Media workshop

Elena Voloshin deconstructs the propaganda broadcast on Russian television

Audio 36:16

Elena Volochine presenting "Seen from Russia", Friday May 13, 2022 on France 24. © Screenshot France 24

By: Steven Jambot Follow |

Simon Decreuze Follow

3 mins

The media workshop

 receives the Franco-Russian journalist Elena Volochine, who for ten years was a correspondent in Moscow, to draw up an inventory of the Russian information landscape and better understand how people get information in Russia in 2022.

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In Russia, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it has become almost impossible to exercise the profession of journalist.

That's why

Elena Voloshin

, after a decade of correspondence in the country, left urgently on March 4, 2022.

For the past few weeks, she has been presenting a column entitled 

Seen from Russia

every Friday on France 24  in which she deconstructs the propaganda broadcast on Russian television. 

At the microphone of

The Media Workshop

, Elena Voloshin recounts how she experienced the beginning of the war and why she chose to leave Russia when " 

absolutely totalitarian propaganda

" was spreading in the Russian media  .

Hundreds of other journalists whose media have ceased broadcasting have made the same choice, such as those of the

Novaya Gazeta

newspaper or Dojd

television

State media have become mouthpieces for Kremlin propaganda, says Elena Voloshin.

We see river

talk shows

 devoted to what is always qualified as a “special operation” but “

there is no image of destruction caused by the Russian army in Ukraine

 ”.

Selected excerpts:

“ 

In Russia, the media have always been either for or against.

There has never really been neutral and independent journalism according to our own canons [...] that is to say that we have ethical, deontological rules, which we simply apply to the letter, we in the media in France, in any case that we try to make respect, us, at our level of journalists. 

»

I'm in something that somewhere almost surpasses me as a journalist, because in Russia for example, to talk about journalists, they often say 'I'm an activist and I'm a journalist.'

That for us is absolutely absolutely unthinkable.

You can't be both a journalist and an activist.

Either you serve a cause, or you are a journalist and you are neutral. 

»

 In fact, it's informational warfare except that the propaganda brandishes it as an informational warfare that would be waged against Russia by the West.

And in that sense, well the Russians have no understanding at all of what a media and informational space is.

And in fact for them, as soon as they look for information, as soon as they go to read a message, it will be a message conveyed by someone who has political interests behind it. 

»

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As World Refugee Day approaches, June 20, 

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From Kampala, he discusses the crucial issue of schooling for children living in refugee camps in Uganda: it stopped dead at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with all schools having closed.

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