PJ Media

It’s not difficult to understand what the Russian Kremlin saw in the Ketchum public relations firm.  In fact, the two can probably communicate without even speaking.

Just ask Armstrong Williams.

Back in 2004, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, Ketchum bribed Williams with a nearly a quarter million dollars to praise the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program on his syndicated TV show and to recruit other black journalists to do the same.  Needless to say, Williams wasn’t to mention the illegal money. When the facts came out, Ketchum promised never to do it again and won millions more in juicy government largesse.

You remember George Bush of course. He’s the fine fellow who invited infamous Chechnya war criminal Vladimir Shamanov to the White House for a photo op and awards ceremony. The one who looked in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, glimpsed his soul, and proclaimed him trustworthy.

That’s the kind of initiative Russian dictator Vladimir Putin likes to see, naturally, so he offered Ketchum a fat contract to sell Russian business to hapless Western investors. The result is a new website called “Modern Russia.”

Here’s a little example of the kind of helpful and reliable “reporting” a potential investor in Putin’s Russia will find on the Modern Russia (MR) website. In a story touting Russia’s most business-friendly city according to the Russian version of Forbes magazine, MR not only fails to tell readers that the World Bank has ranked Russia as a country number 126 out of 183 nations on this planet in terms of attractiveness to foreign investors, it fails to mention that neither Moscow nor St. Petersburg made the Forbes list, which included 30 cities. It therefore fails to tell them that the vast majority of actual business done in Russia is done in those two cities, leaving only meaningless crumbs for the rest. It fails to do so even though another story in Russian Forbes itself (Russian language link) and a commenter on the top-30 article make those very points.

In another characteristic bit of neo-Soviet pseudo-journalism, MR uses a German-language poll report commissioned by the Russian government itself to assert that Russians are full of confidence in Putin’s ability to modernize and improve the country and showering him with their support.