Weaponising news RT, Sputnik and targeted disinformation
This report by the Policy Institute at King’s College London contains three separate analyses of English- language news content published by RT and Sputnik and its implications for news organisations in Western democracies. These analyses are linked, but may be of interest to different audiences. Together, the analyses comprise a comprehensive analysis of how Russian state-linked news outlets play a variety of roles in different situations, ranging from coordinating damage- control messaging, to amplifiers of Russian prestige and aggregators of negative content about Western domestic politics:
Flooding the zone: RT, Sputnik and Russian framing of the Skripal incident. This analysis shows how Russian news outlets inserted over 130 competing and often contradictory narratives into their extensive coverage of the March 2018 Salisbury poisoning incident. The study shows how state- linked news outlets operate in a ‘crisis management’ situation, mobilising a ‘parallel commentariat’ to air dozens of narratives explaining events and the motivations of Western actors, as well as amplifying provocative statements from senior Russian government officials.
Heads we win, tails you lose: projecting Russian strength. This analysis demonstrates how Russian news outlets portray Russian military prowess and
Western military weakness to English-speaking audiences. It demonstrates how RT and Sputnik generate a large volume of coverage critical of NATO and extensive reports on the potency of Russian prototype weapons. The susceptibility of Western news outlets to eye-catching details of Russian military strength is demonstrated through evidence of directly and indirectly replicated information on Russian weapons published by UK news outlets.
Division and dysfunction: how RT and Sputnik portray the West and construct news agendas. The final analysis records how Russian English-language news outlets publish a steady stream of articles about domestic politics and events in the USA and Europe that focus on political dysfunction, institutional failure, social division and the negative effects of immigration. It also shows that RT and Sputnik act as negative news aggregators, harvesting, repackaging and translating stories from local news outlets across Europe, before publishing them for English-language audiences. A software-driven text-matching analysis also demonstrates the extent to which UK news organisations (primarily tabloid news sites) gather and republish content from RT and Sputnik, as well as showing how the Russian outlets replicate content from UK news sources in return.
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