As the war in Ukraine spilled into Russian territory, with shelling in the Russian city of Belgorod, President Vladimir Putin was busy explaining that he “sleeps like a normal person” during an online meeting with families to honor Children’s Day. That Putin mentioned his healthy sleeping pattern, without discussing the ongoing Ukrainian incursion into Belgorod – where civilians, including children, were being evacuated — left some observers wondering who is actually running the country while he plays war.
The Russian regime is far from monolithic, and there are other forces in power besides Putin and the turbo-patriots
Putin has a penchant for disengaging and struggling to make decisions, especially when there are no good ones left to make. He will micromanage his generals, but when it comes down to serious policy choices — like whether to announce another round of mobilization, or intercede in the vicious conflict between his defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of the Wagner mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin — he can’t seem to make up his mind.
Which is odd, because aside from his floundering military campaign, the Russian economy is doing surprisingly well for a country slapped with unprecedented sanctions and isolation. Despite forecasts of a double-digit contraction, the economy shrank by just 2.1 percent in 2022 — less than it did during the pandemic year of 2020. And in April, the International Monetary Fund raised its prognosis for 2023, forecasting growth of 0.7 percent.
While Putin is focusing all of his attention on the front — but without actually deciding much — the business of actually running the country has fallen to his prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin. The resilience of Russia’s economy and its day-to-day functioning is owed to Mishustin and his team of technocrats in the cabinet, as well as the fiscal miracles being worked by Central Bank chief Elvira Nabiullina. The prime minister has done a great deal to reorient Russia’s economy towards the global southeast, and has acted with a considerable degree of autonomy in dealing with foreign heads of state.
It was Mishustin, not Putin, who traveled to China on May 24. He met not only with his counterpart, premier Li Qiang, but also directly with President Xi Jinping. Russia is the junior partner in its relationship with China, so it is significant that Mishustin, and not Putin, reciprocated this state visit.
What is interesting, though, is that evidence suggests Mishustin does not support the war. At the fateful Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022, when Putin essentially asked each of his officials to approve a decision to recognize the secession of a good chunk of Ukrainian territory, Mishustin was one of only three officials who instead favored continuing talks with the West. Insiders say Mishustin was not even informed of the plans to invade until the night before. Moreover, in his public statements, Mishustin, unlike the majority of officials eager to stoke patriotic fervor, avoids talking about the “special military operation” when he can. True, he was responsible for implementing Putin’s orders on economic and social mobilization to support the war effort, but it is believed that even in private he doesn’t like talking about the war.
That has led some observers to identify a “party of silence” or even a “party of peace” in the Kremlin that does not support the war, and which includes powerful officials close to Putin such as Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin.
And this is where things get interesting. While Russia is very much ruled by a system where personal relations with the president often take precedence over institutional power, that is only part of the picture. Institutions still matter, and as prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin is the second most powerful man after Putin, regardless of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s temper tantrums. All state bodies — except the so-called of “men of force,” or siloviki, such as the defense ministry and security agencies — report to the prime minister. In addition, Putin’s practice of over-delegating hard decisions — especially during the pandemic — further beefed up Mishustin’s role.
Mishustin cannot simply go to Putin and talk him out of the invasion. His power depends on his trustworthiness and his impeccable loyalty. Which leaves him little other choice but to make the best out of an impossible situation and at least preserve Russia’s economy to the extent that he can.
All of this is important, however, because it demonstrates that the Russian regime is far from monolithic, and there are other forces in power besides Putin and the turbo-patriots — the loud supporters of the war in Ukraine.
Right now, keeping quiet and doing their job is the only option for these silent, pragmatic technocrats, and we shouldn’t expect them to be in a position to sway Putin towards peace anytime soon. But a time will come when these forces may well be deciding Russia’s future. It is a giant stretch to call them the “good guys”: mired in corruption and complicit in the war, they will inevitably face a reckoning. But beyond the magical thinking about Russia’s disintegration, or conversely its overnight transformation into a peaceful democracy, western policymakers need to start thinking about a realistic future for Russia if they are serious about sustainable security in Europe. These technocrats will not have the answers anytime soon, but alienating them wholesale is not in anyone’s interests.
If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the U.S.-centralized empire, in almost the same way you’d expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets.
The New York Times has reliably supported every war the U.S. has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against U.S.-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan.
U.S. media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began.
