More Moral Equivalency from Vadim Nikitin

Russia Today essentially channels Pozner-Donahue-Chomsky of 20 years ago...

Dear Vadim,

Thank you for your patronizing and evasive reply to my solid critique of your piece on Foreign Policy blogs!

I find your post --  under a picture of Stalin next to Fox News (!) intellectually indefensible, but also morally unaccountable -- and of course for those reasons, highly troubling. I believe my sort of "impassioned" critique of your moral equivalency and pious leftist posturing is a much-needed one, and I hope I will have more company. You're way too young to be an old socialist Nation reader, a red-diaper baby (like Fred Weird and Pozner) or a denizen of Alcove One and Alcove Two at CUNY. But you sound like one. And in fact what we do need is really a FAR more pluralized discourse on Russia -- but neither you and your leftie coterie or Russia Today provide this for us -- in fact, I feel as if I'm trapped in an episode of Time Tunnel with the Pozner-Donahue show endlessly replaying "the smartest man in America" (!) Noam Chomsky.

Your education is incomplete and your thinking is shallow if you believe there is some kind of equivalency between Fox News and Russia Today. Let's get straight on this first, shall we?

Fox News is a privately owned free media company in the United States. Whatever its allegiances to the Bush Administration, it is not a government-owned station. It's a commercial operation. Even if you didn't look at its funding sources to make that very important distinction, you could note that even though Bush fell, and we have Obama now, the station persists and doesn't show any sign of failing, commercially or politically. If it were a toy of some kind of business circle around Bush -- or however someone in Russia might see it cynically, using mirror-imaging -- they'd be wrong.

Meanwhile, Russia Today is a state-funded project of the Kremlin. It is bought and paid for by the Kremlin. It isn't just "likeminded"; it *is* the mind of the Kremlin. It's a project to appeal to Westerners, and especially liberals or the gullible.

Making an equivalence between these two very different entities -- a capitalist-owned media station independent of the government and critical of the current government -- and a state-owned socialist media station that is a propaganda arm of the Russian state -- is intellectually indefensible. It's also not *necessary* if all you want to do is make sure that nobody forgets Russia isn't the only country with a bad government.

No, they are not the same thing -- not only in terms of ownership but in terms of their social and political significance in their societies. I shouldn't have to explain this. Your belief that they are "alike" is a fashionable leftist posture. You imagine that you can "explain" the excesses of Fox News by the fact that it is "the establishment" just like the Russia Today project is "the establishment". But it isn't, once you zoom out with a little critical perspective and see what their respective roles are -- you yourself explained to us that Russia Today is "na export" but Fox Today is meant for domestic consumption.

And...P.S. there isn't quite the liberal media fallacy you imagine because there really is liberal media and it really is more influencial and the net effect of all this definitely more influential liberal media really is Obama. Try to grasp that. Please call me when Russia Today breaks free and backs, um, Medvedev over Putin (or whatever the pseudo-democratic struggle we're supposed to pretend is happening in the Kremlin centralized democracy set-up).

Now that we've gotten *that* straight, let's look at what you actually *did* politically with this article. Your article was in fact a response to my widely noticed post that was mentioned in the Times. You weren't setting out to write about "media coverage of the bomb blast East and West"; you were directly polemicizing with me. And you came up with this strategy of "Fox News is like Russia Today" to try to deflect from the fact that Russia Today wasn't really questioning the Kremlin line, and in fact pretending to be like citizens' media and  posting citizen's youtubes in real time -- and if they went off the reservation and appeared propagandistic, why, "everybody does it".

But...they don't. Fox News is critical of the government in power. Russia Today is not. Fox News may have been supportive of Bush, but their reportage of the average news story at the top of the hour was far more independent than anything a Kremlin outlet could produce. Trust me, I know something about this because for more than a year, I worked as a translator at RTV so I'm very, very familiar with how Russian state propaganda works, and the difference between *that* and NBC or CBC, where I have also worked.

