Since I have been living in London, I have been impressed by British television news. The BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky strive for objectivity and impartiality. The BBC is attacked by politicians from both the left and the right, which suggests to me that its reporting maintains a good standard of balance. Despite being owned by the Fox magnate Rupert Murdoch until 2018, Sky News rejects the political bias that has become the calling card of so many broadcasters abroad. In the US, for example, there has been a marked radicalisation of TV networks, with CNN openly supporting the left and Fox equally siding with the right. This has led US politics to become damagingly polarised and people’s prejudices entrenched to extremes. I regret that Ronald Reagan dropped the ‘fairness’ requirement that up until 1987 demanded balance from the broadcast networks. Now that social networks permit people to close themselves off from alternative opinions and live within a monolithic group, sometimes sharing the most radical and often patently erroneous convictions, this is a question that must be seriously reconsidered.
But in Putin’s Russia, the situation is much worse. In the US, there is at least market competition, which ensures most political views are represented by at least one channel. In Russia, the state has a de facto monopoly of the mass media, which guarantees it also has a ‘monopoly of truth’. Boris Yeltsin allowed a brief interlude of freedom in the 1990s, but Vladimir Putin is replacing glasnost with a return to Soviet times. The Kremlin has created a dominant information stream that wages an aggressive and permanent information war. The few remaining independent media outlets are harassed and restricted by the authorities.
A popular joke of the past couple of years in Russia asks, ‘What is the Russian for fake news?’ with the answer being, ‘News.’ It has become a favourite among those who despair at the mendacity of Vladimir Putin’s state media and communications machine. But the truth is more nuanced. People in Russia know what is going on. News is distorted, but it is not always hidden. The insidious thing is the way that Putin’s propaganda operation has got inside people’s heads and the facility with which it has learned how to make people believe in presumptions. If all the available sources of news keep telling you that a fact should be viewed in a certain way, the majority of us will agree that that is the way it should be viewed.
Psychologists have shown that people are relatively easily persuaded to adapt their opinions to the general view. A series of experiments in the 1950s by the US researcher Solomon Asch investigated the phenomenon of conformity, the process by which a person’s opinions are influenced by those of groups. Asch found that people are willing to ignore reality – to disregard the evidence of their own eyes and give an answer they know to be incorrect – in order to conform to the rest of the group. He concluded that individuals have a compulsion to follow the unspoken rules and behaviours of the society in which they live, driven by an innate fear of appearing different, or by a desire to belong.
The Kremlin’s propaganda machine is adept at exploiting those fears and desires, and we in the democratic opposition must learn to combat them. Freedom of speech and societal openness have been, and remain, the most important elements of democracy. We know from psychology that social support is an important tool in reducing pernicious conformity; if an individual knows that others in her social group are willing to resist, she too is more likely to do so. Our task is to provide that support, to furnish the factual reassurances that will lead to a critical mass of citizens willing to reject the Kremlin’s manipulation. Asch suggests that conformity decreases when people are able to respond privately, without the external pressures of the social domain. This has had the perverse effect that many Russians pretend to accept the ‘official’ view of things in their public life – to avoid opprobrium or appearing different – while remaining fully conscious that the official version is a lie. As the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz has pointed out, it can be an uncomfortable mental task to live this double life of knowing and pretending not to know. It is a conflict summed up in another Russian joke about two KGB men who are having a drink after work. The first one, Dmitry, says to his friend, ‘Tell me, Ivan. What do you
