Translated material
Blogging the strike
Who won the information war
Union of Soviet Socialist Media. The Russian leadership lost the information war in the world, having unconditionally won the propaganda campaign inside the country. Georgia turned out to be much better prepared for confrontation in the international media space. The New Times dealt with cause and effect
The war in South Ossetia showed that neither President Dmitry Medvedev nor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were ready for a full-scale information war. The results of studies by VTsIOM and the Levada Center, conducted immediately after the end of hostilities, say the following: 23% of Russians believe that the president was not tough enough, and 28% do not know anything about Medvedev's position at all. Against this background, Kremlin ideologists complain about the bias of the Western media, which, in their opinion, covered the conflict in South Ossetia too one-sidedly.
Unequal Forces
“It must be admitted that Russia lost the information war,” Nikolai Zlobin, an American political scientist, wrote in his blog. - It is amazing, but none of the top leaders of Russia has ever addressed directly to his people and the world with an explanation of her position. There was no appeal to the nation. There was no explanation why exactly the peacekeepers sent there by official Moscow died, why hundreds of their compatriots are dying in South Ossetia, and the Russian army is openly bombing the territory of a neighboring state.”
During the war, Moscow's main newsmakers were Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and Vitaly Churkin, Russia's representative to the UN. Several interviews and briefings were given by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Once, the former Minister of Defense, and now Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, spoke. And that's it.
Georgia in this regard approached the war much more competently. “I can't think of another conflict that used CNN in this way,” Columbia University professor Lincoln Mitchell told the Moscow Times. “You would have thought that Mikheil Saakashvili had his own show there.” It is simply impossible to count the number of interviews of the Georgian leader in the days of the war with the Western media. In addition to him, the entire Georgian leadership was in constant contact with the press, starting with Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze and ending with the last rank in the Ministry of Defense. According to Mitchell, Saakashvili understood the need to work with Western public opinion before Moscow, while “Medvedev looked like a Soviet apparatchik, and Putin looked like a mafia from the movie The Sopranos.” At the same time, both Tbilisi and Moscow have lobbying offices in the US whose function is to work with public opinion. According to various sources, such a service cost Saakashvili $120,000 and the Kremlin almost $2 million.
Border is locked tight
At the same time, the accessibility of the country's leaders has become far from the most important trump card in the hands of Tbilisi. An international press center has been operating in Gori since the first day of hostilities. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist Dmitry Steshin, who ended up in Gori in the first days of the war, three floors of the local television building were allocated for the press center. “We have gathered Western journalists there. On the first day of the war there were a lot of them - about 50 people. They were taken to positions, every hour the head of the press center came out with operational information, Dmitry Sanakoev (head of the provisional administration of South Ossetia. - The New Times) came regularly. All of them gave interviews in Georgian and English,” Steshin told The New Times.
Foreign journalists who ended up in Russia were in completely different conditions. They were simply not allowed through the Russian-Georgian border in the area of the Roki Tunnel, although there were no restrictions on movement for the Russian press in the first days. “At the border, I was told that only citizens of the CIS countries were allowed to cross it, and they recommended me to go back to Vladikavkaz,” Zhao Jialin, a correspondent for the Chinese Xinhua news agency, told The New Times. “The border guards referred to some kind of Russian-Georgian agreement, according to which foreigners do not have the right to cross the border in the South Ossetian zone,” added Hungarian journalist Gergey Nilash from the Nepsabadshag newspaper.
Sergei Grechushkin, a correspondent for the Polish weekly Pshekrui, managed to get into the conflict zone only thanks to a Russian passport, but after returning to North Ossetia, he spent five hours at the police station while operatives found out his identity. A journalist from the France Press agency arrived in Tskhinvali a few days before the war, but CNN had to wait until the Russian photographer of Time magazine got to the capital of the unrecognized republic: CNN did not manage to get a normal picture, as a result, the Time photographer went on the air and the slide photo show. Closer to the end of hostilities, problems began to arise for Russian journalists, who suddenly needed special accreditation from the Foreign Ministry and the FSB to work. And at this time, as eyewitnesses testify, the Kremlin and KGB PR chiefs tirelessly celebrated the happiness of a peaceful life far from Moscow in the main hotel of Vladikavkaz.
Blog Kremlin
At the same time, the Kremlin PR specialists won the propaganda campaign inside the country unconditionally. However, they had no competitors inside the country. Television traditionally gave only one point of view, even inviting doctors to air, who were asked to diagnose him based on photographs of the excited Georgian leader.
The Georgian authorities did not remain in debt: they demonstrated their “democratic nature” by first turning off Russian TV channels from broadcasting, then closing access to all sites with the ru domain, and, to top it off, stopped broadcasting the Russian-language RTVI after an interview with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was held there "Echo of Moscow".
Russian hackers even earlier hacked government websites in Georgia. Already on August 8, a few hours after the start of the war, hackers managed to crash the websites of the president and the government, parliament, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Georgia. Visitors to the news agency "Georgia Online" found on the main page of the publication a photograph of Saakashvili in a Nazi uniform, while the Georgian leader was painted with a Hitler mustache.
Perhaps for the first time, a complete victory was won by the Kremlin PR people on the Internet. The Kremlin's propagandists were most active these days in the blogosphere. Employees of the pro-Kremlin Gleb Pavlovsky Effective Policy Foundation were especially distinguished. In the mode of news agencies, they filled blog feeds with news from the fronts, diluted with outright propaganda. The propagandists took advantage of the fact that interest in the news in society these days was especially great (the ratings of news programs on television, despite the Olympics, doubled). The popularity of informational blogs was also high, and their attendance during the days of the conflict could well be compared with the attendance of the most promoted online media. Having won, the political technologists even tried to make a scandal around the photos of the Reuters agency from Gori. Bloggers from the FEP claimed that the photos with the corpses of Georgians who died as a result of the Russian air raid were fake, and even fabricated an interview with the photographer, which Aleksey Venediktov, editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy, allegedly took from him. In a fake interview, the photographer confirmed that the shots he took were staged. Even some quite serious media outlets reacted to the fake, reprinting the news about the "puncture" of Reuters. Neither a denial from Venediktov himself (he did not take this interview), nor a message on the official website of the agency that the results of an internal check confirmed the authenticity of the shots could not prevent the spread of misinformation.
The victory in blogs, of course, could not influence international public opinion in any way, but it became one of the stages of victory on the domestic information front. It remains to master international technologies.