Let me step aside for a minute and just talk about Fox news as a fearsome scarecrow for the left. They are always ranting about the evil Fox News. If one actually *watches* it, one doesn't see the nonsense they claim. Talk shows have to be seen separate than news. Talk shows are by their nature tendentious. But given all the other figures on the liberal and leftist side in American TV, Fox News was an innovative corrective -- and one that got a lot of viewers as a result. Most normal people don't find Frank Rich's incitement of hatred of the right and lukewarm leftist pablum in the New York Times a persuasive media diet, even if they are liberals and certainly not if they are conservatives. Most normal people don't find  Michael Moore persuasive as a TV pundit diet -- that's often what the self-indulgent and "tragically-misunderstood left" often doesn't realize about itself: *it's not persuasive or compelling and people do not believe it because it doesn't admit certain basic truths, and does not concede certain points*. 

(I'll never forget this incredibly concocted Russian propaganda story that tried to set up Fox News as supposedly covering the Georgian-Russia war in a biased and even cruel fashion. I will never forget my actual *shock* at hearing a *translator* (!) try to convert a newscaster's normal interruptive cough into a cynically-voiced cough to signify falsity. It was *really* outrageous. In fact, what Fox had done was simply produced for the viewing audience a woman and her daughter who had fled the violence in Southern Ossetia, and who had an anti-Georgian and pro-Russian story to tell -- understandably. She was given her space to speak. But this being American television, she was cut off by the anchor merely for the station break (the way that Fox News conserves its independence, unlike RT, is by being commercially funded). This, too, was outrageously and tendentiously seen as a deliberately cruel cut-off of a desperate victim telling her story. In fact, despite some obvious questions raised by this woman's story, her view *did* get across and Fox News did its job. But you'd never know it from this insane way the Russian propagandists twisted it and turned it around. I really began to be actively scared for the Russian public's ability to really understand what was going on in this war if *that* was what their TV did.)

All you've done is fashionable picked up Fox News bashing like a lot of fashionable young leftists cutting their political teeth on the Internet -- and it's not interesting. The "horror" of Fox News is something you can seldom *really* prove -- especially as you can never prove that whatever horror you *do* find is the only voice heard in America. As I've pointed out about Obama, his net-nannying chilling slam on free speech and fretting about "the terror" Glen Beck -- instead of debating him on the *merits* -- only makes him look *more* like a barracks socialist.

Now let's look line by line at what you actually did in your first polemics with me -- which was basically sidestep all your actual praise of RT, all your misleading statements about RT,  all your cunning placement of other people's adulatory quotes about RT without *any* comment from yourself -- and then merely tendentiously pull out a few quotes where it "looks like" you are actually critical of RT when in fact the entire thrust of your article -- and your judgement in moral equivocating in the very title -- is intellectually unsound.

You claim that you "agree with my piece" but in fact you most certainly do not; *real* agreement with me would have involved conceding that your moral-equivocating headline was off-base, and that maybe, in your zeal to artifically inject leftwing critiques into the discourse (on whose behalf, I can't understand) you had overstated the, um, lovely role of RT -- which for my money, consists largely of trying to make unappetizing Kremlin views more appealing to gullible leftists, to distract and disorganize people actually asking the hard questions about bad Russian government behaviour; to artificially amplify leftist Western voices that are beside the point -- and in general, to behave as if you were channelling Vladimir Pozner circa 1990. That in this modern day and age Russia should be regressing to those old sorts of discredited tactics is troubling; that young Russians from Murmansk educated at Harvard also have some need to support an operation with those methods is disturbing. Why?

For example, you somehow accused me of ‘prettifying’ RT and ‘mislead[ing] the public, and challenged me to “explain what about RT’s coverage departed from the official line”.

But I don’t remember having ever asserted anything of the sort. In fact, I took care to explain that even when RT “quotes and interviews researchers from the liberal-Atlanticist Carnegie Center”, it does this only “when the soundbites are uncontroversial/suit the state narrative”.

