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How Russia's false biolab story was echoed by the U.S. far right : NPR


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SOURCE: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/25/1087910880/biological-weapons-far-right-russia-ukraine
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Summary

Both the U.S. and Ukraine have also signed a treaty vowing never to produce or use biological weapons.But unlike most Russian efforts to spread false narratives justifying its invasion of Ukraine, this one found a receptive audience in the United States among far-right social media channels, Fox News and followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory."It's clearly a case where the U.S. government has been lying; it has mounted a disinformation campaign, if you will, designed to cover up what it is doing," said Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently. He did not offer specific evidence to back that claim.The false biolab story spread quickly both in the U.S. and overseas, where Chinese state media joined in the effort to push the narrative."The Kremlin is intentionally spreading outright lies that the United States and Ukraine are conducting chemical and biological weapons activities," U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said earlier this month. "But for the audiences that are really stuck inside these bubbles of hyperpartisan media, conspiratorial media, scrutiny is not really a strong suit."When a narrative takes hold on Fox News and is embraced by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, Radnitz said, "then there's a symbiosis between Russian foreign policy objectives — pro-state narratives in Russia — and anti-government narratives in the U.S. that these far-right personalities are pushing mostly for profit and notoriety."Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian state media has regularly played clips from Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to validate the Russian government's statements and actions. In the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view," he said.When NPR asked Fox News for comment about Lavrov's remarks and the network's repeated airing of the biolab theory, a spokesperson pointed to other comments Carlson has made in recent weeks — including saying Russia's invasion "was wrong" and saying Putin is "to blame" for events in Ukraine.While most of Russia's efforts to control the narrative about Ukraine have failed, Holt, the disinformation researcher at the Atlantic Council, fears that the biolab conspiracy offers a worrying example of what success looks like."What it did do was it gave the Kremlin a taste of a propaganda win in a conflict where it had astonishingly few of them," Holt said.

As said here by https://www.npr.org/2022/03/25/1087910880/biological-weapons-far-right-russia-ukraine