As Russian tanks were stuck in the mud outside Kyiv earlier this year and the economic fallout of war with Ukraine took hold, one part of Russia’s government hummed with precision: television propaganda.
Spinning together a counternarrative for tens of millions of viewers, Russian propagandists plucked clips from American cable news, right-wing social media and Chinese officials. They latched onto claims that Western embargoes of Russian oil would be self-defeating, that the United States was hiding secret bioweapon research labs in Ukraine and that China was a loyal ally against a fragmenting West.
Day by day, state media journalists sharpened those themes in emails. They sometimes broadcast battlefield videos and other information sent to them by the successor agency to the K.G.B. And they excerpted and translated footage from favorite pundits, like the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose remarks about the war were shown to millions of Russians.
“Be sure to take Tucker,” one Russian news producer wrote to a colleague. The email referred to a clip in which Mr. Carlson described the power of the Chinese-Russian partnership that had emerged under Mr. Biden — and how American economic policies targeting Russia could undermine the dollar’s status as a world-reserve currency.
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The correspondence was one of thousands of email exchanges stored within a leaked database from Russia’s largest state-owned media company, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Company, known as V.G.T.R.K. The data was made publicly available online by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.
The New York Times created a search tool to identify material from the 750 gigabytes of files related to the buildup to the war and its earliest stages from January to March 2022, when the available documents ended. The Times verified the documents by confirming email addresses and people’s identities. In many instances, matters discussed in the emails led to content broadcast on the air.
The emails provide a rare glimpse into a propaganda machine that is perhaps Russia’s greatest wartime success. Even as the country faces battlefield losses, mounting casualties, economic isolation and international condemnation, state-run television channels have spun a version of the war in which Russia is winning, Ukraine is in shambles and Western alliances are fraying. Along with a fierce crackdown on dissent, the propaganda apparatus has helped President Vladimir V. Putin maintain domestic support for a war that many in the West had hoped would weaken his hold on power the longer it dragged on.
To create this narrative, producers at the state media company cherry-picked from conservative Western media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller, as well as obscure social media accounts on Telegram and YouTube, according to the records. Russian security agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., fed other information, creating an alternative version of events such as the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
In other instances, V.G.T.R.K. workers shared clips, sometimes from little-known American media, that appeared to show opposition to the war rising in the West or how sanctions were backfiring against the United States.
The clip showed how some in the area were pasting stickers on the pump with a photo of President Biden saying, “I did that.” It quoted a local gas station manager, who worried the stickers could cause trouble during corporate inspections.
The clip had picked up a modest 30,000 views on YouTube. It noted the sticker protest, which had appeared elsewhere in the United States, had “gained a second wind” as prices rose over the conflict in Ukraine.
The segment covered the ways discontent over inflation was rising in the United States. The reporter concludes: “Because of Ukraine, Biden can’t or doesn’t want to focus on domestic issues in the U.S.”
[Russian] “Indignant drivers decorate gas stations with these Biden stickers that say, ‘I did it.’”
“I peel off 5-6 of these every day. They appear on all of our pumps.”
Other material showed an organization grappling with Russia’s growing isolation. V.G.T.R.K. employees tracked how their broadcasts were received overseas and talked about how to react when their channels were being blocked in neighboring European countries. They even discussed a response to Russia being dropped from the popular Eurovision singing competition, a major television event.
V.G.T.R.K. did not respond to requests for comment. A Fox News spokeswoman didn’t provide a comment.
V.G.T.R.K. has roughly 3,500 employees and operates some of the country’s most-watched channels, including Russia 1 and Russia 24, as well as a robust online operation. With national and regional networks, it reaches nearly the entire Russian population, from urban hubs to rural areas, and its dominance has grown as the government has restricted access to social media and independent news. The company receives about $500 million a year from the Russian government, analysts estimated.
“Besides the political machine of what the Kremlin operates directly, V.G.T.R.K. is the second-most important part of propaganda in Russia,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media researcher at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
Spinning together a counternarrative for tens of millions of viewers, Russian propagandists plucked clips from American cable news, right-wing social media and Chinese officials. They latched onto claims that Western embargoes of Russian oil would be self-defeating, that the United States was hiding secret bioweapon research labs in Ukraine and that China was a loyal ally against a fragmenting West.
