Post by TsarSamuil on Apr 18, 2015 1:46:28 GMT -5
House panel urges US to fight Russia's ‘weaponized information’
RT.com
April 16, 2015 01:01
The House Foreign Affairs Committee blasted “Russia’s weaponization of information” on Wednesday, urging the US government to invest more in media warfare around the world.
Committee chairman Ed Royce (R-Ca) set the tone for the discussion at Wednesday’s hearing by asserting that “Russia’s propaganda machine is in overdrive, working to subvert democratic stability and foment violence in Eastern Europe,” while the US broadcasting was in “disarray.”
Royce’s choice of witnesses for the committee consisted of Russia critics Peter Pomerantsev, Helle Dale, and ex-RT journalist Liz Wahl. This drew criticism from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who said he wished that “we had at least one other person to balance out this in a way that perhaps could’ve compared our system to the Russian system, to find out where that truth is, just how bad that is.”
“Russia is engaged in a major effort to, basically, support its own policies and promote changes and effects on other populations that further the interests of Russia. I would be surprised if that wasn’t the case,” Rohrabacher said. Noting he used to be a journalist himself, Rohrabacher cautioned against a return to the Cold War mentality. “We don’t need another Cold War. We don’t need to take that belligerent stance,” he said.
Peter Pomerantsev, of the London-based Legatum Institute, disagreed. “Russia has launched an information war against the West – and we are losing,” he told the committee.
Helle Dale, of the Heritage Foundation, called the content and commentary from RT and others “polished and slickly produced,” so that “unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.” Dale also falsely claimed that RT had a budget of “$400 million for its Washington bureau” alone. At the current exchange rate the budget for all of RT’s operations is $275 million.
Read More: Info war-mongers: Usual suspects in cash call to fight ‘anti-US messaging’
Last week, the director of Voice of America (VOA) resigned, following the resignation of Andrew Lack, CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) after just six weeks on the job. Lack had infamously equated RT with the Islamic State and Boko Haram, continuing the series of attacks on RT and Russia by senior US officials.
This is not the first time the US government has invoked inflated figures of RT’s funding to plead for more funds for the BBG. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said the US was losing the “information war” to RT and other media. Her successor John Kerry called RT a “propaganda bullhorn” and asked for hundreds of millions of dollars to “promote democracy” in Eastern Europe.
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the other hand, dismissed RT as having a “tiny, tiny audience” and representing no threat to a US media space “full of dynamic truthful opinion.”
Renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky explained the reasoning behind this seemingly contradictory approach. “The idea that there should be a network reaching people, which does not repeat the US propaganda system, is intolerable” to the US establishment, Chomsky told RT.
“If the House wants to study the weaponization of the media, they can look right at the front pages of the newspapers that they get every day,” the MIT professor-emeritus said.“If we look closely at the conflict [in Ukraine], you can find plenty of problems on both sides, but the way they’re interpreted here, is we’re necessarily right about everything. And if anyone’s in the way, they’re wrong about everything.”
--------------
Ex-RT anchor tells Congress how Putin’s media works.
IN THE NOW
Apr 15, 2015
There's been heated competition today on Capitol Hill - who knows more about propaganda machine called Russia Today? Former RT anchor Liz Wahl, Legatum Institute Fellow Peter Pomerantsev and the Heritage Foundation's Helle C. Dale took part in it. No facts or examples - just common phrases "Russian propaganda", "manipulation", "lies", Kremlin-funded". Wahl even said that the Russian media propagates war. Interesting. All of this to apparently attract more funds for the BBG - The Broadcasting Board of Governors or BBG - the organization behind a set of Cold-War-era media projects, funded exclusively by the US government.
--------------
State Dept. wrote to Sony for help in countering Islamic State, Russian narratives.
RT.com
April 17, 2015 21:15
Emails published this week by WikiLeaks reveal that a senior State Dept. official asked the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment for help in countering the narratives of the Russian Federation and the so-called Islamic State.
