A ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’ media strategy has kept Putin in power. Trump is following his example.
By Cameron Hood
The idea that news could be purposely fake has shocked a lot of Americans. But in Russia, the separation of news from truth has a longer and more recognized history.
A popular Soviet-era political joke centered on two newspapers of record: Pravda (“Truth”), the official newspaper of the Communist Party, and Izvestiya (“News”), the official newspaper of the Soviet government.
“In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestiya there is no truth.”
We often think of “fake news” as being easily identifiable — suspicious-looking links with odd URLs, gratuitous ads and overly dramatic headlines scattered in our search results or drifting in our social media feeds. But what if the major television news networks and newspapers of record, the sources we implicitly trust to inform us each day, peddled those same untruths and alternative facts? What if they relayed and repeated only the information and angles approved by the White House? That scenario describes contemporary Russian media.
In the opening pages of his 2014 book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, British journalist Peter Pomerantsev writes that in a place as…
