Arkady Babchenko: sting or stunt – the surreal fake murder of a Russian journalist
As the dust settles on the fake news of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko’s death, journalism lecturer Marek Bekerman considers the global impact on the news industry in this crossposting from The Conversation.
When Kiev’s police chief announced the assassination of the well-known Russian journalist, Arkady Babchenko, on Ukrainian state television, the terrible news was taken at face value and fingers were immediately pointed at the Kremlin.
The former soldier in the Chechen wars – who had become a celebrated war correspondent and who was a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin – had fled Russia in 2017 after receiving death threats. The announcement, on May 29, set obituary writers all over the world working on the life story of yet another Russian journalist killed in the past two decades.
Less than 24 hours later, Babchenko appeared alive and well at a press conference flanked by the head of Ukraine’s security service, Vasily Hrytsak, and the prosecutor-general, Yuriy Lutsenko. They explained to stunned audiences the world over that staging the journalist’s death was the only way of preventing his imminent murder, instigated and funded by Russia’s security forces, and of capturing the middlemen as well as the putative assassin.