Oh, in fact you do -- because you're leaving out all the other things you said to praise RT, put in tendentious quotes that help praise RT; and create a general golf-clapping for RT in a neat trick where you can leave your fingerprints off -- see my line-by-line discussion below.

You've come this far recognizing that picking up the Carnegie Center is going the viewpoint spectrum from..A to B...away from Kremlin orthodoxy; can you now also reach the epiphany that the Nation coterie is also selected precisely because it suits the state narrative -- and frankly, not that much selection is needed half the time.

In addition, I stated very clearly that not only is RT “funded by the government and supervised by Russian state media service RIA Novosty” but also that it is “widely considered to be “a Kremlin project to improve Russia’s image around the world”, accused of airing obscure conspiracy theorists to promote an anti-Western agenda”.

So what? In the *rest* of the piece as you can see below you *undo* this pro-forma, automatic "disclaimer" with a subtle propagandistic twist that leaves the reader to conclude "Hey, this Russia Today isn't half bad, they're like our shrill Fox News, and Catherine Fitzpatrick is out to lunch.*

Moreover, all the articles to which I linked were unanimously critical of the channel, so I struggle to see your interpretation of my piece as some sort of RT hagiography.

Again, the hagiography all occurs in THE REST of the piece you don't admit in your response (see below) and your links to news media actually covering this story better are not discussions about the problem of RT -- the the false moral equivalency with Fox News with *you* introduced into this debate and which really has no place here. Russia Today -- and the entire state-controlled Russian media! -- cannot be let off the hook merely because Fox News might be too too extreme for your refined tastes.

As to whether RT has a provocative take, your own (justifiably outraged) comment:
“Any discussion about human rights activists murdered in the Caucasus like Natalya Estemirova? Any discussion about Kadyrov's reign of terror? (Lavelle even had the temerity to say "Say what you will about Kadyrov, but it's quiet down there lately"  -- demonstrated that it certainly succeeded in provoking you.

Gosh. Well, I don't consider a TV that deliberately and blandly sides with Kadyrov as really being television/journalism in the normal sense; I view it as being state propaganda, and far from being seen as an "interesting talk show" where everyone is "stimulated to think" as if we're watching the Charlie Rose Show, I find it horrifying. You don't seem to get the difference between "provoking" as in "provocateur" and "provoking" as in "thoughtful".

Remember, RT’s target audience is not Russians, but foreigners; in contrast to the Russian language media which is almost wholly pro-Kremlin, such a viewpoint among the contemporary English language press, which tend to be critical of the Russian state, fits the very definition of an alternative and provocative take.

Say, that was some fancy footwork there, Vadim. I saw what you did there. You first went and told me that this Kremlin-sponsored propaganda show is aimed at foreigners. Check. You then said that the contemporary English-language press tends to be too critical of the Russian state. Er, uncheck. It doesn't. There is an awful lot of news coverage that is just -- news coverage. Most of the New York Times coverage is *not* biased, and if critical, deservedly so. The coverage of the Moscow metro bombing contained the almost lurid "black widow" story faster than the Russian media; the grim funeral processions were covered with sympathy and solidarity; the awfulness of the event was conveyed with full horror; the think pieces wondering if this was going to shake Putin's rule had *Russian* voices, not NYT editorial voices.

MSNBC or even Fox News is superficial much of the time in briefly covering Russia. But If some guest on a right-wing talk show host's program is ranting about Russia, that would actually be rare. I don't agree with your characterization of the American media diet on Russia, nor even the European. You, like other Russians I've encountered, seem to have this belief that the Western press, particularly the U.S., took Georgia's side in the Russian-Georgian war. Yet that wasn't the case at all. It didn't. The presence of some Bush operatives in Georgia; McCain's lieutenant giving advice to Saakashvili; some Bush tendency to support Georgia -- these were all cynically and hastily taken to mean "that the media took the side of Georgia" -- and yet it didn't. Read it. It was more persuasively critical of Georgia than your country's shrill stuff because it was really covering facts on the ground. Many people came away from daily perusal of the Times or watching TV thinking "hot-headed Georgians jumped the gun, what could those patient Russians, do?" etc.

