Fabulists: Putin Win Exposes ‘Reset’ Media
But the MSM didn’t focus on that. Not one tough interview of Navalny was published by any Western news outlet. The MSM ignored the fact that the street demonstrations were inherently apolitical, unserious, disorganized, and rare (none at all in the entire month of January). Instead, it focused exclusively on the fact that the demonstrations were the biggest since Putin took power and occurred during cold weather, apparently showing the impressive bravery of Navalny’s followers.
When Putin put an equally large crowed on the streets in February on the same day as Navalny’s effort, the MSM ignored it, or attacked it with charges that attendees had been bribed. The pro-Putin demonstrators got no credit for being out on the street in the same freezing temperatures, even though their alleged bribes at most amounted to pennies.
The nadir: The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley — a reporter pilloried across the Internet for ludicrous errors — was sent to Moscow to watch TV and to decide for the Gray Lady’s readers how free it was. She reported that the opposition’s Echo of Moscow radio was being left alone — as it was being raided. She told readers the press was free to report accurately on the opposition, even as European election observers pronounced — elsewhere in the Times’ own pages — that the opposite was true.
Tom Parfitt, a Russia correspondent for the Telegraph, tweeted that the U.S. ambassador to Russia had tweeted in Russian that vote fraud was tainting the legitimacy of Putin’s election. In fact, Ambassador Michael McFaul had done no such thing — the tweet came from a fraudulent account that did not belong to him.
In September of last year as Putin announced he’d return to the Kremlin, Andrew Kuchins of Foreign Policy reported that all was well and Putin would “play nice” with Obama. This month — without mentioning his prior analysis and just before the actual elections were to prove him hideously wrong — Kuchins wrote that the Obama “reset” was “over” and there was “turbulence ahead.”
The MSM should have listened to some actual Russians.
Daniil Kotsyubinsky, a Russian historian and journalist, has written that Navalny may very well be the best thing that ever happened to Vladimir Putin, and the fact that Navalny has not been arrested or assaulted makes one wonder if Kotsyubinsky might not have a point. Navalny has not spoken out against Russian support for the genocidal anti-American dictatorships in Syria, Iran, and Venezuela.
Similarly, Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky argues that Putin is quite content with Echo of Moscow radio, one of the leading so-called “opposition” voices left in the Russian mass media. It serves as a non-threatening pressure release valve for the small, ragtag contingent of opposition forces, and allows Putin to conveniently keep tabs on them. Putin is a lifelong KGB spy, which is essentially the same as being a gangster, and he has obviously taken to heart Don Corleone’s advice about where to keep one’s enemies.
The most accurate expression of what is happening in Russia came from opposition leader Yevgenia Chirikova, who was interviewed by the brilliant Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute. Chirikova told Aron:
It seems to me that our problem is not Putin but the people. For [we should be] more demanding with respect to our own lives, with respect to what we see out of our windows, and resist every time when government functionaries offend us.
This is the truth, which the MSM either didn’t know or viewed as incompatible with their agenda. In MSM reporting, the Russians were not cowards, but lionhearted. They were not hiding or collaborating with Putin as they did with Stalin, they were marching in the streets like the citizens of Syria or Egypt, ready to give their lives for liberty. Putin was not a dominating figure supported by the masses, he was a doddering imbecile about to be forced from power like the despots of the Middle East.
And Barack Obama was a knight in shining armor.
All of it false.
This isn’t the first time the world has been misled to get its hopes up about Russia. Lenin was supposed to make things radically better; so was Yeltsin. But in both cases, the end result was nothing but disappointment.
The MSM asks its audience to simply ignore history, because this time it’s for real. Just trust them.
And the torrent of attacks on the U.S. coming out of Russia? Don’t notice that man behind the curtain, the MSM said. Don’t notice Russia’ s massive military buildup, pay no attention to its brutal crackdown on American values.
The Internet, and Barack Obama, are going to make the world safe for democracy. Trust us.
In some way now Russia is even more dangerous than the old Soviet Union. At least in the Soviet Union the leader had to answer to the Politburo. Putin is more like a king and doesn’t have to answer to anybody. He can crush any opposition at will and destroy any political leaders that get in his way. Smells more like a monarchy than anything else. Only this monarchy is loaded with nuclear weapons.
At least in the Soviet Union the leader had to answer to the Politburo.
That may have been true in the later years of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev for example, but it was not nearly so true under Lenin and Stalin.
His fellow leaders of the Bolsheviks often disagreed with Lenin, sometimes very strongly, but they always obeyed him even against their best judgement. For example, the coup by which Lenin seized power was ordered by Lenin for a particular day. To a man, the rest of the senior leadership opposed the move but Lenin insisted and they gave in to him. The coup went ahead on the day scheduled and was successful.
