John Sparks, Russia Correspondent

Russia's international broadcasting arm Russia
Today advises us to "Question More". Its online
counterpart Sputnik informs us it is "Telling the
Untold". But a more accurate slogan for these state-
run operations might be: "Decided in Advance".
I had a revealing conversation not so long ago with a
Russia Today correspondent in the field. In a bout of
unexpected openness, she told me how difficult it
was to work the RT way.
Editors decide what journalists are going to say
before the reporting begins - the story line is set in
advance. Then RT journalists have to go out and
find experts, commentators or events that support
how their bosses see the story.
"It isn't easy," she told me. "Sometimes you simply
can't get anyone who agrees with the line on say,
Iran - and you're screwed."
This is a perversion of the journalistic process as it
is typically understood. Coverage of news events
and societal issues take reporters down any number
of unexpected avenues. A good story is difficult to
predict but in the west you are generally free to
pursue it.
In the Russian media world however (which is
controlled almost entirely by the state) good
journalists are the ones who do exactly as they are
told.
Take American Andrew Feinburg for example, who
limped through a five -month stint as 'White House
Correspondent' for Sputnik. He says "Telling the
Untold" actually means, "reflecting the Russian side
of any news story, whether it lines up with reality or
not".
Mr Feinburg made his weirdly non-journalistic bosses
seriously unhappy when he asked President Trump's
spokesman why the President was not sending
military assistance to Ukraine, "in that country's fight
against Russian aggression".
He got himself sacked after telling his supervisors
he was not comfortable digging into an alt-right
conspiracy theory linking the death of a former
Democratic National Committee employee to the
theft of thousands of emails last year.
If foreign nationals like Mr Feinburg have a hard time
doing propaganda for Russian outlets, you can
probably imagine how much pressure journalists
working in Russia come under.
Writing in online publication Coda Story, reporter Ilya
Kizirov detailed his travails at publications where
editors had been instructed by the Kremlin to dump
the "objectivity' and fight 'the new cold war'".
Mr Kizirov related how a colleague was told to do a
positive story on the introduction of toll parking in
Moscow. Unable to find anyone who would say
something good about it, employees from state-
owned company were drafted in to give spontaneous
and positive reviews.
Incidents like that will not come as much surprise to
Russians - they know what they are going to get
when they switch on the box. Yet there has been a
striking intensification of such propaganda in recent
months with state outlets pushing a series of mind-
blowing false-hoods in the guise of breaking news
and "exclusives".
For instance, Russian media "revealed" that the US
government is operating a dozen or more secret
biological labs in Ukraine as part of a covert
program, adding that the facilities were likely
responsible for a series of disease outbreaks in the
country.
A few days earlier, broadcasters breathlessly
discussed a fake article (produced on a fake
Guardian web page) detailing a MI6 plan to
destabilise Russia in neighbouring Georgia. Both
stories originated on a so-called hackers' website
widely linked to the Russian government. Russia's
obsequious media-corp uncritically passed it all on.
The Russian media world is controlled almost
entirely by the state and good journalists do
exactly as they are told
Some stories would surely test the credulity of
President Putin's most devout followers. As tensions
increased over North Korea, Russia's Channel One
pumped out oodles of positive coverage about Kim
Jong Un & co - the capital Pyongyang has enjoyed a
fashion boom, it claimed, that puts it on a par with
Milan and Paris.
Quite what Jean-Paul Gaultier would make of that is
unclear - but the intimate coordination between
Kremlin officials and the Russian media tells us that
there is no counter-veiling power in Russia - that
there are few if any restraints on what the people
who govern can do. It all feels pretty Soviet.
And in some ways the current administration may be
following the Soviet playbook. In 1983, KGB agents
were famously accused of placing a story in an
Indian newspaper which claimed that Aids was the
product of US military research. Soviet Publications
then spread it around the world.
As for the folks at Sputnik, well, you can expect
them to keep "telling the untold".
But the untold here is what the group who run
Russia think about the rest of the world.
And they will use as many journalists as they need
to get the job done.

Tweet