Internal Sony correspondence that was leaked to the web following last year’s colossal SPE hack and now mirrored by the anti-secrecy group shows that Richard Stengel, the US under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, asked for Hollywood’s help in advancing the State Dept.’s agenda as recently as November 2014.
“As you could see, we have plenty of challenges in countering ISIL narratives in the Middle East and Russian narratives in central and Eastern Europe. In both cases, there are millions and millions of people in those regions who are getting a skewed version of reality. And it's not something that the State Department can do on its own [by] any means,” Stengel wrote in an Oct. 15 email to SPE CEO Mark Lynton, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic militants also known as ISIS.
“Following up on our conversation, I'd love to convene a group of media executives who can help us think about better ways to respond to both of these large challenges. This is a conversation about ideas, about content and production, about commercial possibilities. I promise you it will be interesting, fun and rewarding,” Stengel wrote.
The State Dept. official re-sent the email two days later, and nearly a month down the line Lynton responded with the names of five other media execs, including representatives for Disney and Fox.
“Is that enough for you?” Lynton asked.
In the span between emails, Stengel sent another brief communique from his personal Gmail account in which he asks “Who are folks…I can or should see in NY re: anti-Russian messaging – and also anti-ISIL messaging?”
The emails do not indicate if the meeting ever occurred, but Marie Harf, the State Dept.’s active spokesperson, told RT’s Gayane Chichakyan during a scheduled press briefing on Friday that the US government doesn’t hide its effort to combat threats abroad.
Harf said the State Dept. reaches out “to social media organizations, entertainment organizations, other people on the outside that are unaffiliated with the government” with regards the anti-ISIS actions of the US.
“I wouldn’t draw any big analytical statements” from the email, Harf said, “…other than we’re very clear that we believe people who have platforms who can speak out against ISIL should do this.”
With regards to “Russian narratives,” however, Harf said disinformation originating from Moscow has spawned a much different challenge for the State. Dept.
“There is a challenge with the extraordinary level of Russian propaganda. Factually, blatant lies about what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine. That’s one challenge for us. There’s a very separate challenge that we’ve talked about in terms of the piece of the anti-ISIL coalition that deals with their propaganda and their narrative, and they are very different,” Harf said.
Last year, hackers penetrated the computer network of SPE and pilfered a trove of sensitive data, including thousands of internal emails. Although the data has been accessible on the web in the months since, WikiLeaks published the cache on the transparency organization’s site this week and along with a feature that allows visitors to search the stolen contents.
Nearly 30 emails hosted on WikiLeaks were either from or to Stengel, and RT reported previously that the correspondence includes dozens of messages between the entertainment company and officials from the US and UK government, including ambassadors others within the Obama administration.
“This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the center of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there,” editor-in-exile Julian Assange said Thursday.
"Working with the entertainment industry is a very small piece of the anti-propaganda efforts. A lot of what we’ve talked about is working with religions leaders, for example, who have platforms and credibility who can speak up against ISIL’s propaganda as well," Harf said on Friday.
Stengel was sworn in to his current role with the State Dept. last February, and previously served as managing editor of TIME magazine from 2006 to 2013.
--------------
US revives MSM propaganda arm in ‘big way’ against Russia.
RT.com
April 18, 2015 05:12
The US media industry has been the arm of the government for decades, but now the Cold War tool is being resurrected in a “big way” to tackle any Russian influence on the information flow, foreign affairs expert Richard Becker told RT.
RT: The revelations show that US authorities are trying to counter what they call propaganda by using propaganda techniques themselves.... what's your take on that?
Richard Becker: Well it is very interesting. This is really a revival, if it ever was allowed to die, of the Cold War. And the Cold War particularly in the field of culture – there is a famous book about it, called the Cultural Cold War - but it appears that the United States which for decades used reporters, film companies, radio broadcasting, all different forms of communication and culture to promote the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And now they are doing the same. And it is very clear and it has never stopped. You mentioned the Broadcasting Board of Governors which has funded anti-Cuba propaganda by paying journalists, and creating radio and TV stations, hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. So that the notion presented by the State Department spokesperson that this isn't something that the US government engages in, or it is up for the entertainment companies to decide is completely false. This is a collaborative effort and it has been going on for decades. And now it is being revived in a big way against Russia as well as against others.