True, RT said nothing about Estemirova. But how many mainstream Anglophone outlets have questioned the propriety of nuclear superpowers America and Israel lecturing Iran over the nuclear issue?

*Blinks*. Do you get out much, Vadim?  There are plenty of English language outlets where you can see a *news story on Iran* and comments freely expressing the view that America and Israel should be attacked for their hypocrisy on lecturing Iran. And there are plenty of less mainstream, but terribly prestigious outlets making the same point as well as alternative press. You seem to believe "attacking somebody's hypocrisy" should be a "news story" that a "mainstream outlet" "should" produce. Yet you are not grasping that it is *a polemics with policy*, and a commentary on straight news reporting that has AMPLE space in our media, in part because hard-left figures like Chomsky (popular on campuses but still considered an extremist even by liberals) make sure the point shows up.

Let me take a detour again and ask, say, what's *your* plan for getting *your government* to make good on its promises to pressure Iran to comply with *the UN Security Council's resolutions* and the international community's call on Iran to refrain from its nuclear ambitions? hello?! Could it be that the Russian delegation at the UN is out in front of RT on this, pressuring Iran where they will not?  I always new my old interlocutor Sergei Viktorovich was a closet liberal!

And say, what's *your* reason for feeling more safe when nuclear weapons in *your* part of the world are in the hands of a ranting theocratic extremist who jails and tortures and kills his citizens in mass numbers, rather in the hands of democratic states like the U.S. and Israel who do *not* jail, torture and kill their citizens in large numbers and suppress the media -- even if you count occupied territories they control, which contrast sharply with events in the North Caucasus?

RT's merged picture of Ahmadinejad and Obama asking who is the greater nuclear threat is a disgrace. It's also an intellectual abomination, especially when you consider their outrageous massacre of people in Iran who questioned a stolen election, and the hope of reform brought by Obama. It truly is unacceptable; a *state* that employs such low and scurrilous tactics (and Russia Today is a *state* outlet) is really becoming alarmingly unaccountable. Please be frank, Vadim, and tell me that you personally, or Peter Lavelle, *really* can't sleep at night because Obama might "bomb-bomb-Iran"? Can you cite some *real* evidence that this is a likelihood?!

You're young -- perhaps we can tolerate your vehement, wrongheaded moral equivalency again here between two wildly different subjects (the murder of a human rights activist, and your deepseated belief that there is something, er, "out of place" about lecturing Iran about its unlawful nuclear threats -- which, by the way, the Kremlin does now outside of its foreign-language propaganda sphere even though it didn't used to.) These are not only two different genres -- human rights activism and international politics regarding what's effective or hypocritical in dealing with Iran -- they are placed in proximity due to a false premise.

Why would silence about Estemirova EVER be cancelled out by the misjudgement (in your worldview) of some commentator lecturing Iran?!

Wherever you stand on this issue, it is an example of RT provoking debate and challenging established Western thinking.

Yeah. Provoking like a provocateur -- and speaking of provocateurs, where were you "going" with that poster of Stalin writing Romantic poetry (!) -- Stalin, mass murderer of millions -- propagandized by RT, contrasted with Fox News, which is guilty of being romantic about...Bush, who has launched wars that largely resulted in *terrorists killing civilians in the countries the U.S. invaded* and not in U.S. massacres, and terrorists backed by that very state of Iran in places. Difference? I'll say.

You write that “this isn't a discussion about Fox News. It's a discussion about RT”. But actually, my article was specifically a discussion of both RT and Fox News, as the headline, “Russia Today: The Kremlin’s Fox News?” unambiguously indicated.

