Vladimir Putin and Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian television channel RT, attending a cybersecurity conference in Moscow in July 2018. | Sergei Chirikov/Pool via AP
Opinion by Jack Shafer
03/15/2022 04:30 AM EDT
Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.
Since the day Vladimir Putin composed his Ukraine war menu, his propaganda chefs have been working three shifts a day, seven days a week to concoct toothsome and digestible bunk that might persuade his citizens and the West of the rightness of his invasion.
Previously, I doubted that Putin’s state propaganda would prevail for long in Russia. The Russian people had grown accustomed to independent and foreign media, and the bans and censor’s-veto Putin has ordered has alerted many to the Kremlin’s baseline deceit. The curious can still use VPNs to breach the walls he has erected to block foreign media. People can still listen to the BBC on shortwave radio. They have Telegram and Signal. And many Russians have friends and family in Ukraine, who inform them of Putin’s atrocities. There’s not enough vodka in the entire country to wash his propaganda completely down.
But what of the Putin propaganda aimed at the West? Aside from Tucker Carlson Tonight (where its host presently gorges on and regurgitates the Kremlin’s bogus Ukraine lines), some far-right agitators, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, few Americans have bitten on Russian disinformation. To our palate, Russian propaganda tastes like broccoli, and...
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