In 1922, when Lenin had the stroke that incapacitated him and forced his retirement from active leadership of the Soviet Union, Stalin was only one of several men roughly equal in rank. But over the next several years, Stalin carefully formed alliances with first one faction and then another to outflank and eliminate the other potential leaders. None of his rivals survived their encounters with Stalin although Trotsky survived longer than most. (Trotsky was initially exiled but then Stalin realized he was still dangerous to him even outside the country and started a hunt that ended in Trotsky’s murder in Mexico in 1940). By 1929, Stalin was effectively undisputed within the Politburo. Even still, he harbored many old grudges against the Old Bolsheviks over past disputes so he gradually cornered all of them and eliminated the last ones in the purges of the 30s, even though they had all become docile bootlickers. Even Lenin’s widow, who had long been on the Politburo and survived Lenin by some years, was threatened when she dared to oppose something Stalin wanted: he told her that she could be replaced as Lenin’s widow by an actress if she gave him any more trouble! Perhaps his most serious rival in the 30s, Sergei Kirov, had the bad luck to receive fewer disapproving votes than Stalin did at one meeting. (The Party sometimes allowed its top people to cast secret ballots indicating approval or disapproval of individual Politburo members. On one occasion, that voting showed almost 200 top leaders (a lot but still a minority of those voting) disapproving of Stalin and only 3 disapproving of Kirov. Stalin smelled a rival and had Kirov assasinated. Stalin’s role in the killing was VERY carefully covered up and then Stalin had the audacity to use the assasination as an excuse to launch the purges that eventually killed virtually all of the Old Bolsheviks and much of the general population.
In short, from 1929 until his death in 1953, the Politburo had no signficant power to curb Stalin.
I don’t know how Putin manages to make everyone in Russia dance his tune but it certainly looks as if he can do whatever he wants, just as Stalin did in his day.
Putin is loved in Russia. America is quietly jealous that they get a leader like Putin, but we’re stuck with fools like Obama and Bush. Our vice presidents are even more terrifying.
Could it be that Putin is a colossal idiot and the Russians love him because they even bigger idiots?
I have seen no evidence that Putin brings anything good into this world. He seems to be on the wrong side of almost every issue from Iran to Syria to Georgia. And what’s the purpose of his constant animosity to the US? It makes NO sense. Every time I read interviews with common Russians they say mindless things like “we need a strong leader”.
The reason why Russians prefer a strong leader is because of their experiences during the Yeltsin era. We tend to think of Stalin as the worst leader of the erstwhile USSR but the nightmare for most Russians is Yeltsin. Stalin’s depredations are faint echoes of the past but Yeltsin’s gangster mafia state is etched into the memories of a lot of people. As Spengler of PJM put it, the fear of most Germans is strong leadership while that of Russians is the absence of leadership. They prefer a strong leader who is authoritarian to the bumbling liberals of the 90s.
There is also the fact that a fair amount of Russians, because of their longing for national sovereignty, dislike the universality of liberal interventionism. In the west, revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine are thought of as people attaining their freedoms whereas in Russia, they are considered as the encirclement policies of liberal democracies. George Soros is resented because of his funding of these types of revolutions and he is often called an American agent (and Zionist agent) even though Soros thinks of himself as a “world citizen”. When Putin criticizes NGOs and opposition protests as “American funded”, he is expressing his actual thoughts.
Good article by PJM highlighting the incompetence of NYT. The truth is that anti-americanism and anti-semitism have a flourishing currency in Russia. We can recognize this reality or keep deluding ourselves that Russia is full of liberal democrats( like the “Arab Spring”).
Conservatives are trying to debate ideas in the public square with overt media adversaries as our mouthpieces.
Old Media complicity with numerous leftist/ progressive causes, programs and policies seems to be one of the biggest stories of this young century. In an ironic twist there are no commercial broadcast news outlets to report this.
They have acted as public relations for the liberal world view — relentlessly parroting party lines and commiting outrageous sins of omission on stories they choose to report on – or not (Climategate, voter fraud, Fast and Furious, etc).
I know there has long been a leftward tilt within media reportage but it seems much more activist, coordinated and one-sided these days…
How far could any of the left wing causes have advanced in the last 10-12 years without Old Media ? If the answer is – not far — then that is as big a story as any I’ve been reading about.
Leftist media`s permanent mistake: they are searching for the leftists-brothers in Arab world and Russia-the places of far right fundamentalists and nationalists.Russian recent candidates are all right-wingers excluding the loser-Mironov.