The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America

by Timothy Snyder

RT, Russia’s television propaganda sender for foreign audiences, had the same purpose: the suppression of knowledge that might inspire action, and the coaxing of emotion into inaction. It subverted the format of the news broadcast by its straight-faced embrace of baroque contradiction: inviting a Holocaust denier to speak and identifying him as a human rights activist; hosting a neo-Nazi and referring to him as a specialist on the Middle East. In the words of Vladimir Putin, RT was “funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position.” That position was the absence of a factual world, and the level of funding was about $400 million a year. Americans and Europeans found in the channel an amplifier of their own doubts—sometimes perfectly justified—in the truthfulness of their own leaders and the vitality of their own media. RT’s slogan, “Question More,” inspired an appetite for more uncertainty. It made no sense to question the factuality of what RT broadcast, since what it broadcast was the denial of factuality. As its director said: “There is no such thing as objective reporting.” RT wished to convey that all media lied, but that only RT was honest by not pretending to be truthful. Factuality was replaced by a knowing cynicism that asked nothing of the viewer but the occasional nod before sleep. —