Trump and Navalny: The Media, Lies, and Truth
Is it too much to ask the media giants that have profited from presenting one politician's lies to pivot and present another's truths?
The definition of truth, the late Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, his critique of television in 1985, comes in part from the character of the media that conveys it. Television, he asserted, speaks in only one voice: entertainment. The result transforms public discourse, corrupting not only the culture but also the business of democracy. It's a good bet Postman would have seen Donald Trump, a politician concocted from TV celebrity whose lies still fill prime time, as incarnating the medium and its impact at their worst.
Postman’s subject may have been American society, but his analysis 40 years ago is no less relevant to technology and its impact on truth today. Consider events this year and next. Fox News’ $785 million defamation disgrace for broadcasting lies, CNN’s ratings crisis and floundering effort to remodel its journalism, and TV executives drooling over their share of a coming $20 billion election; this year’s headlines and the media’s complicity in disseminating the disinformation certain to fill every channel in 2024 make Postman’s case.
Still, Postman’s focus on American culture makes it hard to know how he would have analyzed the 21st Century media’s effects elsewhere in the world. Who knows? Perhaps like radio in the 1930s, a technology that amplified Adolf Hitler’s oratory no less than Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats, he would have made the same case no matter the geography or regime. But countries and cultures vary when it comes to how technologies influence their societies, not least, in Postman’s terms, in defining truth in authoritarian vs. democratic states.
Take Russia. Over the last two decades, President Vladimir Putin has strangled its independent press, crushed dissent, and resuscitated Stalin’s security state. With due deference to Postman’s brilliant analysis of the American scene, for all their politically carcinogenic effects, television’s web-based, 21st Century technological successors appear to be the only media in Russia with any chance of defining and communicating what’s true. Alexei Navalny’s challenge to Putin is the case in point.
A lawyer, anticorruption crusader, and political candidate, Navalny has been stalked, arrested, attacked, and nearly assassinated by Putin’s security services. After surviving a murder attempt by Russian agents three years ago he chose to return to Moscow and a certain fate. His jeopardy since then has done nothing to divert him. Imprisoned on trumped up charges and facing decades more behind bars because of new bogus crimes, Navalny’s incarceration in a penal colony hasn’t confined his skill in defining as well as communicating truth.
Navalny’s courage represents his threat. It’s well portrayed in CNN Film’s Oscar-winning documentary on his anticorruption crusade, near-death and recovery, and return to Russia in 2021. His media savvy comes through as well. Navalny has used the web to subvert the Kremlin’s authoritarian controls for over a decade. His texts, posts, and videos have mobilized thousands to take to the streets. Even under the Kremlin’s draconian crackdowns, they have drawn millions of readers and viewers. His 2021 video exposé of Putin’s mansion scored 100 million views. Persecuted and jailed or not, his audience speaks for itself.
To be sure, Navalny and his actions are part of an extraordinary as well as tragic history. From tsars to commissars, repression defines Russians’ past. Indeed, the web and its tools in his and his supporters’ hands have many precedents. A century ago, for example, Russian exiles who fled the Bolshevik Revolution for Berlin and Paris wrote, published, and smuggled their work into the communist state. In the Soviet era, samizdat, clandestinely printed tracts that conveyed western as well as Russian writing, circulated hand-to-hand.
Today for millions of digitally native Russians, Navalny’s courage and cause, communicated by technology such as Telegram’s instant messaging, have catalyzed their activism. Take his return to Russia in January 2021. From videos on the plane to his live-streamed arrest at the Moscow airport, Navalny personified the reality of Putin’s repression in real time. Over a million viewers witnessed the regime’s acts. Now on trial in a closed courtroom hours from Moscow, his isolation testifies to Putin’s fear of the man and the media his talents can command.
For governments that have spoken up on Navalny’s behalf and decried Russian repression, championing his release and freedom is complicated. For instance, whether public pressures will help or hinder his cause in a Russia where Putin’s ruthless murders of opponents at home and abroad have eliminated critics and challengers by the score is open to question. That said, there is no argument for failing to regularly as well as prominently feature Navalny and the cause of his freedom whenever presidents and prime minister raise human rights.
In March 2022, a few days after his unjust conviction and sentencing to nine years in prison, the State Department condemned Moscow’s action, calling for his release. “Now more than ever,” its spokesman Ned Price said, “the people of Russia must be able to hear voices of courage and integrity that tell the truth about the Kremlin’s wrongdoing at home and abroad…”
It’s a message that needs to be heard American C-suites as well as the Kremlin. With the outcome of Navalny’s latest trial including a 30-year sentence foreordained, for the media giants that have profited from purveying another politician’s lies to American audiences, recognizing their technology’s role and, thanks to Navalny himself, its importance in presenting the truth to Russians shouldn’t be a stretch.
In fact, in a series of tweets in April 2022 following Ukraine’s invasion, Navalny singled out the communications and social media giants and pointed the way. For the same price as a Javelin anti-tank missile, he tweeted last year, a massive advertising campaign could break through Russian censorship to attract “200 million ad views, or at least eight million views on a video with the truth… in Ukraine.”
For America’s media empires that have taken Trump’s lies to the bank for years, mounting just such a campaign on behalf of Navalny and the truth he represents seems the least they can do.