The Federation Council discussed the first results of the information confrontation
The Federation Council Commission on Information Policy and Interaction with the Media discussed the preliminary results of the “information confrontation in the conditions of the sanctions war.” The participants urged to work more actively in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and to use social networks and bloggers to convey the Russian point of view in the West.
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Opening the meeting, the chairman of the commission, Alexei Pushkov, said that the information war was won inside the country “even before the start of the special operation,” because the Western media had greatly degraded, turned into a tool for serving the authorities, propaganda and lost the trust of the Russian audience. But the opportunities to convey the point of view of the Russian Federation to a foreign audience are stronglimited, the senator admitted. The activities of many Russian TV channels are blocked, Russian media are banned… But in the same Europe, “a certain shift is taking place — from the expectation of Russia’s collapse to the recognition that sanctions are primarily hitting the economies of the Western countries themselves,” so it is very important to “stand up economically” now: this will also affect the situation in the information sphere.
And the rest of the world, Pushkov said, is very tired of the West, “and this is our important resource.” In Arab countries, the Western presence is perceived as “quasi-colonial”, and in the African world “we are perceived exceptionally well because we have challenged those giants who have exploited them for a long time.” As for Asia, Russia does not have its own system of direct information influence there, “all newspapers fromCyprus to Malaysia is quoted by the Western press and agencies, and the columns in them are written not by our authors, but by American ones,” and this is “our significant flaw.” Anyway, the West does not have complete information control in the world, and Russia “must create its own alternative to this disappearing Western monopoly” — this is the conclusion made by Pushkov.
The speakers then talked about how the creation of this alternative is going.
Political scientist, presenter of the program “The right to know!” Dmitry Kulikov is sure that for the sake of reformatting the public consciousness of Russians in the right direction, special attention should be paid to the history of perestroika and the early 90s. It was from those times, in his opinion, in the minds of our citizens and representatives of the elite, the thesis that the USSR lost the Cold War and collapsed due to betrayal almost at the very top, and “the topic of betrayal is very painful.”
“The external factor played a role, just as in Ukraine the Western factor played a role in changing the regime, but Ukraine began to form as an anti-Russia on the basis of Ukrainian nationalism, which originated in the late Soviet period,” Pushkov said. In the West, in his opinion, the same thing is happening now as in the late Soviet period: the population has become disillusioned with the official media and is looking for information in social networks, from bloggers. It is necessary to create more Russian content in foreign languages, at least English, he believes.
“Blogger and influencer” Mikhail Shakhnazarov, who has lived in Latvia for 47 years, was radical. “When I moved here, I was surprised how much everyone here has dissolved,” he said. And he suggested “to make it clear to those who have left that they are not expected here and that there will be no return to the former” (cultural figures. — “MK”), as well as to remove books from bookstores that negatively assess Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Editor-in-chief of the online edition Ukraina.ru Iskander Khisamov said that the media has already begun a certain reorientation to new audiences: they published a column by a Chinese blogger, “they got themselves a Sinologist, and not one”, they are “intensely” thinking about spreading information in Spanish, Arabic… “We see that most of the world — for us, but they are “slaves of the lamp”: they hate the Americans, but they depend on them,” he said.