Kontrpropaganda today: The roots of RT’s defensive practices and countering ethic

Abstract

This article argues that the institutional practices and journalistic ethics on RT, formerly Russia Today, have been influenced by the Soviet kontrpropaganda tradition, a defence mechanism against anti-communist narratives. RT’s post-Soviet institutional structure has enabled the continuation of inherently ‘defensive’ practices in a way that they form a ‘countering’ ethic on the network. While kontrpropaganda informs the journalistic culture of RT’s Russian staff, its international journalists are socialised into it. This article uses historical texts, archival materials and interviews with current and former journalists of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya network to examine how these defensive practices have become an everyday norm. In their strive for broadening the audience and for changing public opinion in the West, RT’s staff adopts reactive, patriotic or legitimising practices. The countering ethic on RT informs the journalists’ scramble for legitimacy not only of Russia as a country but also of RT as their employer. By analysing the underpinnings that organise the work of RT journalists, the article sheds light on broader problems of countering as a status-seeking effort in the international media ecosystem and contributes to ongoing research on self-censorship and conspiracy theories.

Dissemination of RT and Sputnik Content in European Digital Alternative News Environments: Mapping the Influence of Russian State-Backed Media Across Platforms, Topics, and Ideology

“…The shared articles do not overtly glorify Russia or its politics but emphasize the deficiencies of Western liberal democracies (Glazunova et al 2022). This supports the claim that these outlets are part of a broader kontrpropaganda strategy to delegitimize Western democracies by mobilizing alternative news audiences (Kuznetsova 2021). This “sharp power” strategy (Walker 2016) has particular traction in the German-speaking alternative news environment, where the “weaponization” of news through state-backed media successfully latches on to the agendas of domestic right-wing clusters (Ramsay and Robertshaw 2019).…”

“…RT/Sputnik has been described as a case of overt (“white”) state propaganda (Benkler et al 2018) with a strong news framing of conflicts in the West, which can be used by radical pundits and movements that share the Russian line. Kuznetsova (2021: 3) argues that RT’s institutional and journalistic practices are influenced by the Soviet “kontrpropaganda” tradition of “constructing arguments through direct rebuttal and delegitimization of opponents’ discourse.” “Kontrpropaganda” dates back to the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union used information campaigns to delegitimize Western hegemony and cultural imperialism. The spread of this form of propaganda through RT/Sputnik is in line with the notion of “sharp power” as a means to pierce information environments, but from a defensive stance in which the two outlets are used to counter Western soft power by criticizing, discrediting and ridiculing politics and events in Western countries (Cull et al 2017).…”

“…In the fields of international relations and security studies, the influence of Russian-backed media in global information environments has been associated with soft-power nation branding, conspiracy theories, and the legitimization of Russia’s foreign policy (Carter and Carter 2021; Crilley and Chatterje-Doody 2020; Crilley et al 2022; Dajani et al 2021; Szostek 2017; Yablokov 2015). In the field of political communication, RT and Sputnik have been studied in relation to “malign information influence”, propaganda, mis- and disinformation and destabilizing narratives (Cull et al 2017; Elswah and Howard 2020; Kuznetsova 2021; Miazhevich 2018; Wagnsson 2022). Furthermore, RT and Sputnik have been studied as alternative news media due to their counter-hegemonic positioning in domestic information environments and journalistic emphasis on alternative meaning-making (Freudenthaler and Wessler 2022; Müller and Freudenthaler 2022; Müller and Schulz 2021; Rawnsley 2015).…”