Probing Soviet influence
Disinformation is the term that intelligence analysts give to falsehoods a country disseminates by duping foreign news media. Such campaigns usually depend on a legitimate journalist's unwitting participation. Thus it is often all but impossible, even long after the fact, for a news organization to detect that it has been the victim of disinformation. One classic instance that took months to expose: the rash of stories planted among Western journal ists that the late Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was a fan of jazz and Western fiction and a closet liberal.
The inability of a news organ to be sure that...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
