Spectator Books: how fake news took over the world

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The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2019

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam's guest in this week’s Spectator Books is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter lived in Moscow for a decade as a TV producer, and chronicled the metastasis in that country of 'post-truth politics' in his bestselling Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. His fascinating and dismaying new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, describes how Russia’s surreal new information politics turned out not to be a weird exception, but the harbinger of a worldwide phenomenon. In this new book, part travelogue, part reportage, part memoir, he travels from the Philippines to Ukraine, from Mexico to Beijing, to investigate how the internet — which we once thought would be the great political disinfectant — has been weaponised by criminal regimes worldwide.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.6	Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast.
0:23.4	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:25.9	This week, my guest is Peter Pomeranzev, who a couple of years ago published a terrifying
0:30.6	indictment of Putin's Russia and its kind of information war called Nothing is True and Everything is
0:37.3	possible. And he's followed that out with a new book called This Is Not Propaganda, kind of information war called Nothing is True and Everything is Possible.
0:38.1	And he's followed that out with a new book called This Is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the
0:42.8	War Against Reality.
0:44.7	Peter, welcome.
0:46.0	Can you tell me, so, you know, you're in the territory of information, disinformation,
0:51.2	misinformation, misinformation, propaganda.
0:53.7	What made you want to, I mean, how does this relate to your first book?
0:57.3	What, how does it take the story on?
1:00.2	So yes, so my first book, it's a book about Russia and sort of a memoir of my nine years there,
1:05.5	working in the Russian media system, which gave me kind of some insights into what I saw as a new form of
1:12.4	Russian propaganda. And it was new in the sense that, obviously, propaganda isn't new,
1:17.5	and Russian propaganda certainly isn't new. But it was very different to the Soviet one.
1:21.7	It didn't try to sort of insist there was some higher communist objective truth out there.
1:26.2	Quite the opposite. It kind of said that truth was
1:28.0	unknowable, that facts don't even matter. It's a politics of pure performance rather than, you know,
	...

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