Sunday Special: How Not To Do Propaganda: showing a Russian vehicle outside Zaporizhia NPP, NRK claims the Russians are attacking…themselves (?)
Sunday Special: How Not To Do Propaganda: showing a Russian vehicle outside Zaporizhia NPP, NRK claims the Russians are attacking…themselves (?)
Today's teachable moment in terms of 'gaslighting failure' comes courtesy of Norwegian state broadcaster NRK… (it's almost too stupid to comment on this one--congrats, NRK, I suppose…)
Sunday Special: How Not To Do Propaganda: showing a Russian vehicle outside Zaporizhia NPP, NRK claims the Russians are attacking…themselves (?)
I suppose this is self-explanatory:
You see, while the linked article is actually about something else—according to the Int’l Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), power is (about to be) restored to the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), replete with ‘archival footage', dating from March 2022, when Russia took over the power plant.
Today, if you’d venture to Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, you’d see the above piece right on top of the website (it’s between 2-3 p.m. local time here in Norway).
Please don’t overthink this, though, as the highlighted vehicle is clearly marked with a ‘Z’, i.e., the marking used by Russian forces and their supporters among the breakaway regions.
If you’d ever think about this for more than a second—sure, there’s plenty of gaslighting in legacy media as of late of ‘attacks on the power plant’—but since the Zaporizhia NPP has been under control of Russian forces since March 2022, why on God’s green earth would they attack themselves…?
So, dear people over at NRK, if you think this is a good way to restoring your tattered credibility, well, I’d hesitate to ask you to think again: why don’t you guys try starting to think over your misinformation-peddling headlines before you post them?
This is a clear ‘FAILURE’ on NRK’s part.
They've become overconfident and lazy. The Covidian fear porn was lapped up enthusiastically by credulous, lamentably self-important consumers. They think that's a successful, universal model for perception management. No need to exert themselves.
It's normal for journalism, and has always been, to use pictures that are close enough for their purpose: no sinister motive is necessary. Unfortunately, that also means that it is hard to know when a conscious effort is being made to mislead. The "palestinian ambulance" comes to mind.
You wouldn't believe the number of times journalists get things wrong, things even a quick web search would fix - addresses, locations, names of things and so on. "Assault rifles" for example, something which only exists in media. "Tanks" for any kind of armoured vehicle.
When they cannot or will not get things like that correct, what are the odds they could report anything remotely correct?
Having debated and talked with journalists more times than is healthy, I can testify that their arrogance is boundless. They tell the truth, and what they tell is true is how they think: if they tell it, it is true because they tell it.
Upon Trump's election, the then-correspondent for swedish state TV in the US, Bergfeldt, wrote a hit-piece about his atrocious rethoric, claiming to have scientific proof that his linguistic and therefore cognitive ability was on par with an eleven year old child. So I wrote her and asked about that scientific proof. The link she repsonded with was to a much longer piece in the WaPo, which in turn referred to an essay by a first-year colleg student, who had used a program for measuring reading ability, comparing several different presidents' speeches of about equal length. Coming in at the top was Lincoln, the FDR and Reagan, then Bill Clinton and Bush in the middle, and then Trump, and at the very bottom Hillary Clinton (at the level of a seven-year old).
When I wrote back to Bergfeldt about this, and that is hardly qualifies as "scientific proof" and asking why she omitted that Hillay Clinton placed even worse, she immediately responded with slurs, passive-aggressive ad hominem, and the rest of the behaviour typical of women with Cluster B-type personality disorders.
This is just one example, and there's zero reason to believe norwegian jounalists are any different. Arrogance, hubris, fanatical zeal and righteousness and passive-aggressive vindictiveness and revanchism pretty much sums up nordic journalism for the present time as well as the last three decades.