
RT, Sputnik and Russia’s New Theory of War - prostoalex
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/magazine/rt-sputnik-and-russias-new-theory-of-war.html?_r=0
======
le-mark
The other day, on a whim, I decided to point my browser at the
www.bloomberg.com. I'd noticed myself becoming increasingly apprehensive about
reading the news _anywhere_ online due to what I percieve to be an excess of
sensationalism, salaciousness, and out right suspect journalism. For example,
how many articles about politics do we read where sources "close to the
situation" wish to remain secret?

Anyway, going to the spartan, "facts only" seeming homepage of bloomberg was
really a revelation to me. This is what news used to be like. Just a bunch of
bland boring headlines. It made me realize, that angst I'd been feeling,
reminded me of reading National Enquirer[0] headlines, in line, at the grocery
store as a child. "Two headed dog gives birth", "Grandma from Michigan
abducted by aliens, tells all!".

This is what the world has come to. We've lost the bastion of professional
journalism. We _need_ someone to vet this stuff for us. Strange new world
indeed. I believe there is real danger here, to us and our civilization. See
for example any quote from Goebbels[1]

Edit; Or Göring[2]:

> But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy
> and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a
> democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist
> dictatorship.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Enquirer)

[1]
[https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/281832.Joseph_Goebbe...](https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/281832.Joseph_Goebbels)

[2]
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring)

~~~
thephyber
> We've lost the bastion of professional journalism.

I don't read it this way at all.

There are still fantastic journos all over the place. Now, you can find
fantastic journalists at BuzzFeed -- they just aren't the ones writing the
listicles. You can find fantastic journalists at WaPo and NYT, but they are a
strict subset of all article writers at their institution. You can find entire
media outlets which are largely fantastic journalists, such as ProPublica.

We've only lost the idea that all news/media writers on the internet are
"journalists".

> We need someone to vet this stuff for us.

The world is more complicated than it used to be.

We need more media literacy of readers. In the past, there were media
gatekeepers who were very educated and (debatably) ethical. But with the
democratization of media, there are no fences or gates anymore so people
simply bypass the gatekeepers.

The institutions of our world are changing. Not only the specific names of
institutions and the new generation of people manning them, but altering what
it means to be an institution. The "populist" movements worldwide (including
the current Trump+Bannon / Bernie / Brexit / anti-EU, and the Arab Spring +
similar revolutions against the entrenched powered interests) are eroding the
long-established institutions. Media consumers feel the sand shifting between
their feet and are afraid of all media and institutions right now. Some of
these populist movements are using this fear of change and fear of media to
their advantage.

And then again, a fantastic journalist is not the only thing you need. You
also need to have editors to keep journalists honest and ethical, even in a
time when news outlets have to compete with "free" by thinning their editor
ranks and outsourcing "journalism" to non-staff citizens.

~~~
marktangotango
You're last paragraph betrays any point you're trying to make. The world is
not more complicated, it's wearisome to hear people use it as an excuse. I
personally think there's a valid point that journalism has eroded to near
nothing. There are a handful of sites on the internet that serve as defacto
sources of authoritative news. News that can be trusted. Not fox, not cnn, not
msn, certainly not yahoo . We live in an era of marketing, tabloid and
celebrity Sensationalism masquerading as news. It's clearly, as the present
article indicates, the situation is being actively exploited by state actors,
to the detriment of us all.

------
diminish
Russia being a 'western' minded country but still not integrated into the US
sphere of influence plays the tech game better than China and EU. Facebook and
Google dominate the US-led world but In Russia you see Yandex and
Vkontakte/Odnoklassniki dominating the field. You see Yandex Taxi instead of
Uber (now merged) and Kaspersky in security context. Putin stressed importance
of AI to dominate the future of the world, IMHO, In the upcoming years we'll
see more international battles towards AI, Space and robotics.

Very interesting times ahead.

~~~
aphextron
>Facebook and Google dominate the US-led world but In Russia you see Yandex
and Vkontakte/Odnoklassniki dominating the field. You see Yandex Taxi instead
of Uber (now merged) and Kaspersky in security context.

Let's be real though. This is a result of Russia being completely isolated
from most major internet services due to the overwhelming amount of malicious
traffic originating from there, not any inherent superiority of Russian tech
companies.

~~~
diminish
I believe a "different alphabet" causes a delay for majority of the population
accessing services from an English-language based services and gives local
startups time to excel before the US ones start the worldwide expansion. In
latin and other countries within the US sphere of influence, the general
population is more inclined since a long time to consume US products even if
they aren't localized.

~~~
zzzcpan
Actually, Yandex predates Google. But Google still managed to win in russian
speaking markets. They couldn't surpass Yandex only in Russia I think.
Vkontakte, on the other hand, was a Facebook clone that had time to excel
before its worldwide expansion.

~~~
diminish
Yandex predates Google just like many other search engines predated Google but
couldn't give relevant results. But I suspect Google's page rank algorithm was
the deal and Yandex at some point improved their search results after Google
was the hot kid.

Now that LinkedIn is banned in RF (is it still?) there's a chance for moikrug
or other local startups to come up.

In Moscow I have seen and met (including Yandex) dozens of startup guys
copycatting successful US ones. I was always curious why they were more
successful than the Berlin ones or other west and east European ones. My
conclusion has been the cyrillic alphabet. Of course a country of ~150millions
with CIS expansions.

I would assume China, Korea, Japan, and some south Asian countries with a
different alphabet and a large population offer the same opportunity to to
startups.

Curious case is India - and I don't remember they having winner tech giants
except outsourcing ones.

~~~
zzzcpan
No, I think Google was catching up to Yandex, because pagerank alone was not
enough to give relevant results in russian. Eventually they did and started
competing with each other.

------
AnimalMuppet
> In the process, Russia has built the most effective propaganda operation of
> the 21st century so far, one that thrives in the feverish political climates
> that have descended on many Western publics.

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I wonder how much of that "feverish
political climates that have descended on many Western publics" is due to
Russian agitprop and other "active measures".

~~~
ImaMicroService
*Second most effective.

