Everyday Disinformation: RT and Sputnik News Coverage

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter seeks to explain why disinformation should be seen as an everyday practice and how this is connected to digital news media. It takes its point of departure in the notion that the digital media ecology enables the construction and dissemination of strategic narratives (Oates, 2014) and that media technological developments have expanded the digital news media market and its audiences globally. At the same time, these organizational, technological, and political media developments are being used increasingly successfully by authoritarian regimes to suppress, control, and surveille. Sweden is one of the Western countries that has been heavily targeted by Russian disinformation by way of international news. RT and Sputnik news coverage tends to reflect Russian perceptions of the West as a threat to the values that the Kremlin has declared it will defend. They can be summarized as the promotion of typical national conservative values such as the promotion of Orthodox Christianity, “morality”, and “traditional family values”. More importantly, these Russian state media center their coverage on explaining the decline of Western states as a consequence of the increase of Islam in politics and society, LGBTI+communities, and migration. The chapter reviews studies about how RT and Sputnik construct denigrating depictions of a number of different countries attempting to use such imagery to sow distrust between citizens and politicians, and between citizens and public institutions both on a day-to-day basis and centered on events such as election campaigns or foreign policy crisis.