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Blocking Russia Today (RT) shouldn't be seen so much as an attempt to shield citizens from disinformation or prevent them from hearing the "counter-argument" for war in Ukraine. The removal of RT is less a media freedom issue than a symbolic one, argues Herman Wasserman.
"The Gulf War did not take place" was the title of a provocative essay by the famous French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in which he argued that global spectators following the war on their TV screens did not see the war itself, but a selective, propagandistic simulation of it – what he termed a simulacrum.
His point, of course, was not to deny that the war actually happened but that the only access the global publics could have to it was through what was selectively presented to them. In the post-modern cultural environment, audiences could follow a stylised, slickly produced representation of conflict, in real-time, from thousands of miles away, as if watching a war movie or playing a video game.