That this extreme bias occurs is self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention, but why and how it happens is harder to see. The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find.
Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the U.S. empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.
Here are 15 of those factors.
1. Media ownership.
The most obvious point of influence in the mass media is the fact that such outlets tend to be owned and controlled by plutocrats whose wealth and power are built upon the status quo they benefit from.
Owning media has in and of itself historically been an investment that can generate immense wealth — “like having a license to print your own money” as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson once put it.
Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they control who will run their outlet, which means they control who will be doing the hiring of its executives and editors, who control the hiring of everyone else at the outlet.
Rupert Murdoch probably never stood in the newsroom announcing the talking points and war propaganda for the day, but you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of securing a job with the Murdoch press if you’re known as a flag-burning anti-imperialist.
Which takes us to another related point:
2. ‘If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’
In a contentious 1996 discussion between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as “a crusading profession” who are “adversarial” and “stand up against power,” saying it’s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media of the western world.
“How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” Marr objected. “How can you know that journalists are-”
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
In a 1997 essay, Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.”
3. Journalists learn pro-establishment groupthink without being told.
This “you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting” effect isn’t just some personal working theory of Chomsky’s; journalists who’ve spent time in the mass media have publicly acknowledged that this is the case in recent years, saying that they learned very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told.
During his second presidential primary run in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders enraged the mass media with some comments he made accusing the Washington Post of biased reporting against him.
Sanders’ claim was entirely correct; during the hottest and most tightly contested point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted that WaPo had published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. Sanders pointing out this blatantly obvious fact sparked an emotional controversy about bias in the media which yielded a few quality testimonials from people in the know.
Among these were former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Saagar Enjeti, who explained the subtle pressures to adhere to a groupthink orthodoxy that they’d experienced in a segment with The Hill’s online show Rising.
“There are certain pressures to stay in good with the establishment to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism,” Ball said in the segment.
“So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too. Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose.
No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”
“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” said Enjeti.
“It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”
“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a groupthink. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
During the same controversy, former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen published an article in Salon titled “Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias” in which he described the same “groupthink” experience:
“It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”
Matt Taibbi also jumped into the controversy to highlight the media groupthink effect, publishing an article with Rolling Stone about the way journalists come to understand what will and will not elevate their mass media careers:
“Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.”And it is probably worth noting here that Taibbi is no longer with Rolling Stone.”
4. Mass media employees who don’t comply with the groupthink get worn down and pressured out.
Journalists either learn how to do the kind of reporting that will advance their careers in the mass media, or they don’t learn and they either remain marginalized and unheard of or they get worn down and quit.
NBC reporter William Arkin resigned from the network in 2019, criticizing NBC in an open letter for being consistently “in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war,” and complaining that the network had begun “emulating the national security state itself.”
Arkin said he often found himself a “lone voice” in scrutinizing various aspects of the U.S. war machine, saying he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years.”
“We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story,” Arkin wrote. “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”
Sometimes the pressure is much less subtle. Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges left The New York Timesafter being issued a formal written reprimand by the paper for criticizing the Iraq invasion in a speech at Rockford College, realizing that he would either have to stop speaking publicly about what he believed or he’d be fired.
“Either I muzzled myself to pay fealty to my career… or I spoke out and realized that my relationship with my employer was terminal,” Hedges said in 2013. “And so at that point I left before they got rid of me. But I knew that, you know, I wasn’t going to be able to stay.”
5. Mass media employees who step too far out of line get fired.
This measure doesn’t need to be applied often but happens enough for people with careers in media to get the message, like when Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for his opposition to the Bush administration’s warmongering in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion despite having the best ratings of any show on the network, or in 2018 when Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for supporting freedom for Palestinians during a speech at the United Nations.
6. Mass media employees who toe the imperial line see their careers advance.
In his 2008 book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, NBC’s Richard Engel wrote that he did everything he could to get into Iraq because he knew it would provide a massive boost to his career, calling his presence there during the war his “big break”.
“In the run-up to the war, it was clear that Iraq was a land where careers were going to be made,” Engels wrote. “I sneaked into Iraq before the war because I thought the conflict would be the turning point in the Middle East, where I had already been living for seven years. As a young freelancer, I believed some reporters would die covering the Iraq war, and that others would make a name for themselves.”
This gives a lot of insight into the way ambitious journalists think about climbing the career ladder in their field, and also into one reason why those types are so gung-ho about war all the time. If you know a war can advance your career, you’re going to hope it happens and do everything you can to facilitate it. The whole system is set up to elevate the absolute worst sort of people.
7. With public and state-funded media, the influence is more overt.
So we’ve been talking about the pressures that are brought to bear on mass media employees in the plutocrat-run media, but what about mass media that aren’t owned by plutocrats, like NPR and the BBC?
Well, propaganda thrives in those institutions for more obvious reasons: their proximity to government powers. Right up into the 1990s the BBC was just letting MI5 outright vet its employees for “subversive” political activity, and only officially changed that policy when they got caught.
With U.S. government-owned outlets like Voice of America the control is even more overt than that. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate U.S. information interests to receive government funding:
“I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, U.S. government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.”
8. Access journalism.
Krystal Ball touched on this one in her anecdote about MSNBC’s influential call from the Clinton camp above. Access journalism refers to the way media outlets and reporters can lose access to politicians, government officials and other powerful figures if those figures don’t perceive them as sufficiently sympathetic.
If someone in power decides they don’t like a given reporter they can simply decide to give their interviews to someone else who’s sufficiently sycophantic, or call on someone else at the press conference, or have conversations on and off the record with someone who kisses up to them a bit more.
Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will.
This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.
9. Getting fed “scoops” by government agencies looking to advance their information interests.
In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
One of the easiest ways to break a major story on national security or foreign policy these days is to get entrusted with a “scoop” by one or more government officials — on condition of anonymity of course — which just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda.
This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the U.S. intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting. But it’s a practice that’s becoming more and more common in western “journalism” as the need to distribute propaganda about Washington’s cold war enemies in Moscow and Beijing increases.
Both were simply falsehoods that the mass media were fed by intelligence operatives who were trying to seed a narrative in the public consciousness, which they then repeated as fact without ever disclosing the names of those who fed them the false story. Another related example is U.S. officials admitting to NBC last year — again under cover of anonymity — that the Biden administration had simply been feeding lies about Russia to the media in order to win an “information war” against Putin.
This dynamic is similar to the one in access journalism in that outlets and reporters who’ve proven themselves sympathetic and uncritical parrots of the government narratives they are fed are the ones most likely to be fed them, and therefore the ones to get the “scoop”.
We caught a whiff of what this looks like from the inside when acting C.I.A. director under the Obama administration Mike Morell testified that he and his intelligence cartel cohorts had initially planned to seed their disinfo op about the Hunter Biden laptop to a particular unnamed reporter at The Washington Post, whom they presumably had a good working relationship with.
Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed”. Nothing about the story was verified as true in any way; it was just the same story being told by the same source to different people.
10. Class interests.
The more a mass media employee goes along with the imperial groupthink, follows the unwritten rules and remains unthreatening to the powerful, the higher up the media career ladder they will climb. The higher up the career ladder they climb, the more money they will often find themselves making. Once they find themselves in a position to influence a very large number of people, they are a part of a wealthy class which has a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo which lets them keep their fortune.
This can take the form of opposing anything resembling socialism or political movements that might make the rich pay more taxes, as we saw in the virulent smear campaigns against progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
It can also take the form of encouraging the public to fight a culture war so that they won’t start fighting a class war. It can also take the form of making one more supportive of the empire more generally, because that’s the status quo your fortune is built on.
It can also take the form of making one more sympathetic to politicians, government officials, plutocrats and celebrities as a whole, because that class is who your friends are now; that’s who you’re hanging out with, going to the parties and the weddings of, drinking with, laughing with, schmoozing with.
Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.
The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013. If your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a propagandist for the imperial establishment in the ways we’ve been discussing.
Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.
11. Think tanks.
The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on U.S. military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.
“Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues,” writes Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman.
“But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates.”
This is journalistic malpractice. It is never, ever in accord with journalistic ethics to cite war profiteer-funded think tanks on matters of war, militarism or foreign relations, but the western press do it constantly, without even disclosing this immense conflict of interest to their audience.
Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world or what have you.
But in reality there’s only one story to be found in such citations: “War Industry Supports More War.”
The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.
12. The Council on Foreign Relations.
It should probably also be noted here that the Council on Foreign Relations is a profoundly influential think tank which counts a jarring number of media executives and influential journalists among its membership, a dynamic which gives think tanks another layer of influence in the media.
In 1993 former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood approvingly described CFR as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”
Harwood writes:
“The membership of these journalists in the council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. Their influence, Jon Vanden Heuvel speculates in an article in the Media Studies Journal, is likely to increase now that the Cold War has ended: ‘By focusing on particular crises around the world {the media are in a better position} to pressure government to act.’”
13. Advertising.
In 2021 Politico was caught publishing fawning apologia for top weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin at the same time Lockheed was sponsoring a Politico newsletter on foreign policy. Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton wrote at the time:
“There’s a very blurry line between Politico’s financial relationship with the largest weapons firm in the United States, Lockheed Martin, and its editorial output. And that line may have just become even more opaque.
Last week, Responsible Statecraft’s Ethan Paul reported that Politico was scrubbing its archives of any reference to Lockheed Martin’s longtime sponsorship of the publication’s popular newsletter, Morning Defense. While evidence of Lockheed’s financial relationship with Politico was erased, the popular beltway outlet just published a remarkable puff piece about the company, with no acknowledgement of the longstanding financial relationship with Politico.
Politico didn’t respond to questions about whether Lockheed was an ongoing sponsor of the publication after last month when it scrubbed the defense giant’s ads or whether the weapons firm paid for what read largely-like an advertorial.
Politico’s Lee Hudson visited Lockheed’s highly secure, and mostly classified, Skunk Works research and development facility north of Los Angeles and glowingly wrote, “For defense tech journalists and aviation nerds, this is the equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory, but think supersonic drones instead of Everlasting Gobstoppers.”
Ever wondered why you’ll see things like ads for Northrop Grumman during the Superbowl? Do you think anyone’s watching that ad saying “You know what? I’m gonna buy myself a stealth bomber”? Of course not.
The defense industry advertises in media all the time, and while it might not always get caught red-handed in blatant manipulation of news publications like Lockheed did with Politico, it’s hard to imagine that their money wouldn’t have a chilling effect on foreign policy reporting, and perhaps even give them some pull on editorial matters.
Like Jeff Cohen said above: the top advertisers are off limits.
14. Covert infiltration.
Just because a lot of the mass media’s propagandistic behavior can be explained without secret conspiracies doesn’t mean secret conspiracies aren’t happening. In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The C.I.A. and the Media” reporting that the C.I.A. had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.
We are told that this sort of covert infiltration doesn’t happen anymore today, but that’s absurd. Of course it does. People believe the C.I.A. no longer engages in nefarious behavior because they find it comfortable to believe that, not because there is any evidentiary basis for that belief.
There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure U.S. domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today.
The C.I.A. wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.
And indeed we have seen evidence that it happens today. Back in 2014 Ken Dilanian, now a prominent reporter for NBC, was caught intimately collaborating with the C.I.A. in his reporting and sending them articles for approval and changes before publication. In his emails with C.I.A. press handlers Dilanian is seen acting like a propagandist for the agency, talking about how he intended an article about C.I.A. drone strikes to be “reassuring to the public” and editing his reporting in accordance with their wishes.
Lastly, sometimes the mass media act like state propagandists because they are actual state propagandists. Back in Carl Bernstein’s day the C.I.A. had to secretly infiltrate the mass media; nowadays the mass media openly hire intelligence insiders to work among their ranks.
Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona.
The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience.
Last year Lever News published a report on the way the media had been bringing on U.S. empire managers who are currently working for war profiteer companies as part of their life in the DC swamp’s revolving door between the public and private sector and presenting them as impartial pundits on the war in Ukraine.
So as you can see, the news media are subject to pressures from every conceivable angle on every relevant level which push them toward functioning not as reporters, but as propagandists. This is why the employees of the western mass media act like PR agents for the western empire and its component parts: because that’s exactly what they are.
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Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Meduza has been analyzing — and refuting — the Russian military propaganda that tries to justify the war (here’s one recent example). But while we find Moscow’s talking points absurd and unconvincing, there’s no denying it: propaganda works. Even among our readers, there are people who continue to make excuses for the invasion, despite the fact that it’s caused untold pain for millions of Ukrainians and has been destructive to Russia itself. We decided to hear what these people had to say: we asked them to explain why they support Russia waging war on Ukraine. Over just a few days, we received hundreds of detailed responses, read them closely, and decided to publish some of them with minimal edits. We believe these letters are an important record, and we hope they’ll be informative for those working to end the war, trying to change the ruling regime in Russia, and wondering how to deal with people whose minds may never be changed.
Warning: The authors of these letters attempt to justify Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. They may be extremely unpleasant or disturbing to read. Proceed with caution.
Andrey
35 year old, Volgograd
A war ends when one side wins. Russia’s defeat will mean national humiliation, which we cannot allow. Therefore, we must win — we no longer have a choice.
Ukraine isn’t looking for peace. They’re just asking for more weapons and shelling Russian cities. Too much blood has been spilled for us to just say, “Thanks everyone, time to go our separate ways.”
Alexey
24 years old, Yakutsk
[Meduza’s] question [about why some readers support the war] is actually wrongly put. I don’t support the war, but I also don’t want Russia to lose. If that happens, it will be worse for everybody, and there’s no doubt the world we’re used to will collapse — and an even greater darkness will come. The war was a mistake, but losing it is unacceptable.
Pavel
30 years old, Germany
I don’t support the war, but I decided to write a response, because people who try to find justifications for the war are being equated with those who support it.
I’m angry at both sides of the conflict. I’m angry at Russia because it started a stupid, bloodthirsty war that leads to senseless killing every day. I’m angry at the countries that support Ukraine because they’re not insisting on an immediate cessation of hostilities, on an end to the senseless killing. Instead, they’re supplying the country with weapons, understanding all the while that it’s only increasing the number of victims.
Sergey
38 years old, city not specified
I don’t support the war. But unfortunately, the very existence of my Motherland (Russia) is at stake. I don’t want to see the collapse, the destruction of my country. I do have questions for the instigators of the special military operation. But first we need to solve the existential issue.
Anonymous
38 years old, city not specified
The only thing worse than a war is a lost war. Starting it was an insane mistake, but now we have to win it; otherwise we’ll be in the position of vae victis. I don’t support Putin — damn him.
Dmitry
35 years old, Moscow
At first, I consistently opposed the war. But over time, I got tired of what was happening, of the constant fear for myself and my friends, of the fact that I could be called up [to the front] if I opposed the war, and of the foreign media writing that Russians need to do something about the current regime and the war.
I also realized that if Russia doesn’t find a way to get out of this situation without losing face or losing on the global stage, life in Russia will get drastically worse. There are a number of examples in world history that indicate this (such as Germany).
Nevertheless, war is always bad, and it doesn’t bringing anything but blood, death, and crippled fates. The decision to wage it was a mistake, that’s a fact, but now the situation has reached a stage where losing isn’t an option.
Oleg
27 years old, city not specified
[I support the war] because in my view, the “peace plan” presented by Zelensky and supported by the “collective West” is highly likely to do so much damage to Russia that we can’t be sure it would survive. And I’m keenly aware that my well-being, my safety, and my life prospects would worsen significantly more [in that case] than if the Russian army manages to do enough damage to Ukraine that the final peace deal is more of a compromise.
Anonymous
36 years old, Tyumen
I don’t support the war in the “Z” sense. What’s more, I lost my fucking mind on February 24, [2022]. But as a resident of Russia, I believe that while sending troops into Ukraine was a mistake, withdrawing them would be a crime. I have no intention of paying reparations for the mistakes of others for the next 20 years. Nobody listens to the losing side.
I’m not going to take up arms. You could say I’m an observer who doesn’t support Ukraine. I went there dozens of times before the Maidan, and I’m aware of how the mood and the laws have changed there. If a European state is being built there, then it’s similar to Francoist Spain or Salazar’s Portugal, no different from Putin’s Russia.
Victoria
28 years old, St. Petersburg
At first, my view [of the war in Ukraine] was negative, like my view of all armed conflicts. But over time, as I saw the amount of hatred for Russia and Russians, the joy at the explosion of the Crimean Bridge, and the West’s active arming of Ukraine, I started to realize that Russophobia and other things that I used to think were just stupid propaganda are not all lies. War always brings sorrow, but sometimes unpopular decisions are the right ones.
Nikolai
27 years old, Austria
In my view, the Western point of view isn’t quite correct; I agree with Putin’s idea about a unipolar world with double standards. I believe the West rocked the boat itself and then made Russia’s government responsible for the aftermath. In addition, the constant financial support and pumping of weapons into Ukraine makes the Ukrainian regime continue the war rather than entering negotiations.
