Propaganda items in media outlets have increased 30-fold from the summer of 2013 till the end of 2016: this is according to the findings of the Foundation for Humanitarian and Social Research. In its survey “Antidemocratic propaganda in Bulgaria” the organization identifies four main topics underlying this kind of propaganda: the demise of Europe; the rise of Russia; the corrupt political class in Bulgaria; the United States and NATO as a global hegemon and a puppeteer worldwide.

To sum up these conclusions, the foundation first explored 3000 websites. The team found eight of them that provide particularly strong examples of propaganda, and went on studying 3000 articles carried by these websites. It has turned out that the four main themes were most commonly discussed by PIK news agency, A-specto Magazine, the websites Glasove, Russia Today and Pogled Info and the newspapers Trud, Duma and Weekend.

We cannot say whether there is a single centre engineering this propaganda, comments Associate Prof. Boyan Znepolski, though Europe has repeatedly pointed to Kremlin as the source. According to the sociologist however, Bulgaria is faced with four major threats, and they relate to the country’s membership of the European Union in the first place – because of the systematic media denigration of European institutions and the country’s civilization choice, as well as of liberal democracy.

“One of the threats is the purposeful discrediting of various elites – the political and business ones”, Prof. Boyan Znepolski goes on to say. “Propaganda is also aimed at discrediting civil society – various foundations and nongovernmental organizations are being vilified as servants of foreign interests. The other threat pertains to discrediting the European Union and more generally, the Euro-Atlantic values. All these threats go hand in hand with creating an atmosphere of populism and majoritarianism – the elites have been denounced, everything seems to be in the hands of the people, but this is a speculation that can be very dangerous.”

Propaganda language in media tends to intensify in connection of certain events. And while until 2013 it was almost non-existent, the emergence of Kiev’s Maidan unleashed a wave of manipulated information. That same year saw civil protests in Bulgaria against the appointment of Delyan Peevski as head of the State Agency for National Security. Antidemocratic propaganda peaked during the annexation of Crimea, the first anniversary since the annexation, the statement of Angela Merkel about refugees, Russia’s intervention in the war in Syria, the NATO summit in Warsaw and during the presidential elections in Bulgaria.

„When a more general picture is drawn up, it becomes obvious that in excess of 3000 articles dwell on the same topics and that during certain events articles on the said topics increase tenfold or one-hundredfold. This is not accidental but rather a purposeful, organized action aimed to generate tensions and suggest certain theses. Besides, in propaganda discourse these theses are never placed in a context in which a different thesis contests them or subscribes to the opposite view”, Boyan Znepolski explains.

The sociologist points to an example with criticism of the European Union – as either a political organization subordinated to North America and serving its agenda, or as a civilization project eroded internally due to the ideology of liberalism.

It is however interesting to see how criticism of Europe compares with criticism of Russia.

“There is zero criticism of Russia in these articles”, Prof. Znepolski replies. “On the contrary, they discuss the rise of Russia, Russia’s upsurge in terms of armament and geopolitics – in other words, Russia is praised in an international perspective as a civilization model opposing the model of the West.”

And while media in Bulgaria have increasingly turned into manoeuvring ground of hybrid warfare and are becoming more tangled in oligarchic and political dependencies, Bulgaria has once again occupied the infamous position of the country with the least media freedom in the EU. The new Reporters Without Borders world index has ranked it 109th due to that it is dominated by corruption, and a merger of media, politicians and oligarchs including Delyan Peevski, an owner of a media group of six newspapers and controlling 80 percent of the distribution of printed publications. The Reporters Without Borders report also points out that the government administers European funding to particular media outlets in the absence of transparency and in this way actually bribes editors not to criticize it and to refrain from reporting on particular topics.

English Daniela Konstantinova