The British newspaper The Times accused Russian media Sputnik and Russia Today of interfering with the results of Brexit. Moreover, it happened, according to the newspaper, as early as in 2016. The report, on which the article is based, was presented by a British research firm. And it raises many questions.
My colleague Arkady Glushenkov will tell about these questions and whether there are answers to them.
260 publications of Sputnik and Russia Today, almost 150 million views. Such solid figures are attributed to our news agencies by the analysts of the 89up agency. And, supposedly, this is three times more than tweets of the two main British groups that campaigned for withdrawal from the EU. At the same, the newspaper doesn’t reveal the statistics on articles that can be considered as anti-Brexit, although it admits that RT and Sputnik had those as well. But this doesn’t exhaust questions to the research. It's contained right in the Times' material.
"The research has been conducted by 89up. Its clients include Best for Britain, a campaign to keep the UK in the European Union. The agency claims that it funded the work. The research of the agency was not subjected to an independent verification".
And the editor-in-chief of Russia Today, Margarita Simonyan, in response to accusations, raised the main question of politics on Twitter: if the agency pays for the research, who pays the agency?
"The office is financed partly by the NGO Soros invested in. He never concealed that he invests money in active propaganda for the preservation of the EU membership. But no one called for propaganda and intervention. And we just ruined it all with our 260 articles".
The British experts themselves don’t believe the fact that 260 articles in six months can affect such a society as the British with its powerful independent media.
Marcus Papadopoulos, journalist: "Hell will freeze over before RT and Sputnik convince the Brits to vote for Brexit. I believe in the important role of RT and Sputnik and they have their readers, but the majority of the Brits, 90-95%, see large media as the main source, for example, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Sun, BBC, Channel 4. People voted for Brexit out of economic, political, and cultural reasons".
But the proposal to look more closely at the sponsor of the campaign against our media, billionaire George Soros, has been raised in the British society before. Nigel Farage, one of the ideologists of the campaign for withdrawal from the EU, has repeatedly called for it. In his opinion, Soros is more dangerous than any other political forces.
"We need to open our eyes to who George Soros is and how vast his organization is. His Open Society Foundation received 30 billion, not million but billion dollars. It’s the largest political organization in the world. He has his own program, and there’s nothing illegal about this, but he doesn’t believe in what he calls nationalism and what I’d call a democratic national state. And Brexit was just about that. We said that we want to rule the country and adopt laws ourselves".
Soros already donated 400 thousand pounds to various organizations opposing Brexit. Of these, 100 of it went to the Best for Britain, which is serviced by analysts from 89up. But, perhaps, the main and the fairest, from the experts’ point of view, argument of Farage is not about the fact that Soros pours too much into the campaign against Brexit but about when he does it. People already voted, the decision was already made, and the billionaire goes against the opinion of society, that is the very foundation of democracy.
And even if we believe the dubious claims that the two Russian agencies surpassed the influence of the media in the United Kingdom, they certainly acted within the framework of democracy and didn’t undermine its basic principles.
Arkady Glushenkov, Vesti.
