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Analysis: 'Info noise' helps Russian TV drown out Skripal reports

Adam Robinson, BBC Monitoring journalist Russia specialist
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Russia's media response to reports identifying the two Skripal suspects as officers of Russian military intelligence officers has differed markedly from its treatment of previous revelations about the Salisbury poisonings.

While statements by British police and government officials were met with efforts to ridicule and undermine them, the reaction to the investigations by The Insider and Bellingcat has tended to be more subdued and indirect.

This time, the preference has been to avoid directly responding to the news, and instead to drown it out with other stories, above all with what a leading Russian commentator has called "information noise".

The latest Bellingcat/The Insider investigation - identifying one of the two suspects as Alexander Mishkin, a decorated doctor of the GRU (now GU) military intelligence agency - was not mentioned on Kremlin-controlled TV until a brief report the next morning on the relatively little-watched state rolling news channel Rossiya 24.

There was also a brief mention on one of the top political talk shows, 60 Minut on Rossiya 24's sister channel Rossiya 1, where a guest dismissed Bellingcat with the rhyming insult "Kot i Krot" ("Cat and mole").

But apart from that, there was largely silence on the three main TV channels.

Instead, the top story on the mainstream news bulletins was Russian football internationals Alexander Kokorin and Pavel Mamaev beating up a civil servant in a Moscow cafe.

'Kremlin dunces'

On Russian state TV, it was treated as a breaking-news-worthy major national event, replete with correspondents reporting from the scene.

For days after, the story continued to be amply covered, with regular blow-by-blow updates on various people reacting with outrage at the men's behaviour, and on whether the pair would be charged and with what.

One online commentator voiced the theory that the footballers' story was a distraction from the GRU revelations, as well as other issues, such as the government's unpopular pension reforms.

A prominent anti-Kremlin anonymous account on Twitter, "Prof Preobrazhensky", mocked the "Kremlin dunces' sincere belief that by promoting this story, they are forcing everyone to forget about pensions, about the GRU's shame, Putin's departure from reality, about the new taxes."

Similarly, for nearly 24 hours after Bellingcat/The Insider's earlier findings that the other suspect, Ruslan Boshirov, is in fact Anatoliy Chepiga, a decorated GRU colonel, there was not a peep about the story on state television.

When one of the guests on 60 Minut tried to bring up Chepiga, he was quickly shouted down by the host.

Instead of rebutting the Chepiga investigation, the talk shows that day preferred to concentrate on mocking the suit and tie worn by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during a photoshoot with Donald Trump (See "Analysis: Russian TV uses Ukraine as a distraction from Skripal".

'Everyone clicks on it'

The story of Poroshenko's dress sense was picked out by Russian commentator Oleg Kashin as something he has dubbed "information noise".

Writing on the commentary website Republic, Kashin defines this as "not fake news and not as post-truth", but as a sort of meaningless non-news designed merely to distract the unwary and uncritical.

As another prime example, Kashin cites a recent report according to which a State Duma (parliament's lower house) deputy has called for action to do something about the dangers supposedly posed by masturbation.

Such largely meaningless statements by rent-a-quote legislators are the stock-in-trade of information noise, he says.

"Although nothing has happened, and it is guaranteed nothing will happen, some people will believe it, someone people will be outraged by it, some people will think up funny jokes, thus taking the story further, and everyone clicks on it," Kashin writes.

Kashin says this kind of news is quite different from the type of often rather superficial news that goes viral among social media users, and is in fact deliberately generated.

As evidence, he argues that only news of this type that comes from certain media outlets - and in particular the talk station Govorit Moskva, the creation of strongly anti-Western presenter Sergei Dorenko - are subsequently widely spread by the main Kremlin-controlled media outlets.

Since Kashin's article, several online commentators have taken to info-noise-spotting. The independent TV channel RTVi has for a while now run a separate "information noise" rubric on the front page of its website. In a commentary in 2017, RTVi defined "information noise" as "news that is not real news" - news about real events that have "no impact whatsoever on our lives".

Among the stories recently highlighted by media commentator Alexei Kovalev was one by state news agency RIA Novosti - part of a consortium run by Dmitry Kiselyov, widely dubbed as the Kremlin's "chief propagandist".

The report quoted State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov - a hardline social conservative who appears to be a particularly favoured source for such material - as calling for compulsory drug testing for Russian top-division footballers.

"Is it true that you are paid additional money for traffic generated by such trash 'news'?" Kovalev replied to RIA Novosti's tweet.

Drone-borne mosquitoes

While "information noise" appears to have been the Kremlin's media main tool against the GRU revelations, it has coexisted with the more well-known fake news.

A week after the Bellingcat/The Insider investigation about Chepiga emerged - and amid a continuing barrage of independent independent Russian media reports confirming it - the Russian defence ministry accused the US of running a germ warfare laboratory in Georgia.

The allegations about the Richard Lugar Laboratory founded in Tbilisi in 2011 were heavily promoted on prime-time state TV bulletins, despite effectively being a rehash of a longstanding complaint by Russia about the facility.

The "evidence" presented was based on a presentation by former Georgian Security Minister Igor Giorgadze, who has lived in exile in Russia since the late 1990s and is seen as an agent of Moscow in his homeland.

This to a large extent consisted of slides apparently showing documentation from the testing of known and documented Hepatitis C drugs, and included the dramatic suggestion that the laboratory may have been involved in spreading disease-bearing mosquitoes by drone.

SOURCE: BBC MONITORING 11 OCT 18

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