Russian propaganda's daisy chain

Alexey Kovalev's website, NoodleRemover.news, which uncovers dirty dealings and dishonest reporting in the Kremlin-controlled Russian media, has uncovered new dirty dealing and dishonest reporting in the Kremlin-controlled Russian media.

Kovalev's latest report addresses a story titled “AgoraVox: Russian Sanctions Against the West Threaten a Severe Depression,” which appeared on Russian.rt.com, RT's InoTV project, which translates foreign media reports about Russia.

The original article was published on the French-language website AgoraVox, which is more a blog platform than a news media outlet. The text claims that Russian officials are considering defaulting on the country's foreign debt, which would supposedly “unleash an economic cyclone” against the West. Like many translations that appear on InoTV, the story depicts the Kremlin as master over the West, and Vladimir Putin as a leader who always manages the upperhand in dealings with foreign aggressors.

As Kovalev points out, presenting such content as representative of the Western press is the same as saying, “according to the distinguished American media outlet Facebook.” Anyone can write for AgoraVox, and so it is odd to treat the website like a source for expert analysis, let alone a respected one.

Kovalev discovered that the article InoTV chose to translate was itself a French translation of an English-language text that first appeared on the conspiracy-theorist website WhatDoesItMean.com, written by a woman named Sister Maria Theresa, who is described as “the 73rd Sorcha Faal of the Sorcha Faal Order, elected as mother superior on February 3, 2007.” According to her profile on the website, she has “traveled and lectured extensively throughout the world, with her primary focus being the systematic structure of languages serving as a link between thought and sound.” To make matters stranger, she “further expanded her own research on ‘linguistic ordering’ with knowledge gained while a visiting researcher with Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev on the esoteric structure of DNA and its uses in explaining physic phenomena.”

This is the “expert” source of commentary that RT deemed appropriate for translation and publication.

The embarrassment doesn't end there, however. Kovalev also discovered that the article on WhatDoesItMean cites and was largely based on a report that appeared on the pro-Kremlin website Russia Insider on September 19, 2015. Two days earlier, that text first appeared on RT itself, completing the daisy chain of conspiracy journalism, from RT, to Russia Insider, to WhatDoesItMean, to AgoraVox, back to RT's own InoTV.