"Gas cotton" instead of "explosion"

How the Kremlin Novoyaz penetrates into news about accidents and disasters

The chief editor of the international version of Medusa Kevin Rotrok finds out why in the Russian press the explosions of gas were increasingly called “claps”. Where do euphemisms in the news come from and are such manipulations in the Western media found?

In the past three years, the word “explosion” has increasingly replaced in the Russian media with “cotton”, and even in the news about explosions with obvious destruction and human victims. According to Medusa, at the beginning of 2017, dozens of “cotton” were already in journalistic texts, and by the beginning of 2020 this word began to be consumed hundreds of times more.

Sources in law enforcement agencies and the presidential administration note that this is happening intentionally: this is how the authorities are trying to create a “regime of information favors” in order to avoid panic.

Since February, when Medusa published an investigation into “gas claps”, the role of euphemisms in the news only grew against the background of the pandemic of coronavirus. Kevin Rotrok in the new episode of the English -language podcast The Naked Pravda tried to understand how the media language is a means of manipulation. Kevin talked with the head of the Medusa investigation department by Alexei Kovalev and a professor at the University of Maryland Sarah Outs.

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Producer, installation - Kevin Rotrok

Music - Victor Davydov

The episode uses Fragments of the compositions of Thinking (Kevin Macleod), when Johnny Comes Marching Home (Leon Lishner and Friends); Creative Commons license.