Again, Vadim. Why are you unable to talk about how your media in Russia covered or did not cover the tragic metro blast without reference to Fox News? What does Fox News *really* have to do with the problem of media suppression and manipulation in Russia? Fox doesn't suppress and manipulate ALL the news or even some of the news quite in the way you imagine in anything like the way RT and RTV and such do; I've just supplied you a dozen links to all the ways in which you can HAVE the conversation about "hypocrisy" to your little heart's contents right on the million-eyeballed New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post (arguably even more influential than these latter two) and even Haaretz (!) What *is* your problem?!

I also find somewhat puzzling your likening a dispassionate comparison between two networks to a ‘moral equivalence game’, particularly when I made no moral judgements about either one.

Oh, but you have -- by just outrageously making such a comparison in the first place, distracting from your task, as a media analyst and member of the intelligentsia, to evaluate how Russia media covered or did not cover the news (and my point, which was that social media, as fabulous as it is, didn't help cover it either because of the way in which the airwaves are so controlled by the state). So you lurch off and say, "well, guys, they didn't do such a great job but look at Fox News, they are as bad". Oh? There's a major news story in America, say, on the right-wing militias, that is somehow buried and suppressed by Fox or some other channel and people are reduced to reading samizdat?

That aside, the central argument of my piece - which I apologise for perhaps not having made very clear - is that Russia Today and Fox News share a common psychological base, or ‘origin myth’: a rather paranoid and besieged view of the world, a desire to correct the record and align it more closely to their respective ideologies.

No. Actually, they don't. That is, maybe Russia Today has this psychology of being "besieged" but I think that really isn't a fair description of the international stance of Russia Today. Moscow was rather cocky and exuberant when flush with oil sales; it became more subdued and defensive when oil sales fell due to the global downturn; but this is a power that is feeling rather strong and confident, as witnessed by its continued obstruction on progress in Iran for its own regional interests, apparently (hard to understand what else it would be, unless a Soviet hangover preferring totalitarian states as partners). It's newly-aggressive around Afghanistan (the CSTO now will get involved in "combatting narcotics trafficking" which gives it enormous scope to roam through the Central Asia region and Afghan border areas and...do whatever it is they *do*). It has nuclear weapons, warships and tanks that it displays on television regularly and often in obscene ways; it has utterly cowed Europe in various settings like the OSCE or Council of Europe; it stands by murderers in the North Caucasus in the most chilling manner; it blandly neglects to investigate the killings of journalists and human rights activists; it keeps hundreds of thousands of men at arms under abusive conditions. It increasingly promotes the state religion of Orthodox in ways that suppress non-Russian cultures and ideas. This...is a weak and vacilating state? I don't think so.

Meanwhile, Fox News, under Bush, wasn't besieged, but the establishment, once. Under Obama, it isn't defensive and cornered, but bullish with the rise of the Tea Party movement and only forced to get rid of Dobbs due to public outcry over his anti-immigrant sentiments, or forced to hold little tete-a-tete with White House operatives about toning down the rhetoric not out of "fear" but out of a desire to be professional in a changed environment.

You seem to be speaking from some very lofty perch where I frankly find the air too oxygen-depleted, that looks with grand bemusement, as if on old aging superpowers lurching around in their, um, death throes. I'm not seeing it. More and more both countries are "normal" but still very powerful. More and more they matter less than China in some ways -- and yet they still matter. The real narrative of the world is not about Soviet-American mirror-imaging in the Cold War, when even then, these powers were not equivalent. Why is this still *your* narrative at your age?

 then quote a CJR article in which Terry McDermott describes “a loopy self-absorption to this that is peculiar to Fox and that derives from its origin narrative as the network for the unrepresented, for the outsiders. There is a strain of resentment, of put-upon-ness that pervades almost everything Fox puts on the air”.

"Loopy self-absortion" is what I would call people who put up Stalin posters next to a conservative American TV station, and make mash-ups out of Bam and the I-ranter.

