Inside Putin’s Information War
At one end of the table sat one of the country’s most famous political TV presenters. He was small and spoke fast, with a smoky voice: “We all know there will be no real politics,” he said. “But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained.”
“So what should we play with?” he asked. “Shall we attack oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like a movie!”.. In a country covering nine time zones and one-sixth of the world’s land mass, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, from the Arctic to the Central Asian deserts, from near-medieval villages where people still draw water from wooden wells by hand, through single-factory towns and back to the blue glass and steel skyscrapers of the new Moscow—TV is the only force that can unify, rule and bind the people.
.. The 21st century Kremlin might be controlling the media just as it did in the Soviet era, but there’s one mistake today’s Russian will never repeat: It will never let television become dull.
.. When the entertainment network TNT, for example, made the Russian version of The Apprentice, the show flopped. The premise of the show is to reward the self-confident and self-assertive business mind. But in Russia, it is the grey apparatchik who is celebrated, while the independent, bright entrepreneurs end up in prison or exiled
.. NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection.