RT’s Agitprop
By Sean at 27 January, 2010, 1:06 am
When I first saw the ads Russia Today is using in its American and UK ad campaign, I immediately had the reaction that most Americans and British probably had. Comparing Obama to Ahmadinejad? That’s like comparing Christ with the devil! Is RT crazy or just stupid!? Well, the last question is not a simple gut reaction since RT often runs stories that are both crazy and stupid.
But then I started to think about the ad, realizing my gut reaction is exactly what it was supposed to provoke. Welcome to the world of agitprop, or agitation-propaganda, the use of images and text to incite affective reactions and posit provocative intellectual points. “Who poses the greater nuclear threat?” the ad reads. To most Westerners, their gut tells them it’s Ahmadinejed, though the man currently has no nuclear weapons at his finger tips. However, taking the Guardian’s Luke Harding’s reaction as an example, the gut can reveal much more:
For many people the answer is clear – after all, Obama hasn’t so far called for Israel to “vanish from the page of time“. But for the Kremlin the Obama image is the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire.
Two decades after the demise of Pravda, the Kremlin’s 24-hour English language TV channel, Russia Today (RT), is launching its first major advertising blitz across the UK. Dubbed North Korean TV by its detractors, the channel, available on satellite and cable TV, gives an unashamedly pro-Vladimir Putin view of the world, and says it seeks to correct the “biased” western view offered by the BBC and CNN.
And here is where RT’s agitprop reveals the power of American/UK propaganda. Ahmadinejad’s often quoted call for Israel to vanish from the earth (despite more informed people’s assertion that it is a mistranslation) rears its powerful head followed by the claim that Russia is attempting to create a new Pravda. Forgotten, or rather hidden by these memes, is the fact that Obama presides over the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and leads a country which is the only one in history to nuke another nation.
It also says how much the Hardings of the world just don’t get it. I would have never guessed that RT could intellectually fly over anyone’s head. First time for everything, I guess.
RT’s agitprop was allowed to become even more brilliant with some rather ironic help from American airport officials. RT wanted to run the Obama-Ahmadinejad ad in airports in New York, Washington DC, Baltimore, and Newark. The airports refused, allowing RT to place this one instead:
“Our Ad. Politically Correct.” I love it.
Then RT gave this Fox-Newsish response:
RT advertisements juxtapose provocative images which show different sides of a story. We ask questions and encourage viewers to question more, since you can only reach a balanced judgment by being better informed. By challenging the accepted view, we reveal a side of the news that you wouldn’t normally see. After all, the more you question, the more you know.
Whatever your personal point of view is on any of these stories, we at RT believe it is valid to pose the questions.
Yeah, yeah. Fair and balanced, blah, blah blah. Personal point of view, blah, blah, blah. I sure wish state or corporate media would drop the objectivity and fair and balanced crap. Anyone with a brain knows it’s not. Plus, as I’m sure many Americans will retort, the fact that you can say and pose what you want doesn’t mean airports have to broadcast it for you. Okay, fair enough.
Nevertheless, the Obama-Ahmedinejad ad highlights a more crucial point. Often castigated as North Korean TV, a Kremlin propaganda machine, or simply there to broadcast the world according to Vladimir Putin, RT’s ad reveals the limits of acceptable political discourse in America. Political discourse is not based on the binaries of black and white, but a range of the acceptable, the border of which is only revealed at the moment of its transgression. As George Bataille wrote, “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it.” Posing a simple question accompanied by juxtaposed images of one celebrated and another vilified political figure is one such transgression that posits the border of the acceptable. Allowing the ads to run in their original form would have pushed the boundary of the acceptable to a potentially dangerous political space. If travelers muddle over the question of “Who is the greater nuclear threat?” who knows what they will come up with. The power of real propaganda is not controlling one’s every thought, but administering the range of thoughts that can be considered rationally and empirically plausible. The fear is not that people will come up with the wrong answer. The hegemonic discourse can easily dismissed them as fanciful. The real fear is that people won’t come up with the right answer.
