The British journalist writes hundreds of sensational articles about Russia every month. How is it possible?

The podcast The Naked Pravda - about who Will Stewart is

In the third episode of the English-language podcast The Naked Pravda, the chief editor of the international version of Medusa Kevin Rotrok tells about the British journalist who supplies crazy articles about Russia in the Western media, and tries to understand who needs it and why.

In October 2019, the Russia today news agency published data that almost half of all the articles about Russia in the foreign press are “negative”, and the bulk of such materials are released in British publications. As Medusa found out , a significant part of these notes is written by the same author. This is the British journalist Will Stewart. He arrived in Moscow in the early 1990s and soon created an agency: his employees collect articles from Russian tabloids, and Stewart then rewrites them, sometimes embellish them-and sells Western newspapers.

How does the business of Stuart work? What does Stuart write about Russia and how does his articles affect the image of the country abroad? Kevin Rotrok discusses the situation with the head of the Medusa investigation department Alexei Kovalev, a professor at the University of Maryland Sarah Outs and an invited researcher of the School of Communications and Journalism Annenberg in the United States Vasily Gatov.

In the release:

• 02:47 Alexey Kovalev explains how he found out about Will Stuart and why the British journalist arrived to write a serious analytics, and in the end went to the tabloids.
• 09:46 Sarah OUTS does not approve of Stuart’s methods, but at the same time, in her opinion, one should not be surprised that the Western media write “negative” articles about Russia.
• 16:09 Vasily Gatov talks about the symbiosis of security forces and PR specialists: how do they manipulate information?

Subscribe to The Naked Pravda podcast so as not to miss new episodes. We are on all the main platforms: Apple Podcast , Google Podcasts , Castbox , Spotify , Yandex.Musica . Questions to Kevin, wishes and suggestions write to the postcasts@meduza.io.