Kyiv, October 22, 2014 – Margo Gontar,“StopFake” editor and co-founder, during her briefing at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center presented a fresh set of Russian media-fakes and told about key directions of Russian propaganda transformation.
According to Margo, Russian media have a traditional “translation issue”. A great evidence for this is the Russia’s country-wide channels, Channel One video report during the “News”, broadcasting a part of the press briefing of the US State Department representative Jen Psaki, as if she admitted the US financing the revolution in Hong Kong. The report shows Jen Psaki answering “Yes” to this question. As it can be derived from the Russian media report, the US government did not support the Hong Kong protesters directly, but it told the NGOs how to spend money, received from the US officials. However Jen Psaki did not indeed answer this question positively. The First channel deliberately picked the wrong translation for the words of the US representative wrong, falsifying video footage. Margo Gontar stated that misleading translation is a very common type of fake.
Gontar also mentioned a confusing moment on the Russian TV, which happened to the RBK journalist Mariya Stroyeva. During the live report the journalist did not fall for a provocation of a news presenter, assuring that Kyiv is a most peaceful city and people in the capital are strongly against violence in the country. Such comment of the journalist didn’t correspond with the video footage on the channel.
Margo mentioned that the volunteer project “StopFake” experienced 7 months negligence from the government. Margo considers such situation as unacceptable, while the information war is going through its active phase. In the situation when the channel “Russia Today” intends to widen its broadcasting in France and Germany and the Russian propaganda changes its tactics, Ukraine still has no in-depth informational strategy for countering Russia’s informational aggression.
Also Margo Gontar called upon Ukrainian mass media responsibility for the information disclosed, so far as “StopFake” documented cases of unreliable facts being unveiled by Ukrainian media resources. Margo is convinced that such mindless attitude of Ukrainian press to published content gives grounds for Russian propaganda to produce its own fakes, based on Ukrainian ones, and thereby discredit our national media.
