Old-Style Russian Propaganda

This is like something from the cold war.

First, take a look at this clip from Fox News:

You only need to watch 30 seconds of it, but you can watch more if you want. It is an interview with a 12-year-old American who, along with her aunt, was in South Ossetia when the fighting broke out in Georgia. If you watch the tape, you will see that the people being interviewed are staunch supporters of the Russians and blame everything on the Georgian government.

The next clip is in Russian, but you don’t need to understand Russian to get what is going on.

It takes about 40 seconds into the clip before the good part starts. Emir Kamenica and Elena Zinchenko, who both speak Russian, describe what happens as follows:

What’s happening here is that the Russians are showing a bit about how American media is engaging in information warfare against Russia. They provide an example of [how] one American interview went wrong. The voice-over in Russian makes it seem as if — when the aunt starts blaming Georgia — the interviewer starts coughing loudly to cover her comments, becomes extremely rude, and cuts her off without giving her a chance to continue. As you can tell by watching the original clip, however, all of this is completely fabricated.

Two things strike me as completely bizarre about this Russian clip. First, the interview is completely pro-Russia. I can see why the Russian media might show anti-Russia TV clips to demonstrate American media bias. Wouldn’t that be simpler than what they do here?

Second, wouldn’t it be obvious to any Russian viewer that when this was originally shown in the United States, it would have been in English — and thus the coughing was dubbed in later?

(Addendum: After I wrote this, but before it was posted, The New York Times wrote this article discussing the news clips. Also after I wrote this and before I posted it, the Russian news outlet that produced it took it down off its web page, presumably because of the embarrassing attention it was receiving. In the age of YouTube, however, you can run but you can’t hide.)