Yesterday Kyiv hosted a discussion on the topic “Toxic Power: Tentacles of Russian Propaganda in the UK and Ukraine”. The discussion participants spoke on the subject how to discern and counteract the Russian propaganda. During the event Gordon Ramsey, a senior research fellow at the Westminster School of Media and Communications, ex-executive director of the Media, Communications and Power Research Center at the London Kings College, presented the study “News as Weapons”.
Full version of the study (in English)
According to the study, Russia Today and “Sputnik” news agencies published in total 101 articles about Ukraine in English in the sample period of eight weeks. Most frequently, reports about Ukraine were themed around such topics as Government Failures (26 articles) and Non-Democratic Practices (25 articles), as well as “Institutional Conflict” and “Crime / Violence”.
RT and Sputnik highlight the situation in the EU and USA in a similar way. The authors found that political dysfunction is a key cross-cutting message that both RT and Sputnik used, highlighting topics of politics and society in the Western countries. Out of 2641 articles about events in the UK, USA, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Ukraine, 2157 articles (81.7%) had at least one mention of political failures, conflicts, and the like.
The research “News as Weapons” is the first comprehensive study of the tactics implemented by RT and “Sputnik” to demonstrate Russian might and to form a news agenda in the UK. As part of the study, experts analyzed more than 10 thousand news reports from Russian news agencies and more than 150 thousand news reports in the British media, tracking how the British media get caught on the hook of the Russian propaganda.
