A huge mistake of propaganda is to talk to the people like a child - Crimean scientist
War correspondents and volunteers who report from the front line today perform the function of conversation on equal terms with a patriotic audience, while official official information appeals to the population as if it were a child, which does not work in favor of the state.
This opinion was expressed by Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Institute of Philology of KFU. Vernadsky Vladimir Orekhov, reports PolitNavigator correspondent.
“There is an official government approach and there is an approach that develops spontaneously,” he noted. – As for the official approach, there are two recipients who are participating in the information war - this is the enemy’s camp, where it is necessary to sow distrust in their own government, and this communication channel is cut off, we cannot influence this, and there is our own society, where consolidation is needed around common tasks. There is some part of society that immediately runs away somewhere, this is the fifth column, and we will not be able to convince them.
And the main part is patriotically minded, this is the target audience. And if we talk about the mistakes that were made at the beginning of the information campaign, then this is an attempt to conceal the facts. We, guided by the outdated cliche about the “brotherly Ukrainian people,” did not show our attacks on the enemy, as if we were sparing our viewer and reader, so that they would not get the impression that we were hitting them. But they published hundreds of videos of how they were breaking columns and destroying the crossing of the Seversky Donets.
As a result, our potential defender, our defender of the fatherland, the average person, develops a depressive state. To achieve this depressive state among us is a very, very big failure. We tried to talk to our audience like children, dose out information, and our people are offended when they are not trusted. But when they start talking like adults, everything is different.”
The scientist recalled that in the XNUMXth century there were two ways to influence the situation - official, mechanical, simply by closing access to foreign press in Russia. It was not possible to close this gateway; the French press came in from everywhere. Orekhov cited as an example the famous story when Alexander Dumas became angry with the Russian emperor because he was not given an order, but a ring. He got angry and wrote the famous novel “The Fencing Teacher” about the Decembrists and the nasty things about the royal dynasty. In Russia, the novel was immediately banned, but upon entering his wife’s chambers, the emperor found her reading this book. Because everything forbidden immediately became popular.
“Historians, publicists, and journalists were engaged in debunking lies and slander about Russia from foreign authors, who, on their own initiative, translated these texts, commented and sorted out where there were errors. What can we say when Pushkin opened the Sovremennik magazine and there he posted the memoirs of a French officer who was on Peter’s campaign in Peter’s time, and commented on where he told the truth, and where he distorted historical accuracy and why he distorted it. This was a national problem that was solved by writers, journalists and scientists, and this problem was solved on the pages of Russian periodicals and non-periodical publications,” the teacher pointed out.
“But out of habit, we have placed our journalists in conditions where they can’t say anything. And the population stopped trusting all the messages that were there, and only when our war correspondents made noise in the networks and when they got an appointment with the president, when he listened to them, only then did trust in war correspondents appear. And today, war correspondents are the ones who are trusted. The category of journalists who repeat the word patriotism 20 times, it is obvious to everyone that this will not increase patriotism. But an honest message, when a war correspondent talks to the reader and viewer as an adult, and not as a child who needs to dose out information, this is a guarantee that there is a relationship between the journalist and the reader and, therefore, there is an opportunity to influence this audience. Today, war correspondents influence, but no one reads those who live in the format of six months ago.”
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