RT’s propaganda is crude, too transparent and lacks the slick packaging of a CNN or a Fox News. It will never rise to the level of real, effective propaganda fit for the 21st century. That is to say, it will never become propaganda that isn’t labeled as such. But now I think I get it. RT’s missives are supposed to be crude. They’re supposed to be transparent. RT’s style, whether intended or not, is a parody of the propaganda of old. But in that parody, it can at times function as an even greater parody. A parody of American propaganda’s parody of real, informative news. When taken as agitprop, RT is resoundingly affective and effective.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Sean,
I have to disagree with you on this one. The ads were banned in American *airports,* not in America. Although RT doesn’t admit it, the ads were also banned in British airports, according to the press office of the company that handles advertising there, BAA. The ads are interesting and provocative and thought-provoking, and I’m sure they could easily be placed on the streets of America or in any publication. My copy of The Atlantic Monthly regularly features ads that are similarly provocative and appropriate. The question here is whether such ads, with words like “terrorist” and big images of automatic weapons are appropriate for *airports* these days, which we all know are already tense and stressful places. It seems to me that we are approaching the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” arena at which restrictions of free speech become defensible. I don’t know if I would have made the same decision if I were in charge of advertising at U.S. or British airports, but I definitely would have given it a lot of consideration. Again, I don’t think these ads are anywhere near “the boundary of the acceptable” for speech in the U.S. generally.
Deconstructing Russophobia http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2008/08/12/editorial-deconstructing-russophobia/
Switch “Russophiles” with Russians and “Russophobes” with Westerners”, and it applies it in this case.
PS. All the ballyhoo about airport security is one of the bigger scams of the modern world – http://www.boingboing.net/200912301009.jpg
Hey Robert – Have you been to the airport in Las Vegas? There are huge signs everywhere with ads to go shoot machine guns, so I guess what I’m not really seeing your point on the airports. As for these kinds of “anti-American” ads appearing everywhere in the US…I look forward to that display of free speech. Let me know which magazines agree to run these ads. The beauty of our freedom is that we have the “freedom” to run any type of ad but we all know there are underlying limits and boundaries to the level of discourse in America. Check our Manufacturing Consent for starters.
“RT’s propaganda is crude, too transparent and lacks the slick packaging of a CNN or a Fox News. It will never rise to the level of real, effective propaganda fit for the 21st century. That is to say, it will never become propaganda that isn’t labeled as such. But now I think I get it. RT’s missives are supposed to be crude. They’re supposed to be transparent. RT’s style, whether intended or not, is a parody of the propaganda of old. But in that parody, it can at times function as an even greater parody. A parody of American propaganda’s parody of real, informative news. When taken as agitprop, RT is resoundingly affective and effective.”
I’ve come to this decision as well. And I think it is freaking brilliant.
The people who are victims of propaganda are you!
It’s true that the USA has not called to obliterate Israel like Iran did.
But on the other hand, they have taken upon themselves to declare who is on an “axis of evil”!
Iran happens to be there, and North Korea. Iran happens to believe in islam, North Korea in communism and self-reliance, and other ex-ememies of the US misc. other ideologies.
Think about it! Your country LEVELLED North Korea and killed half the male population. They had done nothing to you… You did ENORMOUS damage in Vietnam and countless other places around the world.
Why should the Afghans and Iraqis be happy that the coalition is there? Life is NOT necessarily better for them. There was more stability during Saddam than now. Not even the women appear to be better off in modern Afghanistan, and the drug trade is back in business.
So are you so sure that Obama is “Christ” and Amadinejad is “the devil”.
And even if he was — why is that America’s problem? Let the Iranians solve their own problems if they they they have one.
Finally, Only one country has used nuclear weapons in wartime! To spare its own soldiers.
This almost reminds me of the British stunt recently, when they put up the “Working women don’t make good mothers” or something like that. All for the sake of publicity.
“RT’s propaganda is crude, too transparent and lacks the slick packaging of a CNN or a Fox News. It will never rise to the level of real, effective propaganda fit for the 21st century.”
Actually RYT does not do propaganda in the accepted sense of the term. Propaganda is a form of misrepresentation. The notorious and widespread deliberate misrepresentation (not mistranslation) of the famous “vanish from the pages of time/ wiped off the map” is propaganda because the writer attempts to convey information that is knowingly false as if it were true. The latest example I have was Associated Press on January 25th “Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the Holocaust and called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Israel also fears Iran is developing nuclear weapons.” How about that for a concentrated dose of propaganda comment from a wire service supposedly reporting the facts inserted into an article on a speech by Netanyahu.
