archive.ph
Propaganda is Failing. I admit, Russian channels have felt a… | by Na…
7 - 9 minutes
Nadin Brzezinski
I admit, Russian channels have felt a tad on the slow motion the last few days. It’s like everybody is waiting for orders. Or everybody is waiting for something to happen and has no idea how to respond. However, there is also a feeling that people are no longer buying it, which matters.
I also wonder if many of the remaining subscribers to the Z channels are those of us in the West monitoring them. Or is it the core of a group of Russians who want to believe? But I thought it was very significant because we have seen this. The last time Russia collapsed, trust in official media dropped precipitously. So here we are:
Russians stopped believing in military propaganda. Z-channels are losing subscribers en masse, and political talk shows are losing viewers
One of the main results of 2023 was a growing distrust of propaganda, We Can Explain found. Residents of the country are less and less interested in Solovyov’s programs, Z-channels on Telegram are losing subscribers, and the main propaganda sites are losing their audience.
The rating of Vladimir Solovyov’s show fell by one and a half times. By the end of 2022, the top 100 most popular programs in Russia (audience 4+ according to Mediascope) included 5 propaganda talk shows, and the highest was “An Evening with Solovyov”: 14th place with a rating of 3.6%. A year later, Soloviev is still more popular than his fellow propagandists, but only in 35th place with a rating of 2.1% (a drop of more than one and a half times).
Views of propaganda sites have collapsed , statistics from the LiveInternet service show. Among the main victims are RIA Novosti, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestia. Over the course of a year, they lost between 9 and 20 million visitors. In December 2023, 60 million unique users visited the RIA website, and in December 2022–75 million. Lenta.ru was visited by 54 million people last December (a year earlier — 63 million). The biggest losses are at Komsomolskaya Pravda. If in December 2022 107 million users visited the KP website, then a year later — only 87 million.
Users are massively unsubscribing from Z-channels. The losses began after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup in June. The most unsubscribes are from “military correspondents,” who lose almost 1 thousand people a day, according to TgStat data. Thus, the WarGonzo channel (Semyon Pegov) has lost more than 200 thousand subscribers since June (from 1.3 million to 1.09 million). Evgeniy Poddubny had similar losses (minus 170 thousand over six months). Yuri Kotenok has lost more than 50 thousand subscribers. And the “military correspondent” of VGTRK Alexander Sladkov has ceased to be a millionaire altogether — in July he had 1.08 million subscribers, now there are only 944 thousand.
At the end of the year, sociologists recorded that Russians in general were tired of the war , and ending it was their main wish for 2024.
Now, anybody familiar with the 1991 Soviet collapse will certainly see the parallels. Back then, jokes started about the usefulness of both Pravda and Izvestia. Granted, this came from Glasnost, which is now gone.
So, are we seeing a similar pattern? I think it’s a good guess because people are dying. And at this point, people are tired of the war. One of the first signals of this is precisely a loss of trust in what the government is saying.
This is a society where nothing is true, and everything is possible. I still recommend that book, but in this case, nothing is valid, with the loss of subscribers being a strong noise signal. I kept making analogies to an ice flow. This is creaking even more noisily.
So, are we slowly moving away from this nightmare? It’s indeed a good question because this would be the end of Putin. And that is the truth. He will pay a heavy price for this war. Remember, he fears to die like Qaddafi did. That left an impression on him.
But then we have this from a school in Moscow. Remember, they are working hard to establish a new state, and Kadyrov is part of it:
Schoolchildren were given “Akhmat is power” mugs for the New Year.
This is a gift from Kadyrov’s men to fourth-graders from school №14 in Kolomna, Moscow Region, because the children “for a long time” made trench candles and camouflage nets for them. In addition to the mugs, the children received Milky Way chocolates.
Now I have a question. Isn’t a Milky Way an American candy? Speak about double messages. The decadent West is terrible. We reward you for weaving netting, which is standard in wartime, but we give you chocolate from the main adversary.
My head hurts. Talk about contradictions in the message. But who am I to judge? I’m sharing it because it’s the other end of the propaganda. So adults are getting it, while kids are exposed to metric tons of it.
I will close with two more. Both involve food, to a point. Here is the first:
In the Republic of Tyva, stores with cages like those in the poorest African countries were built for the local population. The majority of the population lives there below the poverty line.
But on TV they will always talk about the Decaying West and the need for war in Ukraine.
The photo attached to the message is very telling. It’s not a modern store. It’s more like what you find in very rural areas. There is a correlation between people having access to internal plumbing and service in the army.
This is one of the poorest regions in the federation. And they probably believe they are doing far better than people in London or New York City. Propaganda is a powerful thing.
And before you say it, yes, we have issues. But nothing close to these regions, and we should do better.
Now, let’s look at the last episode with eggs, shall we?
News of getting up from your knees — “egg fever” continues in Russia. The Russian Federation begs for eggs in countries near and far abroad, 318,000 eggs were purchased from Turkey.
In the 24th year of Putinism, it suddenly became clear that agriculture was at the bottom. Who would have thought!
It’s the last sentence that brings me back to the first post. It’s a full circle to the glorious days of Soviet collapse in 1989. One reason for that collapse was the failure of Soviet agriculture.
So it seems we are coming full circle to those days. If the egg issue is isolated, rumors of bird flu are one thing. But given other failures, including trains breaking down, I can undoubtedly see regions not wanting to export these goods to the other areas.
Again, this is 1989 all over again. And we are watching it happen all over again. The other parallel to 1989 was the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan. The cost of that war was orders of magnitude lower than the Ukraine conflict. But like that war, this one is now entering the consciousness. As I type this, Belgorod is getting pounded again. There are a few more targets in Crimea and one in the Kuban. We wait to see what the targets hit, but here is a map of at least the southern targets.
Rumors are that Valery Gerasimov bought the farm, but I can’t find any confirmation. So rumors remain. And given the nature of the Federation, we’re still playing with multiple rumors that Putin is dead, and the doubles…and I mean multiples, not one. This also involves a version of Politburo 1957 after the death of Stalin. Why do I share it? Rumors are strong in Russia. Russian conspiracy makes QAnon look almost normal. This is the kind of society we are dealing with.
The rating of Vladimir Solovyov’s show fell by one and a half times. By the end of 2022, the top 100 most popular programs in Russia (audience 4+ according to Mediascope) included 5 propaganda talk shows, and the highest was “An Evening with Solovyov”: 14th place with a rating of 3.6%. A year later, Soloviev is still more popular than his fellow propagandists, but only in 35th place with a rating of 2.1% (a drop of more than one and a half times).