Artyom
40 years old, Berlin
What I support first and foremost is not the war but the Russian people and Russia’s interests. At first, I was strongly opposed to it, but as things have developed, I’ve changed my view.
I’ve lived in Germany for 20 years and have never seen so much propaganda. Western politicians and media have taken an absolutely one-sided stance: Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is a heroic state. Anyone who subscribes to a different view is pushed out of the information space and “canceled.”
The countries of Western Europe have shown themselves to be completely weak-willed and are doing the bidding of the U.S. Ukraine is being directly controlled by the Americans. This conflict fully proves that there are no independent countries in Western Europe and that there are practically none left in Eastern Europe.
Alexey
31 years old, Moscow
Well, what options do we have, guys? The war has already begun, there’s no turning back. Given the circumstances, I’m not ready to leave; I don’t want to feel like a migrant worker, even an educated one (I’m a programmer). I love Russia and Moscow has always been the most comfortable place for me. How can I oppose it now, when everyone understands perfectly well what’s going to happen if the current regime loses?
It’s too late to turn back. Let them fight as long as there’s mutual interest, and after the regime change (which is inevitable), we’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, what happened, what the reasons for it were, and whether it was worth it are all pointless judgements to make right now. For what it’s worth, I opposed the war from the very start. But now I’m against the radical “libtards,” Western hypocrisy, and everything that continues to feed this war.
Sergey
27 years old, Perm
I support the actions of my president and my country. Yes, I didn’t initially understand the purpose of this whole “operation,” but after some time, I saw the Russophobic statements from both the European Union and the U.S. Anyone with critical thinking skills and a modicum of intelligence understands: Russia is not a “terrorist state,” we’re just protecting our interests and our sovereignty. So I, like the majority of Russian citizens, fully support the special military operation, and if it becomes necessary for me to go fight, I’ll do it.
Ruslan
28 years old, Kazan
I don’t support the war, but I don’t judge Russia for it either. I believe that by starting the war, Russia showed the weakness of its diplomacy and its inability to negotiate with its neighbors. But I also don’t support the view of those who say Russia is practically the same as Nazi Germany.
First of all, Ukraine had a choice: it could have come to an agreement with us in the first days of the war, before things had gone too far, and met our demands. It would have lost territory, but it would have saved itself as a state. Is territory really more important than human life? So Ukraine is also partially at fault for the lives of those who have died. I’m confident that the lives of the people who lived on the territories that would have gone to Russia would not have gotten any worse. In some cases, it may have even gotten better.
David
34 years old, Saratov
The Minsk agreements were a formality; Russia wasn’t able to implement them unilaterally. The West cynically admitted later on that it was just preparing Ukraine for war.
Nobody was stopping Ukraine from negotiating with the [self-proclaimed, and later annexed] LNR and DNR and giving them autonomy. Instead, Ukraine bombed its own cities.
The war in Ukraine can be regarded as the solving of the national question that was postponed after the collapse of the USSR. Nobody was stopping Ukraine from developing Crimea [before its annexation] either. They only remembered that Crimea was Ukrainian after they lost it. An overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s population honestly voted to join Russia.
Ukraine didn’t want to negotiate with Russia. Zelensky took the wrong position when he believed the West’s promises. In the end, Ukraine’s cities were destroyed, its economy is collapsing, and millions of people have left the country.
Murad
28 years old, Moscow
Despite the fact that our government is corrupt and ineffective, Ukraine poses a danger to our southern border. If we don’t have the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, we’ll lose influence over the Black Sea and the Caucasus. From 2014 to 2022, all Ukrainian governments explicitly stated that they’d get Crimea and their eastern territories back by force or by diplomacy. That’s a direct threat.
[For comparison:] any European or U.S. country would use force without a second thought if it sensed a threat from its neighbors. I consider their current rhetoric to be a policy of double standards.
Dmitry
24 years old, Moscow
I don’t support the idea of starting a war, but I also don’t support the idea of ending it right now. My feeling is that nobody in the world right now is trying to offer Russians any decent alternative to what Putin is offering. The authorities don’t touch Russians who are studying or doing something related to defense, so surviving the war under this government is possible.
Meanwhile, the only ideas I’ve heard from abroad have involved Russia having a bleak future or simply involved our dehumanization. So it’s better to be with my compatriots that to count on the good will of someone like [Volodymyr Zelensky’s communications adviser Mykhailo] Podolyak or an American official making money off the war.
