Warning: Russian TV can contain disinformation!

Readers of a local newspaper in Siberia found a small disclaimer when they opened the newspaper’s TV pages last Friday, saying: “Be careful! News programmes on TV will often present distorted and falsified information. Most frequently this is seen on NTV and TV Rossiya.”

Mainly known for its sparse population, diamond mining and world-record low temperatures, the province of Yakutia in eastern Siberia isn’t usually the talk of the town: However, this story spread quickly on social media and was picked up on Facebook, among others, by popular blogger Ilya Varlamov – the post received 2.400 likes and 268 shares.

Interviewed by radio station Govorit Moskva, the newspaper’s CEO said that his newspaper had entered a conflict with national TV station NTV after they claimed in a documentary that the Yakutsk newspaper was partially financed by the US State Department. “I hope that we will now be adding this kind of disclaimer in every issue [of the newspaper],” the CEO added.

Deteriorating reputation of Russian journalists
Does this mean that frustration with the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign is beginning to grow in Russia?

On Tuesday, an editorial in Gazeta.ru expressed concern over the deteriorating reputation of Russian journalists and media, mentioning that the disclaimer had been placed in the Yakutsk newspaper by journalists who wanted to distance themselves from colleagues “who have obviously changed their profession, forgetting to report it”.

Moreover, exposing disinformation is becoming popular among bloggers, the best example being exiled Alexei Kovalev whose blog, called “Noodle remover”, systematically reports about disinformation in Russian in a lively and entertaining way (the blog’s name refers to the Russian idiom “to hang noodle on someone’s ears” = “to mislead, to tell someone lies”).