A Russian TV Insider Describes a Modern Propaganda Machine - NYTimes.com: LONDON — NORMALLY a boisterous sort, Peter Pomerantsev says he kept quiet when he found himself, at the age of 24, in a Moscow meeting room listening to 20 of the country’s top media executives discussing the news agenda for the week.
Not what the news was, but what they would make it, said Mr. Pomerantsev, the author of a recent book chronicling the moral and financial corruption of modern-day Moscow and the manipulation of a Russian television industry that he later joined.
He listened in amazement, he says, as a prominent news anchor reviewed the coming events as if they were part of a film script, musing on how best to entertain the audience and questioning who that week’s enemy should be.
“It was shocking,” said Mr. Pomerantsev, speaking over coffee in London last month. “They really saw television and news as a movie, and talked about it as a movie.”