RT: In one of the leaked emails, the State Department asks the CEO of Sony to work with them to tackle the narratives from Islamic State and Russia...how is Sony supposed to do that?
RB: Well of course we can think about different forms that it could take. Again this shows the utter ridiculousness of the State Department claim that it is just to the companies. They can produce TV shows. They can produce movies. They can produce all forms of music videos. It just goes on on and on and on. Sony is an extremely large corporation and they certainly not the only who being approached to do this. But they have many means by which to propagate a narrative, their narrative which shows them the bastion of democracy while whomever they are targeting is portrayed in the worse possible light. And clearly this is continuing to go on.
RT: This revelation shows us a case of a private company becoming an arm of US interests... does this surprise you? Do you think that this is a sign of the transformation of the American private sector into a policy tool?
RB: Well these corporations, the entertainment corporations are huge capitalist corporations. And they have a government that is very much on their side along with other big corporations. And there is nothing really new about this. But after the end of WWII , which as we know just ended 70 years ago, this collaboration was intensified exponentially to turn the media, the big business media, newspapers, movies, TV, radio, etc, the big corporations into arms of the government. And in fact they serve that purpose as arms of the government.
RT: The WikiLeaks revelations also mentions that Sony reached out to an organization specializing in research for the US military and intelligence sector and for advice regarding its North Korea film "The Interview". Do you think we will see more of this kind of cooperation in the future?
RB: Yes. I think this has been going on for a really long time. I think that most people are hearing about it for the first time, but in reality the Pentagon and the military, again really going back to the time of WWII, have collaborated with the movie studios and TV production and other forms of media, when they were doing the programming that the military, that the Pentagon felt was helpful to the US wars around the world. That has been going on for a really long time. It is good that at least some of the population is finding out about this.
RT.com
April 16, 2015 01:01
The House Foreign Affairs Committee blasted “Russia’s weaponization of information” on Wednesday, urging the US government to invest more in media warfare around the world.
Committee chairman Ed Royce (R-Ca) set the tone for the discussion at Wednesday’s hearing by asserting that “Russia’s propaganda machine is in overdrive, working to subvert democratic stability and foment violence in Eastern Europe,” while the US broadcasting was in “disarray.”
Royce’s choice of witnesses for the committee consisted of Russia critics Peter Pomerantsev, Helle Dale, and ex-RT journalist Liz Wahl. This drew criticism from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) who said he wished that “we had at least one other person to balance out this in a way that perhaps could’ve compared our system to the Russian system, to find out where that truth is, just how bad that is.”
“Russia is engaged in a major effort to, basically, support its own policies and promote changes and effects on other populations that further the interests of Russia. I would be surprised if that wasn’t the case,” Rohrabacher said. Noting he used to be a journalist himself, Rohrabacher cautioned against a return to the Cold War mentality. “We don’t need another Cold War. We don’t need to take that belligerent stance,” he said.
Peter Pomerantsev, of the London-based Legatum Institute, disagreed. “Russia has launched an information war against the West – and we are losing,” he told the committee.
Helle Dale, of the Heritage Foundation, called the content and commentary from RT and others “polished and slickly produced,” so that “unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.” Dale also falsely claimed that RT had a budget of “$400 million for its Washington bureau” alone. At the current exchange rate the budget for all of RT’s operations is $275 million.
Read More: Info war-mongers: Usual suspects in cash call to fight ‘anti-US messaging’
Last week, the director of Voice of America (VOA) resigned, following the resignation of Andrew Lack, CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) after just six weeks on the job. Lack had infamously equated RT with the Islamic State and Boko Haram, continuing the series of attacks on RT and Russia by senior US officials.
