The Kremlin Weaponized News: RT and Sputnik

Overview
This report contains three separate analyses of English-language news content published by RT and Sputnik and its implications for news organizations in Western democracies. These analyses are linked, but may be of interest to different audiences. Together, the analyses comprise a comprehensive analysis of how Russian state-linked news outlets play a variety of roles in different situations, ranging from coordinating damage-control messaging, to amplifiers of Russian prestige and aggregators of negative content about Western domestic politics:

• Flooding the zone: RT, Sputnik and Russian framing of the Skripal incident. This analysis shows how Russian news outlets inserted over 130 competing and often contradictory narratives into their extensive coverage of the March 2018 Salisbury poisoning incident. The study shows how state-linked news outlets operate in a ‘crisis management’ situation, mobilizing a ‘parallel commentariat’ to air dozens of narratives explaining events and the motivations of Western actors, as well as amplifying provocative statements from senior Russian government officials.

• Heads we win, tails you lose: projecting Russian strength. This analysis demonstrates how Russian news outlets portray Russian military prowess and Western military weakness to English-speaking audiences. It demonstrates how RT and Sputnik generate a large volume of coverage critical of NATO and extensive reports on the potency of Russian prototype weapons. The susceptibility of Western news outlets to eye-catching details of Russian military strength is demonstrated through evidence of directly and indirectly replicated information on Russian weapons published by UK news outlets.

• Division and dysfunction: how RT and Sputnik portray the West and construct news agendas. The final analysis records how Russian English-language news outlets publish a steady stream of articles about domestic politics and events in the USA and Europe that focus on political dysfunction, institutional failure, social division and the negative effects of immigration. It also shows that RT and Sputnik act as negative news aggregators, harvesting, repackaging and translating stories from local news outlets across Europe, before publishing them for English-language audiences. A software-driven text-matching analysis also demonstrates the extent to which UK news organisations (primarily tabloid news sites) gather and republish content from RT and Sputnik, as well as showing how the Russian outlets replicate content from UK news sources in return.

Project Scope and Methods

• In total, 151,809 online articles published by UK national news outlets and 11,819 articles on the English-language sites of RT and Sputnik were analyzed across two four-week samples from May-June 2017 and March 2018.

• The search and tagging functions of the digital content analysis tool Steno were used to conduct large-scale content analyses of Russian English-language news output, and to determine key themes and frames deployed by RT and Sputnik in their coverage of the Skripal poisoning, Russian military capacity and Western democratic politics.

• The ‘Steno-Similar’ text-matching tool, created for this project, allowed researchers to compare databases of Russian and UK news content to determine the extent to which content produced by news outlets based in one country was replicated in the other.

RT, Sputnik and Russian Framing of the Skripal Incident

• Coverage of the Skripal incident on RT and Sputnik was abundant, with 735 articles on the story published across both sites over the four weeks following the discovery of the poisoning.

• In total, 138 separate – and often contradictory – narratives explaining the incident and its aftermath were published by RT and Sputnik during this period, ranging from interpretations of Western motives, to explanations of the origins of the nerve agent used in the poisoning, to full-blown conspiracy theories.

• Narratives often appeared following public interventions by Western governments. Following Theresa May’s speech to the UK Parliament on 12th March in which Russia was accused and the nerve agent ‘Novichok’ identified, a flurry of narratives contesting the origins and existence of Novichok appeared on RT and Sputnik, and narratives framing the incident as defined by geopolitics and Western domestic political problems began to emerge.

• The most frequently repeated narratives supporting the Russian position asserted that Russia’s willingness to cooperate was being rejected by the West, that there was no evidence to prove Russian guilt, and that the Western response was driven by ‘Russophobia’ and hysteria. Theresa May’s accusation of Russian guilt was frequently cited, but often immediately rebutted by editorial statements by RT or Sputnik

• The news agendas of RT and Sputnik were more likely to focus on immigration and Islam than UK news outlets, and considerably more likely to cover terrorism (13.8 percent of combined total coverage, compared with 7.1 percent of UK news articles published in the same period). Approximately 13 percent of articles on immigration published by RT and Sputnik were identifiably from major wire agencies, while the reliance of both news outlets on local German and Swedish news sources for articles on immigration in those countries indicates that RT and Sputnik use content harvested from other news outlets to build their own narratives about aspects of political dysfunction in Western democracies.

• Using text-matching software to compare datasets of Russian and UK articles, 21 articles in UK national media outlets were found in which a large portion of content from RT (16 articles) or Sputnik (5 articles) was detected. All 21 articles were published on the sites of UK tabloid newspapers. While some of the replicated articles were of strange or sensational stories such as UFO sightings and apocalyptic prophecies, more than half were about political or military issues, including Russian-friendly narratives on the Russian military and the European Union.

• The text-matching analysis also found 32 instances of articles first published in UK media being replicated by RT and Sputnik. 22 of these articles were about political issues in the UK and EU, many of which contained subject matter that sustain the RT and Sputnik narratives of political dysfunction in the West, including articles about immigration, child sex abuse and terrorism. The Guardian (10 articles) was the most commonly replicated source by the Russian outlets.

Case study: Russian-Language News in Russia and Ukraine

• To test the applicability of the Steno analysis and comparison tools in a different linguistic environment, a case study was conducted in collaboration with Kyiv-based investigative and open data journalism organization Texty.org.ua to assess how Steno could be deployed in a Russian-language analysis.

• Steno was used to monitor whether content produced by Russian state-linked media outlets could be detected in Ukrainian Russian-language news sites, or whether there was any movement of information in the opposite direction. Content was collected from the Russian outlets RT, TASS and RIA Novosti, and the Ukrainian sites Vesti.ukr.com, Strana.ua, Podrobnosti.ua, Newsone.ua, 112.ua, Obozrevatel.com and Korrespondent.net. The Steno analysis and comparison tools were then tested to determine how easily they could be applied in this context.

• Content-scraping and analysis found evidence of heavily negative coverage of the 2018 Independence Day of Ukraine parade on sampled Russian news sites, repackaged for Russian domestic audiences. Use of the Steno content comparison tool on a separate pre-existing database of articles covering the recognition of independence for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church found some evidence of Ukrainian news sites replicating content from TASS, and multiple instances of Russian outlets repackaging Ukrainian news content with added emotional or partisan language.

— Read more in Gordon Ramsay and Sam Robertshaw, Weaponizing News: RT, Sputnik, and Targeted Disinformation (King’s College London, 2019)