Anonymous
30 years old, Astana
For a little over a year, the people I previously considered moral authorities have turned into traitors (who wish harm on citizens of their own country and call for sanctions and don’t try to get them removed), disgraces (they propose that soldiers surrender and blame themselves), weaklings, and liars.
Still now, I think Russia got drawn into this war in vain, very much so. But the method of getting out being proposed by the politicians who I used to trust is shameful, painful, humiliating, and dishonest. It’s better to wait for the people who will replace Putin: Russia is full of smart people.
As far as spending the next three lifetimes repenting, giving up our nuclear weapons, and paying reparations thanks but no thanks. I hope the war will end soon and that as few people will die in it as possible — primarily Russian citizens, but also citizens of Ukraine.
“To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles. …To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use,” argues Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic.
What neither Cohen, who also famously pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, nor The Atlantic acknowledge in the article is that most of the weapons Cohen mentions in the article — including long-range missiles, F-16s, and even F-35s — are made by funders of Cohen’s employer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
While this might seem like a glaring conflict of interest that, at the very least, should be disclosed in the article, a new Quincy Institute brief that I authored, “Defense Contractor Funded Think Tanks Dominate Ukraine Debate,” shows that this article isn’t an exception; it’s the norm. America’s top foreign policy think tanks are awash in funding from the defense industry. They’ve dominated the media market related to the Ukraine war, and they seldom, if ever, disclose that many of the weapons they’re recommending the U.S. give to Ukraine are made by their funders.
In short, when you hear a think tank scholar comment on the Ukraine war, chances are you’re hearing from someone whose employer is funded by those who profit from war, but you’ll probably never know it. That’s because 78 percent of the top ranked foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. receive funding from the Pentagon or its contractors, as documented in the new brief.
At the very top, defense industry influence is even greater: every single one of the top 10 ranked foreign policy think tanks receives funding from the defense sector. And, for many think tanks, the amount of defense funding is enormous. For example, CSIS, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and The Atlantic Council all reported receiving more than a million dollars a year from the defense sector.
These and other think tanks that receive considerable defense sector funding have publicly advocated for more militarized U.S. responses to the Ukraine war and, compared to their counterparts at think tanks that accept little or no defense sector funding, have dominated the media landscape related to the Ukraine war.
The new brief analyzed mentions of these top ranked foreign policy think tanks in Ukraine war related articles that appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. This analysis revealed that media outlets were more than seven times as likely to cite a think tank with defense sector support as they were to cite a think tank without it. Of the 1,247 think tank media mentions we tracked for the brief, 1,064 (or 85 percent) were mentions of think tanks with defense sector funding. And, the two most mentioned think tanks in Ukraine war related articles were think tanks flooded with defense sector dollars: CSIS and The Atlantic Council.
Yet, we only know the extent of CSIS and the Atlantic Council’s funding from the defense sector because both think tanks are commendably transparent about their donors and list all funders, within funding ranges, on their websites. Unfortunately, many of the nation’s top think tanks aren’t as forthcoming. In fact, the new brief found that nearly one third of the top U.S. foreign policy think tanks do not publicly disclose their donors. This included some of the most mentioned think tanks in media articles about the Ukraine war, like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Though AEI scholars have disclosed at public events that the organization receives funding from defense contractors, the organization does not list its donors on its website.
Media outlets were, similarly, not transparent about the conflicts of interest of the experts they were citing. In fact, none of the media mentions analyzed in the brief were accompanied by disclosures of defense industry funding of think tanks that were, at times, recommending policies that could financially benefit their funders.
All of this points to several clear recommendations for reform.
First, Congress should mandate that think tanks disclose their funders. Given think tanks’ prominent role in the policymaking process and the enormous amounts of money they receive from the defense industry, foreign governments, and other special interests, it’s imperative that the public and policymakers know who is funding the think tank expert they’re hearing from.
Second, media outlets should report any potential conflicts of interest with sources they’re citing about major U.S. foreign policy decisions. As the brief notes, “By not providing this information media outlets are deceiving their readers, listeners, or viewers.”
Given the growing chorus of research documenting how think tank funding influences think tank work, the very least media outlets can do is let their readers know when a source might be biased, especially when they’re commenting on questions of war and peace.
