Aux armes, journalistes!

When Russia was preparing to annex Crimea a year ago its television broadcasts, portraying the protesters who had recently overthrown Ukraine’s regime as a neo-Nazi rabble, softened the peninsula’s defenses as effectively as any artillery assault. One month later, when Russian-backed rebels overran Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, one of their first acts was to seize control of the television center and replace Ukrainian broadcasts with previously banned Russian ones. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine has been a key component of the “hybrid warfare” that Russia has waged in Ukraine, and has helped shore up Vladimir Putin’s support at home. But it spreads much further. It spills into east European countries via television services that offer viewers tasty blends of entertainment garnished with sprigs of fake news. It extends westward in the form of outfits like RT (formerly Russia Today), a Kremlin backed news out fit which broadcasts in English, Spanish, French and German, or neatly designed supplements placed in the New York Times or Daily Telegraph.

Sometimes it is smuggled directly into respectable domestic publications, as gullible or time starved editors unknowingly reproduce Russian misinformation. Meanwhile Kremlin-backed trolls poison online discussion forums and social networks. Countries in the front line of Moscow’s “weaponisation of information”, in the words of Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, two analysts, have long sought to draw attention to the problem.

The European Union is at last listening. Heads of government, meeting in Brussels as we went to press, were expected to ask Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, to produce a plan to counter Russia’s “disinformation campaigns” by June. Before that the EU will launch a task force (working name: Mythbusters) charged with monitoring Russian media, identifying patent falsehoods and issuing corrections. This is awkward terrain for Europe. It was hard enough to galvanize a collective response to Russia’s military adventurism; information warfare is a still murkier world.

The challenges faced by Britain in countering RT’s misinformation are different from those in Baltic States with Russian-speaking minorities, or in war-torn Ukraine, subject of Russia’s most egregious lies. That the EU has belatedly been persuaded to act is progress. But officials stress that individual countries must do much of the work. Some are pushing ahead: in September Estonia will launch a general television channel aimed at the quarter of its population who speak Russian first. The ideas floated instead are sensible, if small: getting national media regulators to talk to each other, building networks of trusted journalists and, in countries at risk, supporting local producers of good journalism. One example often cited is Hromadske, an online Ukrainian TV channel that sprang out of Kiev’s Maidan protests. The government is finalizing plans for Ukraine Tomorrow, a channel designed to square up to RT that local journalists fear will descend to its standards.

Up against lavishly financed Russian media, cash-strapped, fractious Europe will always struggle: one American official likens the battle to using a teaspoon to shovel out of a snowstorm. But European values like free speech and a commitment to truth remain potent, as Ukrainians know well. The Americans are spending more, and encouraging Europeans to do the same. The British picture is bleaker—facing a squeeze, the BBC World Service ended broadcasts in Ukrainian in 2011—but officials have at least woken up to the danger. Countering the storm of Russian propaganda will require innovative thinking as well as money, two resources in scarce supply in Europe. But it is worth giving truth a chance.

MARCH 21ST–27TH 2015

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