During the Soviet era there were quite a number of useful idiots in the West, who - for various ideological/pecuniary/opportunistic reasons - were willing to praise the corrupted communist rulers. Fortunately there not many western observers and commentators who perform the same type of services for the present corrupt and criminal master(s) in the Kremlin.
That´s why it is all the more surprising that the renowned Forbes Magazine has chose a person like Mark Adomanis - a de facto Public Relations officer for Putin and a contributor to Russia´s propaganda outlet Russia Today - as its "Russia hand".
Here are a couple of recent samples:
However, while recognizing that it exists and can be quite ugly, I’ve long thought that it is a mistake to focus only on the irascible and anti-Western side of Putin. Doing so is a mistake because if you focus only on the anti-Western bits you miss a pragmatic and realistic streak that, on some issues, makes Putin eminently comfortable with close cooperation with Western countries. Much more comfortable than many Russians at the high levels of the foreign policy and defense bureaucracies who really do dislike and distrust the West as a matter of principle. Indeed I would argue that Putin’s realist streak is a lot more important in understanding his foreign policy, and his conception of where Russia fits in the world, than his often ham-handed attacks on Western interventionism, arrogance, and hypocrisy. “Realist” doesn’t mean “good” or “warm” or “cuddly,” but it does mean that Putin is absolutely not someone who is comprehensively “anti-Western” in outlook.Read the entire article here
Something that I’ve always found more than a little bit annoying about Western coverage of Putin is the accusation, more common among right-wingers but hardly limited to their ranks, that he is “re-creating the Soviet Union” or somehow trying to pull communism off of history’s ash-heap where it, deservedly, lies. Putin’s Soviet predilections are usually confirmed either through vague notions that he still retains loyalty to the KGB or through repetition of his well-known quote that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Read the entire article here
Americans need to get used to a world and a media environment in which we do not always shape the narratives or frame the coverage. That is, other non-Western countries and cultures, who do not necessarily share a belief in the United States’ inherent goodness or in the “seriousness” of its major media outlets, are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. So if, like Weigel, you think RT is distasteful and off-putting just wait: over the coming years the Western, and especially American, media’s near monopoly on setting the agenda is going to evaporate and voices from China, India, Brazil, and other swiftly developing countries are going to be heard.
And that, I think, is what galls people so much about RT, they don’t play by the normal rules. As Josh Kucera, a journalist who has covered Russia and the former Soviet space, tweeted: “RT covers the US like US media covers Russia — emphasizing decline, interviewing marginal dissidents.” It turns out that it’s not very fun to be the target of over-hyped and sensationalized news coverage that obsessively details your country’s every real or perceived failure and which interviews an unrepresentative sampling of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the current state of things. There’s a deeper lesson in there somewhere, and it’s not simply “RT bad! Mainstream media good!”
Read the entire article here
No comments:
Post a Comment