So, sorry, that's just leftist claptrap. Leftists love to portray Fox as some kind of dysfunctional -- and then they can try to discredit anyone who watches it all in one swoop and not have to *really* debate their sometimes loony beliefs, because they can just bask in the complacence of having demonized entire swathes of the population (say, do you think that's why they never succeed in this country? They love to portray it as more outrageous than it is. But hey, if *is* doing that (and I'd love to see some clips proving your point -- I seldom watch it myself), then, you know? The conservatives are pretty much unrepresented now. Er, not like Obama and Gov 2.0 represents them!

And, ya wanna see loopy? Again -- Loopy is comparing the President of the United States working to reverse nuclear arms and engaging in diplomacy with Iran, by contrast with his counterpart, who is busy murdering students and threatening to remove Israel from the map.

This is followed by my conclusion that “in its obsession with Western ‘misrepresentation’ of a Russia struggling to be heard above the lies and calumny of its foes, McDermott could easily have been describing Russia Today”.

Note that this last sentence is hardly a rousing endorsement of RT.

That's in the rest of the article you established as a frame.

I agree with you that Russia Today does not offer an alternative take from the Kremlin narrative.
But what both RT and Fox do do is offer an alternative take from what each perceives to be received wisdom; in Fox’s case the enemy is the ‘liberal media’ and for RT it is the ‘Western media’.
This is my observation. What it is not is a comment on the validity of that take or the veracity of its raison d’etre.

This is more defensible, but I'm not buying this, either. The liberal media really is a factor; and I say this as a liberal who voted for Obama. It really does dominate the intellectual life of America on the coasts and even in many cities, especially now. All the late-night talk show hosts are liberal to left -- not conservative. Rush Limbaugh is not at the 11:00 pm prime time talk show spot of mainstream American TV. He's on radio, which is a different (and still important) medium serving a different (and not to be marginalized) constituency.

In the case of the RT "enemy of the Western media," again, you and they -- if they really believe this -- have to be kidding. That's not what is going on, Vadim. Get a clue.

But if I were to comment, I would say that while both are fairly dubious, there is far less basis for believing in a ‘liberal media bias’ than there is for believing that Western media have generally not treated Russia with the same sort of forced objectivity reserved for other subjects.

See, this is where you -- and they, if they believe this truly and not as a cynical posture -- are dead wrong. Russia has more objectivity than it knows what to do with. Please read the Times, the Post, see NBC and CBS, see Huffington, see NPR. Please find something that *isn't true* about Russia. Please give me a sample of this *biased* press. Please find for me something poisoning American minds and hearts against Russia. Show me something that isn't a hard fact on the ground of Russia's bad behaviour at home and abroad that isn't poison all on its own, without any evil Western media.

And while a number of very reputable media critics, scholars and theorists (McChesney, Bagdikian, Chomsky and Herman, to name just as few) have convincingly debunked the liberal media fallacy, several media studies have found a predisposition of mainstream Anglophone media towards an anti-Russian slant (see also my analysis of the western media coverage during the Russia-Georgia war:
http://russia.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2008/08/13/the-cnn-effect-a-tale-of-two-wars/)

Sorry, dear, I won't be climbing on that freight train to nowhere. Chomsky? You *are* kidding, right? He hasn't convincingly debunked any such thing; he is part of the extreme left that has a following on campuses and foreigners but isn't part of the liberal blogosphere discourse much of the time or the liberal media -- which is, indeed liberal. If you mean that credible liberal media hasn't adopted some wacky theory of his, like the notion that the U.S. deliberately starved Afghans and withheld wheat deliveries when it invaded in 2001, based on his false and tendentious reading of news sources and ignorance of facts as the situation evolved, well -- good! I think your take on the Russian-Georgian war isn't going to be at all persuasive, given your existing prism of slanted reading of "Western media" (whatever that is) but in any event, beyond the scope of this already long blog.

To sum up: is there room among the Western media for a more considered and nuanced Russia narrative, one that could sometimes happen to align with the Kremlin’s interests?

