THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 27
after Yanukovych. Ernst had imagined
that the Olympics would mark a bright
new era for Russia, and he was taken
aback by the abrupt change in tone. Bol-
tenko told me that the production team
saw it as “a clear and ringing collapse of
all of our hopes.” When I spoke to Ernst,
however, he rejected the idea that the
new narrative had been forced on him
from above. “We—us at Channel One,
as the citizens of the country—felt
deeply offended, and we didn’t need any
additional motivation,” he said.
In July, 2014, Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17, headed from Amsterdam to
Kuala Lumpur, was shot out of the sky
as it passed over eastern Ukraine, and
all two hundred and ninety-eight peo-
ple on board were killed. The Dutch
launched a years-long multinational
investigation, which eventually iden-
tified Russia-backed separatists as hav-
ing fired the missile and traced the anti-
aircraft system used in the attack to a
Russian military unit. As the inquiry
proceeded, state media went into a fury,
giving voice to every other possible the-
ory: that the Malaysian airliner had been
targeted by the Ukrainians in the mis-
taken belief that it was Putin’s plane; that
it was hit accidentally as part of an air-
defense training exercise gone wrong;
that it was downed by the Ukrainian
Air Force. In November, 2014, Channel
One aired what it called “sensational”
footage: a satellite image, supposedly
taken by Western intelligence services
and passed to Russia by an American
scientist, that purported to show the
plane being attacked by a Ukrainian
fighter jet. “The image supports a ver-
sion of events which has hardly been
heard in the West,” a host said.
The picture was quickly outed as
a fake. The time stamp didn’t match
that of the incident, the plane had iden-
tifying markings that distinguished it
from the Malaysian aircraft, and the
terrain underneath was clipped from
photos posted online two years before.
When I asked Ernst why his channel
gave voice to something so easily dis-
proven, he said that it was a simple error:
“Yes, we’re human, we made a mistake,
but not on purpose.”
Baldly false stories, in the right doses,
are not disastrous for Channel One; in
fact, they are an integral part of the Putin
system’s postmodern approach to propa-
ganda. In the Soviet era, the state pushed
a coherent, if occasionally clumsy, nar-
rative to convince the public of the offi-
cial version of events. But private media
ownership and widespread Internet ac-
cess have made this impossible. Today,
state outlets tell viewers what they are
already inclined to believe, rather than
try to convince them of what they can
plainly see is untrue. At the same time,
they release a cacophony of theories with
the aim of nudging viewers toward be-
lieving nothing at all, or of making them
so overwhelmed that they simply throw
up their hands. Trying to ascertain the
truth becomes a matter of guessing who
benefits from a given narrative.
In this case, the state’s approach seems
to have worked: a year later, a poll showed
that only about five per cent of Russians
blamed their government or the sepa-
ratists for the disaster. When I asked
Ernst about the official Dutch report,
he told me that our disagreement came
down to a matter of belief: “You believe
the Dutch report is true, and I believe
the Dutch report is unprofessional.” It
was as if we were arguing about religion
or aesthetics rather than a set of facts.As a young man, Ernst told me, he
watched “All the President’s Men,” the
1976 film about Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein’s investigation of Watergate
for the Washington Post. He was enrap-
tured by the film’s portrayal of journal-
ism’s moral force, its critical distance and
independence. Like many in his gener-
ation, he was frustrated by the stifling
controls of the Soviet system, and pre-
sumed that everything was more honest
in the West. But when the barriers be-
tween the two worlds collapsed Ernst
began to see the blind spots of the media
outlets he once worshipped. “I grew up
and travelled all over, and, especially in
recent years, it’s become increasingly clear
to me that justice, democracy, the com-
plete truth—they don’t exist anywhere
in the world,” he said. Ernst wears his
cynicism as a sign of enlightenment. It
would be impossible to convince him
that today’s CNN and the BBC don’t
have the same partiality as Channel One,
or are not also following an agenda.
“People who make television are citizens
of a specific country, from a certain na-
tionality, with particular cultural codes,”
Ernst told me. Channel One must play“Count your pets, folks.”