This is not the first time the US government has invoked inflated figures of RT’s funding to plead for more funds for the BBG. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously said the US was losing the “information war” to RT and other media. Her successor John Kerry called RT a “propaganda bullhorn” and asked for hundreds of millions of dollars to “promote democracy” in Eastern Europe.
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the other hand, dismissed RT as having a “tiny, tiny audience” and representing no threat to a US media space “full of dynamic truthful opinion.”
Renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky explained the reasoning behind this seemingly contradictory approach. “The idea that there should be a network reaching people, which does not repeat the US propaganda system, is intolerable” to the US establishment, Chomsky told RT.
“If the House wants to study the weaponization of the media, they can look right at the front pages of the newspapers that they get every day,” the MIT professor-emeritus said.“If we look closely at the conflict [in Ukraine], you can find plenty of problems on both sides, but the way they’re interpreted here, is we’re necessarily right about everything. And if anyone’s in the way, they’re wrong about everything.”
--------------
Ex-RT anchor tells Congress how Putin’s media works.
IN THE NOW
Apr 15, 2015
There's been heated competition today on Capitol Hill - who knows more about propaganda machine called Russia Today? Former RT anchor Liz Wahl, Legatum Institute Fellow Peter Pomerantsev and the Heritage Foundation's Helle C. Dale took part in it. No facts or examples - just common phrases "Russian propaganda", "manipulation", "lies", Kremlin-funded". Wahl even said that the Russian media propagates war. Interesting. All of this to apparently attract more funds for the BBG - The Broadcasting Board of Governors or BBG - the organization behind a set of Cold-War-era media projects, funded exclusively by the US government.
--------------
State Dept. wrote to Sony for help in countering Islamic State, Russian narratives.
RT.com
April 17, 2015 21:15
Emails published this week by WikiLeaks reveal that a senior State Dept. official asked the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment for help in countering the narratives of the Russian Federation and the so-called Islamic State.
Internal Sony correspondence that was leaked to the web following last year’s colossal SPE hack and now mirrored by the anti-secrecy group shows that Richard Stengel, the US under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, asked for Hollywood’s help in advancing the State Dept.’s agenda as recently as November 2014.
“As you could see, we have plenty of challenges in countering ISIL narratives in the Middle East and Russian narratives in central and Eastern Europe. In both cases, there are millions and millions of people in those regions who are getting a skewed version of reality. And it's not something that the State Department can do on its own [by] any means,” Stengel wrote in an Oct. 15 email to SPE CEO Mark Lynton, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic militants also known as ISIS.
“Following up on our conversation, I'd love to convene a group of media executives who can help us think about better ways to respond to both of these large challenges. This is a conversation about ideas, about content and production, about commercial possibilities. I promise you it will be interesting, fun and rewarding,” Stengel wrote.
The State Dept. official re-sent the email two days later, and nearly a month down the line Lynton responded with the names of five other media execs, including representatives for Disney and Fox.
“Is that enough for you?” Lynton asked.
In the span between emails, Stengel sent another brief communique from his personal Gmail account in which he asks “Who are folks…I can or should see in NY re: anti-Russian messaging – and also anti-ISIL messaging?”
The emails do not indicate if the meeting ever occurred, but Marie Harf, the State Dept.’s active spokesperson, told RT’s Gayane Chichakyan during a scheduled press briefing on Friday that the US government doesn’t hide its effort to combat threats abroad.
Harf said the State Dept. reaches out “to social media organizations, entertainment organizations, other people on the outside that are unaffiliated with the government” with regards the anti-ISIS actions of the US.
“I wouldn’t draw any big analytical statements” from the email, Harf said, “…other than we’re very clear that we believe people who have platforms who can speak out against ISIL should do this.”
With regards to “Russian narratives,” however, Harf said disinformation originating from Moscow has spawned a much different challenge for the State. Dept.
“There is a challenge with the extraordinary level of Russian propaganda. Factually, blatant lies about what Russia is doing in eastern Ukraine. That’s one challenge for us. There’s a very separate challenge that we’ve talked about in terms of the piece of the anti-ISIL coalition that deals with their propaganda and their narrative, and they are very different,” Harf said.