Day by day, state media journalists sharpened those themes in emails. They sometimes broadcast battlefield videos and other information sent to them by the successor agency to the K.G.B. And they excerpted and translated footage from favorite pundits, like the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose remarks about the war were shown to millions of Russians.
“Be sure to take Tucker,” one Russian news producer wrote to a colleague. The email referred to a clip in which Mr. Carlson described the power of the Chinese-Russian partnership that had emerged under Mr. Biden — and how American economic policies targeting Russia could undermine the dollar’s status as a world-reserve currency.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The correspondence was one of thousands of email exchanges stored within a leaked database from Russia’s largest state-owned media company, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Company, known as V.G.T.R.K. The data was made publicly available online by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.
The New York Times created a search tool to identify material from the 750 gigabytes of files related to the buildup to the war and its earliest stages from January to March 2022, when the available documents ended. The Times verified the documents by confirming email addresses and people’s identities. In many instances, matters discussed in the emails led to content broadcast on the air.
The emails provide a rare glimpse into a propaganda machine that is perhaps Russia’s greatest wartime success. Even as the country faces battlefield losses, mounting casualties, economic isolation and international condemnation, state-run television channels have spun a version of the war in which Russia is winning, Ukraine is in shambles and Western alliances are fraying. Along with a fierce crackdown on dissent, the propaganda apparatus has helped President Vladimir V. Putin maintain domestic support for a war that many in the West had hoped would weaken his hold on power the longer it dragged on.
To create this narrative, producers at the state media company cherry-picked from conservative Western media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller, as well as obscure social media accounts on Telegram and YouTube, according to the records. Russian security agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., fed other information, creating an alternative version of events such as the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
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In other instances, V.G.T.R.K. workers shared clips, sometimes from little-known American media, that appeared to show opposition to the war rising in the West or how sanctions were backfiring against the United States.
How a Local News Clip in the U.S. Became Part of a Russian Broadcast
On March 3, an ABC affiliate in Huntsville, Ala., ran a segment about rising gas prices.
The clip showed how some in the area were pasting stickers on the pump with a photo of President Biden saying, “I did that.” It quoted a local gas station manager, who worried the stickers could cause trouble during corporate inspections.
Two days later, the broadcast was featured in an email roundup of video clips from across the United States sent to V.G.T.R.K. journalists.
The clip had picked up a modest 30,000 views on YouTube. It noted the sticker protest, which had appeared elsewhere in the United States, had “gained a second wind” as prices rose over the conflict in Ukraine.
That same day, the clip appeared dubbed into Russian on Russian national news.
The segment covered the ways discontent over inflation was rising in the United States. The reporter concludes: “Because of Ukraine, Biden can’t or doesn’t want to focus on domestic issues in the U.S.”
[Russian] “Indignant drivers decorate gas stations with these Biden stickers that say, ‘I did it.’”
“I peel off 5-6 of these every day. They appear on all of our pumps.”
Other material showed an organization grappling with Russia’s growing isolation. V.G.T.R.K. employees tracked how their broadcasts were received overseas and talked about how to react when their channels were being blocked in neighboring European countries. They even discussed a response to Russia being dropped from the popular Eurovision singing competition, a major television event.
China was used to bolster Russian story lines, according to the records, with producers pulling from Chinese media for potential story ideas. In another instance, they discussed currying favor with a top Chinese propaganda official.V.G.T.R.K. did not respond to requests for comment. A Fox News spokeswoman didn’t provide a comment.
V.G.T.R.K. has roughly 3,500 employees and operates some of the country’s most-watched channels, including Russia 1 and Russia 24, as well as a robust online operation. With national and regional networks, it reaches nearly the entire Russian population, from urban hubs to rural areas, and its dominance has grown as the government has restricted access to social media and independent news. The company receives about $500 million a year from the Russian government, analysts estimated.
“Besides the political machine of what the Kremlin operates directly, V.G.T.R.K. is the second-most important part of propaganda in Russia,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media researcher at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.
An Alternate Reality: How Russia’s State TV Spins the Ukraine War
Leaked emails detail how Russia’s biggest state broadcaster, working with the nation’s security services, mined right-wing American news and Chinese media to craft a narrative that Moscow was winning.
www.nytimes.com