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Most Russians believe that the country's state-run news agencies have provided objective coverage of the events unfolding during the Ukraine conflict, a poll by the Levada Center revealed Wednesday.
Fifty-nine percent of respondents to the poll, conducted between Oct. 24 and 27, said they disagreed with the notion often expressed by Western critics that Russian media is distorting the facts on the Ukraine crisis.
Another 13 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement that Russia is conducting an information war against Ukraine — but that it is justified. Eleven percent said Russian media was guilty of biased media reporting and that it was "harmful and dangerous."
Most respondents also said they noticed an information war being waged against Russia as a result of the conflict, with 54 percent of respondents citing Ukraine as the ringleader of the information war and 55 percent the U.S.
Influencing international audience needs additional effort.
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Russia is rapidly expanding its global propaganda empire, and while some of its mouth pieces and media outlets are broadly recognized as closely tied to or owned by the Kremlin, others continue to escape the world’s attention, passing themselves off as independent projects. In the most recent major example, on November 10, the director of the Kremlin-backed international media corporation RT (formerly Russia Today), Dmitry Kisilev, announced the launch of a new “brand” connected to the RT parent company—a gigantic news agency to be named “Sputnik” (Vedomosti, November 10). According to Kisilev, the project includes a main website, Sputniknews.com, with more than 800 hours of daily programming in 30 languages, covering over 130 cities in 34 countries. Kisilev says these numbers will increase in 2015 by 30 new “multimedia hubs,” each hosting radio stations, news bureaus, press-centers and employing 30 to 70 staffers. And in addition to the three languages RT itself already broadcasts in—English, Spanish and Arabic—on December 1, the media outlet plans to launch a Chinese-language service as well. It is noteworthy that the online IP address for Sputniknews.com points to Moscow’s Federal State Unitary Enterprise Russian Agency of International Information (ip-tracker.org, accessed November 12)—the official name of the large, state-owned Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which is set for liquidation this year.