Moscow News attempts to explain how propaganda is related to presentation of facts, with a look at their own history of reporting.

The newspaper under Lomko’s editorship gives off an eerie feeling of having been transported to a parallel universe. The language is English, so you don’t immediately envision a propaganda machine like Pravda. It looks like a newspaper, it feels like a newspaper.

It has pictures and headlines and cartoon illustrations. It has facts, figures and commentary. In fact, you would be hard pressed to argue with Lomko when he insists that he was producing an informative and objective newspaper.

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Reading the newspapers long enough, one notices a glaring absence: there are no negative facts about any aspect of life in the Soviet Union. Problems are not “challenges to be overcome,” as they are in Western-style political correctness. They are simply never mentioned.

This simple omission is what defined propaganda in general and Soviet newspapers in particular, and it is key in understanding the task that lay before Lomko in producing the paper after Khrushchev’s thaw and Brezhnev’s stagnation. Only the relevant facts are revealed, and the right conclusion is always drawn.

Such insight is essential to security reporting and data analysis. The ability to report on all the facts must be allowed by management, else they run the risk of instilling a propaganda-like view of their environment.