Pictures: YouTube
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US-based media platforms have made an extraordinary effort to cut off Western audiences from news from a Russian perspective. When social critic Noam Chomsky pointed out how unprecedented this was, Newsweek’s “factchecker” (7/26/22) declared his criticism “clearly false” – a determination that did more to confirm the ideological restrictions of American media only to demystify them.
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russia Today, funded by the Russian government, was pulled from DirecTV and Dish Network (New York Times, 3/12/22), YouTube (France24, 12/3/22), TikTok, Meta (CNN, 01/03/22) Google News (Reuters, 01/03/22) and Spotify (Reuters, 02/03/22) in the United States and/or Europe . RT and Sputnik (another Russian state-funded network) have been removed from Apple’s App Store (TechCrunch, 3/1/22).
Microsoft banned RT from the Windows App Store and downgraded RT and Sputnik in Bing search results (TechCrunch, 03/01/22). Google (Reuters, 03/01/22), Meta (Reuters 02/26/22) and Microsoft (Microsoft.com, 02/28/22) banned RT from receiving advertising revenue through their platforms. RT was also banned by Roku, a streaming hardware company (CNN, 3/1/22).
The motivations for banning RT and Sputnik were due to “extraordinary circumstances”, in Google’s words (Reuters, 2/26/22), and to protect “against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (Microsoft. com, 2/28/22). RT’s offices in the United States had to completely shut down production (Washington Post, 3/3/22).
PayPal recently froze independent media accounts such as Consortium News (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22) and MintPress (Democracy Now!, 5/4/22; FAIR.org, 5/18/22). The circumstances surrounding PayPal’s actions are less clear than those of the actions against RT. Consortium News editor Joe Lauria said he doesn’t know why PayPal froze his account, but he suspects a clause in the user agreement against “spreading misinformation” may have been invoked (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22).
One of the many chilling effects of the media blackout was that YouTube deleted its entire archive of comments by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges (who previously worked for The New York Times and NPR) because he was hosted by RT (Democracy Now!, 4/1/22).
In May, the United States announced new sanctions against Russian television stations Channel One Russia, Television Station Russia-1 and NTV Broadcasting Company (CNN, 5/8/22), cutting them off from U.S. advertisers.
“A kind of totalitarian culture”
Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and renowned media critic, responded to this consolidated effort to “counter the threat” posed by “information warfare” (Newsweek, 7/26/22) in an interview with the actor Russell Brand (Youtube, 7/22/22):
Take the United States today; it’s living under a kind of totalitarian culture that never existed in my lifetime, and which is far worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Back in the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access the BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.
Chomsky’s comments were recently “verified” by Tom Norton of Newsweek (7/26/22). He wrote:
While the BBC and Radio Free America broadcast in Russia after World War II and during the Cold War, their frequencies were jammed by the Soviet government for decades. Any access the Russian public has had has been gained despite, not because of, the efforts of their government.
The article briefly covers the history of signal jamming in the Soviet Union and other comments by Chomsky, concluding:
To suggest that Americans have less access to information than citizens of Soviet Russia is therefore not only clearly false, but an argument that overlooks the sacrifices and perils journalists have endured to provide accurate information about the country, and continue to endure to this day. .
Newsweek’s official ruling declared Chomsky’s comments false:
By all accounts, Americans can access news from Russia despite the fact that many Western journalists have fled the country and Russia has blocked its audiences from accessing most social media and news platforms. Westerners.
“A Pervasive Phenomenon”
One of the articles used to back up the certification of the lie was a New York Times (5/26/87) article from 1987 which reported that “Russia began broadcasting Voice of America after blocking its signal for seven years” . A BBC article (3/23/11) from 2011 was also used to explain that between 1949 and 1987 the Soviets spent significant funds developing jammers to block Western transmissions.
Interestingly, the same New York Times article reported that “a Harvard University study in the mid-1970s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union were listening”. [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’ And similarly, from the same BBC article quoted by Newsweek:
However, jamming has never been fully effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] The Russian Service along with other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.
Using just two articles from Western sources selected by the fact-checker, it appears that millions of people, including virtually all intellectuals in the Soviet Union, accessed and tuned into Western media in the 1970s, which is quite consistent with Comsky’s comments: until the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access the BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to know the news .
Newsweek contacted Chomsky for comment, who replied:
I was explicit. I referred to the banning of RT and other channels, comparing it to pre-perestroika Russia when Russians got their news from the BBC and VoA, according to US studies.
A mass Soviet audience
A collection of studies was published in 2010 in the book Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by A. Ross Johnson, a former researcher at the Hoover Institute (a conservative think tank) and director of Radio Free Europe (media financed by the United States) and R. Eugene Parta, also former director of RFE and contributor to the Hoover Institution. Studies support the claim that people in the Soviet Union frequently listened to Western media.
In the 1970s, simulations estimated by MIT indicated that weekly VoA listening peaked at 19% of the adult Soviet population, with the BBC reaching 11%. “The results of the study showed that by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the urban population of the USSR listened more or less regularly to foreign broadcasts,” according to Cold War Broadcasting.
Out of curiosity, what do American studies say about the 1980s?
Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe listened weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s. This represented about half of VoA’s worldwide audience at the time.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan apparently did not stop people from listening to Western broadcasts. In 1984, 40% of the urban population received information about the war in Afghanistan from Western radio stations, and in 1987 it was 45%.
In the contemporary United States, however, this is not allowed. We cannot have people who listen to the enemy in times of war.
Cold War Broadcasting noted that
the audience size of Western radio stations has steadily increased since broadcasting began in the early post-war period to reach over 50% of the Soviet urban population by the early 1980s.
In other words, Western radios had a massive audience in the former USSR. The number of regular listeners reached 20 to 25%.
Soviet listeners seemed to use their access to information from several angles to get a fuller picture of events:
Despite a relatively high level of trust in Western radio stations, most listeners do not fully accept all the information they hear. The Soviet public took a more deliberate approach to understanding information that was based on a comparison of information obtained from Soviet mass media with that of foreign radio programs.
Thus, Western media and American studies seem to agree with Chomsky: despite the jamming, people had access to and often listened to Western sources in the Soviet Union and were very engaged in current affairs at the time, especially in the 70’s.
