.
The report is based on an analysis of nearly 12,000 articles published in English by the two outlets and over 150,000 online articles by U.K. news outlets. The articles were collected between May and June 2017, and in March 2018, in the immediate aftermath of the Skripal poisoning.
Here is the report’s Executive Summary:
