a news report on Seismic activity produced by a suspected North Korean nuclear test , at a railway station in Seoul , South Korea , September 9 , 2016 . Kim Ju - sung / Yonhap via REUTERS A South Korean soldier watches a TV broadcasting a news report on Seismic activity produced by a suspected North Korean nuclear test , at a railway station in Seoul , South Korea , September 9 , 2016 .
Widely seen as a master of political spin , Mr Surkov specialised in manipulating information in a way which often left his interlocutors unsure as to where the facts ended and the fiction began . This also appears to be an approach used by Dmitry Kiselyov , the powerful head of the state - run Russia Today media network , and a man often referred to as " the Kremlin 's chief propagandist " . Tasked with broadcastingcontact.mediastatement.broadcastthe Kremlin 's point of view , both to Russians and the rest of the world , Mr Kiselyov told the BBC earlier this year that " the age of neutral journalism " had passed . Blurred reality Image copyright AFP Image caption Anton Vaino : The bureaucrat 's grandfather was a communist boss in Soviet Estonia