Why Putin Can't Win the Propaganda War at Home
Vladimir Putin slipped a noose around the throat of independent Russian media last week, and with a few tugs has begun to choke the life from it.
Drawing on his existing legal powers and new ones passed by the Russian legislature — which forbids the spread of information that contradicts the official Russian take on the Ukraine war, punishable by 15 years in prison — Putin has silenced domestic critics of his regime. In reaction to the new measures, opposition radio station Ekho Moskvy and TV Dozhd (Rain) have closed shop. Mediazona, which covers political arrests, Snob magazine, the Agentstvo investigative news site and others have been blocked by the government. Access to Facebook and Twitter has been interrupted, and Russians can no longer upload to Tik Tok. Many international news organizations have either abandoned their Russia bureaus or curtailed their reporting.
The clampdown has relegated the war to news outlets that agree to call the Ukraine invasion a “special military operation,” that proclaim as “fake” the bombed-city footage we’ve been watching, and that assert that Russian troops are “rescuing” Russian-speaking people from “Nazis.” Official Russian propaganda has now obliterated what was — by Soviet standards, at least — a relatively free media environment. That doesn’t mean Putin has been a free speech radical during his time in office. The New Yorker noted his general hostility to open expression last summer and his regime's attacks on journalists are well-documented.
But information technology has gained a significant toehold in Russia, making it difficult for the state to blot out the messages it disdains, and the country’s younger citizens have been exposed to too many Western experiences through travel and media to ever swallow whole government propaganda again. Whether he knows it or not, Putin seems doomed to lose an extended propaganda war at home.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/opinion-why-putin-cant-win-the-propaganda-war-at-home/ar-AAUR7VC