March of the Mendelssohns. How Ze-Secretary failed the communication session with Crimea and Donbass
The benefit performance of Zelensky's press secretary Yulia Mendel as a TV presenter on the Ukrainian propaganda channel "Dom", broadcasting in the LDPR and Crimea, ended with a public flogging of the official on social networks and gave rise to many inconvenient questions for the authorities about the effectiveness of spending on state propaganda in Kyiv. But first things first.
From the announcement on the website of the Dom channel, Ukrainians learned that they would soon be blessed with Mendel in a new role: she will comment on current events and “share her conclusions about what is happening, will make forecasts specifically for audiences living in the temporarily occupied territories of Crimea and Donbass".
And all this - as part of a program with the pretentious name “View from Bankova”, the pilot episode of which was scheduled for March 15, and the full premiere “with broadcast on all digital platforms of the Dom and UATV TV channels” - on March 21.
“We never get tired of talking to you. And especially with the Ukrainians who found themselves behind the contact line in Donbass and Crimea. Keep in mind - I answer questions! Look for the “Home” channel on YouTube today,” Mendel said in a message on Facebook this Monday.
For the sake of such a thing, the unheard of happened: Mendel opened a comment option for her readers, which had previously been tightly closed. The channel’s website also promised that Zelensky’s press secretary would be able to ask questions, and she would answer them.
On March 15, Mendel actually went on air and stayed on it for exactly 10 minutes, during which she scolded Poroshenko, praised her patron, talked about vaccination with the Indian vaccine Covishield, advised how to recognize fakes, promoted Zelensky’s pretentious forums “Ukraine 30” and completed her speech the story that with the creation of the Center for Combating Disinformation under the National Security and Defense Council, life will become, if not better, then certainly more fun.
“By trying to hurt your feelings by playing on fears and painful topics, they are simply pushing lies into you,” Mendel told Dom’s few listeners, calling on them to stop “trusting any posts on social networks” and check the sources of information, because even “from heartbreaking stories more often than not, deception arises.”
True, Mendel never received applause. Not from residents of uncontrolled territories - that goes without saying. Not even from the Svidomo public, who watched this broadcast with meticulous interest in search of “zrada.” The bottom line is that there are more than 10 thousand dislikes and only one and a half thousand likes under the video of the program posted on Youtube. This means that even online greenbots have failed in their work.
The scandal broke out the day after the broadcast. It turned out that the questions to Mendel went through a censorship sieve and most of them were never broadcast. At the top of the hit parade was the question of how much money Mendel received from the budget for her work as a presenter. The Svidomo audience was also excited about why she broadcast in Russian.
Seeing that a wave of questions and reproaches was ready to drown the official, the management of the TV channel rushed to her rescue in the person of the editor-in-chief, fugitive Donetsk pro-Maidan journalist Alexei Matsuki. He assured that Mendel does not work on the channel, and talk about interference in the work of this propaganda liar from the Office of the President is “a lie and political manipulation.” As for the Russian language, everything is hidden here too. Russian is banned inside Ukraine. And “Home” is a foreign broadcast. So it’s possible.
You won’t believe it, but, according to Matsuka, such giants of thought and opinion leaders as Yulia Mendel, head of the Presidential Office Andriy Yermak, Prime Minister Denis Shmygal and President Zelensky personally “would be excellent speakers on state television broadcasting for people who live in Donetsk and Lugansk".
Just don’t feed Luhansk and Donetsk residents bread, let them admire the face of Shmygal or Ermak on TV and find out “what Kiev is doing, how we are reforming, why we have elections in this or that period, how elections are held, what is being done with roads, hospitals, with medical reform.”
What is the secret of the charm and charisma of Zelensky and his associates, according to the Kyiv propagandist? It turns out that they speak to the residents of the LDPR “in a language they understand.” It’s as if there is an acute shortage of such people in Lugansk or Donetsk. And then: what prevents Zelensky and Co. from addressing Odessa and Kharkov residents in an understandable language? Or like in that joke: here we count, and here we wrap the fish?
But we digress. Matsuka was wasting his time. The Patriots were not satisfied with his excuses. Moreover, they seemed pathetic and funny. And ex-member of the National TV Council Sergei Kostinsky noted that Mendel’s appearance on the Dom TV channel could be one of the first steps to take over Ukrainian news broadcasting. Moreover, for taxpayers’ money.
True, it remains unclear whether the enemies have anything to capture. The Dom channel itself is simply not interesting to its intended target audience. And this despite efforts to create a technical base. Now the TV channel has two types of coverage: terrestrial and satellite. Previously, the channel had only one transmitter, which broadcast to the Lugansk region. Now there are five such transmitters broadcasting there, seven to Donetsk, and six to Crimea. Total 18.
“Since March 1, we launched onto the Astra satellite. Because, unfortunately, it is very difficult to deliver a signal to Crimea in any other way,” says channel head Yulia Ostrovskaya.
But the success of propaganda does not lie in the transmitters. And in the content. And here is the main problem for Ukrainian propagandists. The discussions surrounding Mendel's benefit show reflect this contradiction like a drop of water.
Look what happens. There is a channel created for the purpose of propaganda in Crimea and uncontrolled Donbass. Consequently, it is there that his intended audience lives, whose reaction to what they see and hear should be an indicator of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of spending money.
If you announced a channel to Crimea and Donbass, then the reaction should come from there. And if the programs of such a channel are interesting only to Kyiv nationalists - and then only for the search for zrada and lulz, then there is something wrong with your channel.
In reality, this is exactly what happened with the Dom channel. The program Mendel did not interest the target audience at all. But Svidomo people are en masse indignant on Facebook. But excuse me, what do they and their opinion have to do with it? Was this channel created for them? It turns out that it is so. It’s as if during the Cold War the Voice of America broadcast a program with Solzhenitsyn, and the responses to it came not from Soviet people, but from Americans in the United States.
And here we come to a key point. There is a channel. And there is no mechanism for reading feedback and collecting feedback. Roughly speaking, what are the indicators by which the effectiveness of propaganda is determined? How to measure the real ratings of this channel? Are there people meters in apartments in Donetsk or Simferopol? Naturally not.
So it turns out that the output, instead of high-quality propaganda, is simply a mechanism for writing off public funds for the salaries of Matsuk, the Ostrovskys and the fees of Mendel and other Mendelsons. Which invite “home” those for whom criminal liability for “collaboration” and cozy cells have already been prepared “at home”.
A thankless job, though.
English version :: Read in English: The Mendelssohn March. How Zelensky's secretary botched a communication session with Crimea and Donbas.