Last year, hackers penetrated the computer network of SPE and pilfered a trove of sensitive data, including thousands of internal emails. Although the data has been accessible on the web in the months since, WikiLeaks published the cache on the transparency organization’s site this week and along with a feature that allows visitors to search the stolen contents.
Nearly 30 emails hosted on WikiLeaks were either from or to Stengel, and RT reported previously that the correspondence includes dozens of messages between the entertainment company and officials from the US and UK government, including ambassadors others within the Obama administration.
“This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the center of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there,” editor-in-exile Julian Assange said Thursday.
"Working with the entertainment industry is a very small piece of the anti-propaganda efforts. A lot of what we’ve talked about is working with religions leaders, for example, who have platforms and credibility who can speak up against ISIL’s propaganda as well," Harf said on Friday.
Stengel was sworn in to his current role with the State Dept. last February, and previously served as managing editor of TIME magazine from 2006 to 2013.
--------------
US revives MSM propaganda arm in ‘big way’ against Russia.
RT.com
April 18, 2015 05:12
The US media industry has been the arm of the government for decades, but now the Cold War tool is being resurrected in a “big way” to tackle any Russian influence on the information flow, foreign affairs expert Richard Becker told RT.
RT: The revelations show that US authorities are trying to counter what they call propaganda by using propaganda techniques themselves.... what's your take on that?
Richard Becker: Well it is very interesting. This is really a revival, if it ever was allowed to die, of the Cold War. And the Cold War particularly in the field of culture – there is a famous book about it, called the Cultural Cold War - but it appears that the United States which for decades used reporters, film companies, radio broadcasting, all different forms of communication and culture to promote the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And now they are doing the same. And it is very clear and it has never stopped. You mentioned the Broadcasting Board of Governors which has funded anti-Cuba propaganda by paying journalists, and creating radio and TV stations, hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. So that the notion presented by the State Department spokesperson that this isn't something that the US government engages in, or it is up for the entertainment companies to decide is completely false. This is a collaborative effort and it has been going on for decades. And now it is being revived in a big way against Russia as well as against others.
RT: In one of the leaked emails, the State Department asks the CEO of Sony to work with them to tackle the narratives from Islamic State and Russia...how is Sony supposed to do that?
RB: Well of course we can think about different forms that it could take. Again this shows the utter ridiculousness of the State Department claim that it is just to the companies. They can produce TV shows. They can produce movies. They can produce all forms of music videos. It just goes on on and on and on. Sony is an extremely large corporation and they certainly not the only who being approached to do this. But they have many means by which to propagate a narrative, their narrative which shows them the bastion of democracy while whomever they are targeting is portrayed in the worse possible light. And clearly this is continuing to go on.
RT: This revelation shows us a case of a private company becoming an arm of US interests... does this surprise you? Do you think that this is a sign of the transformation of the American private sector into a policy tool?
RB: Well these corporations, the entertainment corporations are huge capitalist corporations. And they have a government that is very much on their side along with other big corporations. And there is nothing really new about this. But after the end of WWII , which as we know just ended 70 years ago, this collaboration was intensified exponentially to turn the media, the big business media, newspapers, movies, TV, radio, etc, the big corporations into arms of the government. And in fact they serve that purpose as arms of the government.
RT: The WikiLeaks revelations also mentions that Sony reached out to an organization specializing in research for the US military and intelligence sector and for advice regarding its North Korea film "The Interview". Do you think we will see more of this kind of cooperation in the future?
RB: Yes. I think this has been going on for a really long time. I think that most people are hearing about it for the first time, but in reality the Pentagon and the military, again really going back to the time of WWII, have collaborated with the movie studios and TV production and other forms of media, when they were doing the programming that the military, that the Pentagon felt was helpful to the US wars around the world. That has been going on for a really long time. It is good that at least some of the population is finding out about this.