RT openly puts an alternative point of view that is Russian. You can take it or leave it. There is no pretence. But the interesting situation now is that if for example you want to know what people like Wayne Madsen and Noam Chomsky think you can go on RT and find out, which you cannot do in the Western MSM generally. Actually RT is part of a wider movement that includes the well known Al Jazeera and Telesur but also a host of less well known sites from the developing world that do not toe the Western media party line. See for example Al Jazeera on the US response to the Haiti earthquake and Telesur on the Honduras coup. It is interesting to follow lesser known sources from Africa on western activities on that continent – not flattering.
Putin himself said referring to news spin in the aftermath of the Georgia war “You in the West do these things so much better than we do.” It was a nice insult dressed as a compliment.
Because Sean has used the word “agit-prop” it might be a good time to remind people that agit-prop was not intended to deliberately misrepresent or spead lies, nor did “propaganda” carry any nefarious connotations. Propaganda = dissemination of ideas (Marxist in the case of orig. “agit-prop”) and Agitation = motivating people to act on those ideas. Whatever the “currently accepted sense” of the term propaganda is today, any educated consumer or producer of media is fully away that all communication contains a biased agenda. Propaganda isn’t just propaganda when you don’t agree with it or when it is a lie.
This is not agitprop which I can guarantee that I recognised if I saw it.
Its just a statement and people can make of it what they want. They want to get people to start thinking and stop swalling Western “news” which are just as full of “propaganda”, just of a different type.
But in all fairness they should have imposed Medvedevs face on this too, since Russia is a major nuclear power.
I certainly don’t like Iran, but on the other hand, they don’t keep nukes and 200,000 soldiers stationed in Europe. Just for starters. I’d rather neither country had nukes.
I repeat; only one country has ever used nukes against civilians.
If travelers muddle over the question of “Who is the greater nuclear threat?” who knows what they will come up with.
This little snippet goes far. it appears without RT’s assertion of something of the kind, no traveler would ever ponder any of these questions. Your faith in supremacy of media and propaganda over reason of regular people is quite revealing. Those dumb travelers.
That’s like comparing Christ with the devil!
Christ? Maybe Alexander VI would be a better comparison.
Well, Sean, you missed this time
“RT’s propaganda is crude, too transparent and lacks the slick packaging of a CNN or a Fox News.”
This is the answer from the Margarita Simonjan – Chief Editor of RT (she was 25 when got this job).
“Эти чудесные баннеры отрисовала нам компания под названием Маккэн Эриксон.Это одна из ведущих международных рекламных контор, которая работает на этом рынке – на секундочку – сто два года, среди ее клиентов Кока-Кола, Сони, Майкрософт, Лореаль, Джонсон энд Джонсон, Эксон Мобил и вообще почти любой известный брэнд.”
http://m-simonyan.livejournal.com/2010/01/14/
If you have any questions – you can ask her personally.
For those who doesn’t read Russian – ad was created by McCann group
http://mccann.com/ – worldwide ads company. The point is – the ideas are not from Russia Today but from this international company
Full line of their ad for RT – http://rt.com/ads
PS. I love this comparison – Obama = Christ
))))
Forgotten, or rather hidden by these memes, is the fact that Obama presides over the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and leads a country which is the only one in history to nuke another nation.
Neither of which is a factor in the likelihood of the US using nuclear weapons now. It’s not forgotten, it’s irrelevant.
Sean, why, possibly it’s simpler. As we say in Russia, bad PR is also PR. It’s okey for the RT to be crude and aggressive, as far as it helps to broaden its audience. One of the major purposes of the RT is to invite as many viewers as possible. With this post, you helped it to do that.
Sean,
Describing or comparing Ahmadinejad with Jesus Christ is probably going a bit far. Just a thought.
Steve Smith
…and Jesus Christ to boost budget-spending on nuclear weapons next year…
“Yeah, yeah. Fair and balanced, blah, blah blah. Personal point of view, blah, blah, blah. I sure wish state or corporate media would drop the objectivity and fair and balanced crap. Anyone with a brain knows it’s not.”
Actually, if you’ll notice, nowhere in the preceding quote does RT News claim to be fair and balanced. The term “balanced” is used in reference to the viewer making up their own mind, coming up with a balanced perspective on their own, not claiming that RT News is balanced. In fact, in claiming to challenge the accepted view, RT is demonstrating its commitment to a single, alternative viewpoint. RT is not Fox News.