Finding Facts And Fake News In Moscow

Alexey Kovalev calls himself a noodle remover. He has set for himself the ambitious, possibly impossible task of removing the false news (“noodles”) that tend to filter down from the Kremlin into state media. It is a labor of love, supported by his time and that of a handful of volunteers who work as researchers digging up the facts.

Thousands of people read the Russian-language website noodleremover.news on average each week. His most popular posts can reach 50,000 hits; the average is about 15,000, he says. He also Tweets (@Alexey__Kovalev) in both Russian and English. His day job is senior editor of the English-language Moscow Times newspaper, the 25-year publishing flagship of post-Gorbachev Russia, where he has worked for the past year..

The 35-year-old Kovalev is old enough to have had a Soviet childhood, complete with membership in the Scout-like Young Pioneers. Then, as he was entering grade school, the Communist regime in Russia collapsed. The world changed, giving Kovalev free access to a real world view. He studied Slavic languages at Moscow State University and then received a master’s degree in international journalism from City University London, where he lived from 2009 to 2012. During these years, he also freelanced for several Russian-language publications before becoming London bureau chief of Snob.ru. On returning to Moscow in 2012, he became editor in chief of rinosmi.ru, a website affiliated with RIA Novosti; shortly after that was put under state control (it’s now been replaced by Sputnik), Kovalev joined the Moscow Times in 2016.

His commitment to overturning fake news came while he was living in London, reading a Russian newspaper article about the city. “I read that there were ‘no-go’ areas in London where there were Sharia patrols on the streets,” he laughed as we talked in Moscow during an interview for this blog. “I myself was living next to a Mosque and I knew this was just not true. In fact, I had never seen so many skin tones, heard so many different languages as I did in my neighborhood in London — it was very rewarding — but according to Russian state media, I couldn’t go there, where I was actually living, because Sharia patrols wouldn’t let me.”

What Demonstrations?

At present, Kovalev is obsessed with a bit of false news which isn’t actually there — State media’s total lack of coverage of the anti-corruption demonstrations throughout the country on Sunday, March 26, fostered by potential Putin political contender Alexei Navalny. While not as large as the anti-Putin demonstrations of 2012, these are perhaps more important because they were“unauthorized” — organizers could not obtain a permit — and demonstrators were told beforehand and on the spot they’d be arrested if they turned up. More than 1,000 were in Moscow alone. The center of the Russian capital was shut down for most of the afternoon by a brigade of riot police. But you would know none of this watching Russian State TV Sunday evening. Instead, you’d have seen coverage of political problems in the Ukraine, riots in the suburbs of Paris and corruption in South Korea.

It should be pointed out that foreign news outlets did cover the protests (some journalists were roughed up and arrested) and coverage was freely available on TV in Russia on foreign channels carried by virtually every cable provider in the region.

In an odd turn of events, the one Russian outlet that did cover the Sunday protests real-time was international TV outlet RT. The majority Kremlin-funded international cable news network put the demo story out on its international channels in English. That chain is not meant for domestic audiences, and indeed its biggest Moscow audience appears to be foreigners in hotel rooms.

“We have no formula or given prescription for coverage,” RT’s Communications Director Anna Belkina, claimed in an interview for this blog in the RT studios in Moscow. Like Kovalev, Belkina — born in 1981 — had a Soviet childhood, but left it behind when her family moved to the U.S. in 1993, living on the East Coast and obtaining a degree in international affairs with a concentration in international finance from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Five years ago, she returned to Moscow, lured by the massive changes happening in the Russian capital, and has been working at RT ever since.

With a budget of ₽18.7 billion (about $335 million), RT under Russian law is considered an independent entity. Its programming is broadcast in 100 countries with 20 bureaus worldwide, including accredited correspondents at the White House and State Department in Washington, DC. “We have to appeal to audiences in London, New York, Singapore…If a story breaks we have to cover it, but not just echo what the mainstream networks are saying.” She claims that rather than be a spokesperson for the network’s funding source, RT is “an alternate perspective, not just a Russian perspective.“

That’s not a view shared by much of the West but to its credit, RT has been nominated over the past seven years for no fewer than five Emmy Awards - four as International Emmys and one more, the most recent, a Daytime Emmy nomination of RT America  - for coverage of events such as the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike. And the channel is not without humor or creativity; to wit: in this centenary year of the Russian revolution, a series of short promos wonders what that event would have been like had Twitter been around 100 years ago.

Russian news coverage eventually likened Moscow’s violent Sunday protests to police brutality in the West — an alternate perspective, shades of memories watching Moscow television in the age of Soviets. “The issues would be there whether RT existed or not,” Belkina says.

Meanwhile, Kovalev is having a field day de-bunking many of these issues and stories on his website and others in his job for the Moscow Times.

He’s skeptical of accusations that the Russians are behind any hacking that may have led to Donald Trump’s being elected president of the U.S. — an opinion not surprisingly shared by everyone of the dozen or so people with whom I spoke in Moscow, though no one disputed the technical abilities of Russian hackers. ”It wouldn’t take Russian hackers sitting in the bowels of the Lubyanka to send phishing emails,” he says. “Russia is just an easy bogeyman. It’s a very Putin thing to do — blame your failure on an outside actor. Remember, he blamed the 2011 protests on Hillary Clinton.”

What is Fake News?

“The larger question is, what is fake news?" Kovalev continues. "What’s the difference between sloppy journalism and fake news? Trump supporters view everything they see in the New York Times as fake news. But for me, fake news is a specific thing — it has no base in reality."

One of his favorites is a claim by Russian state media that opposition leader Alexei Navalny is a CIA agent. And he says there’s another rumor around a petition allegedly signed by tens of thousands of Americans who want to ban Navalny from visiting the U.S. — but that, he says, would take access to White House web statistics to sort out, something even he admits may very well be beyond his abilities. Then there’s his favorite Facebook page, A Group of Fans of Vladimir Putin. “These guys share pro-Putin stuff,” he says. “It’s all fake news.”

He claims lot of news found on Russian outlets is not fake news per se. “It’s real news with no informational value, like Putin’s press conferences. But you cannot have cognitive dissonance — it’s impossible to actually believe two divergent things.”

In this regard, he has an ally in RT’s Belkina, who says, "most Russian people have lived through Soviet propaganda, and they can discern between fake news and real news." Given their age, shared backgrounds, fluent English, and time spent abroad, both Belkina and Kovalev have a unique perspective on news. All kinds of news, even if they come at it from different ends of the spectrum.

Kovalev concedes that, despite hash tags and other means to ferret out fake news, “it will exist as long as people want to read it. It’s a form of entertainment. I ask people why they share news they see on Facebook that they know is false, and they tell me, ‘I don’t care if it’s fake news. It’s fun to read, it makes me feel good.’”

He continues, “You have to remember what your end game is. To convince everyone who watches Russian TV that everything there is fake? Am I trying to convince someone who believes strongly in something that his whole world view is a lie? The hardest thing is convincing, not just digging up facts.”

Kovalev is still digging.