Umm...no? That is, it doesn't need room made for it -- it already has a well-funded and well-lit corner that requires no extra remedial help. It isn't the job of independent national or "Western media" to portray the Kremlin's interests anyway, and feed its insatiable need for flattering and biased media. It isn't the job of media to "allign itself" occasionally with a state pointing nuclear weapons at it, now, is it.

"The narrative" is actually pretty damn nuanced, Vadim. There is a HUGE variety of voices on Russia. These "alternative voices" that you so yearn for are on the biased Johnson's list daily served up to thousands of decision-makers and scholars and activists. The Kremlin's interests don't need "help"; they need much more critical engagement -- as you and other neo-perestroika-liberals (for want of a better term) do -- in spades. The paralysis of moral equivalence is stunning; it's dangerous when we think that what we count on critical and highly-educated thinkers to do in international affairs is to criticize their own government first (we don't have a problem doing that here) and take a rather seasoned and and weather eye to the propaganda of other countries' government -- not justify their own government's propaganda and demand a "rightful space" for it in the other country's critical discourse.

Do we need more interviews with people like Vanden Heuvel, Fred Weir, Mark Ames, Stephen Cohen and Boris Kagarlitsky in the English-language press? Emphatically so.

Um...I don't think so?. That is, these are all great people. They are in my social circles. I read them regularly and have for -- gosh, Vadim, 25 years now! Perhaps before you were born! Vanden Heuvel and her husband Steve Cohen and Boris, whom Katrina covers in The Nation sometimes and likely sees in Moscow  -- well, they're all the same line (although correcting myself, he's more of a Counterpunch author). Ditto Fred Weir. These people found that, er, "more considered and nuanced Russia narrative, one that could sometimes happen to align with the Kremlin’s interests" back in the Soviet era. They always had something positive to say about the Soviet Union at a time when a lot of us critical of Reagan, too, *reaaaly* found it a stretch.

Today, they are important voices on the left but there are hundreds more of them that either simply don't care about Russia (you know, they find it isn't that important for them to care about Russia, hard though that may be to swallow), or don't have that "considered nuanced" need to apologize for anything Russia does, because it's just not necessary -- as it was in the old days -- to genuflect in that fashion before going round the stations of the cross to criticize America:

I don't find those voices needing amplication by Kremlin-sponsored TV; if they routinely appear there to lend luster to Kremlin-sponsored TV (and I don't see that they do) then I find that troubling. They don't need to, in order to criticize America first, the favourite past-time of the left, and they don't need to in order to keep their Russian visas valid.

Now, to the REST of your article which you very cleverly and tendentiously left out of this round of the debate which in fact set up not only your narrative of inappropriate moral equivalency, but raises serious questions about your status as a credible media analyst. 

Yet one news outlet not only aired a special news bulletin on the bombings, but also filed many live dispatches from the blast sites and a hospital. As far afield as London and Washington, its square green logo could be seen on the footage hosted by CNN and the Guardian.

Sounds awful noble and dramatic, Vadim, but you've flipped the script here. I did an article on *social media* and why it didn't/couldn't function a tragic event of this nature -- at least not as much as social media does elsewhere even in Iran in providing alternative civic narratives. You're dropping the actual topic then, and lurching off to admiring "the bold green logo" on the CNN and Guardian. But...that's not a good thing. A key reason I challenged the New York Times is that they put up "citizens' media" which in fact came from or was amplified by Russia Today. The "citizens' youtube" was made by a citizen, so to speak. And the citizens' youtube didn't help us answer -- let alone ask -- any questions. Live dispatches from the blast site? I was seeing studio talks with very sparse stand-ups. Stand-ups where no EMS officials were queried or challenged, where no figures of authority were chased down for hard news.

Instead, we see a very, very long take holding tight on a bomb victim -- well past the point that even prurient tabloid TV would leave because it's really intrusive to keep filming a man with rubble and glass in his hair shaking from trauma. A camera lingers on a woman getting a neurological test from a finger-waving doctor -- again, way too long, given that even for tabloid TV it intrudes on the privacy of the medical space and also doesn't provide *news*. Yes, victims should be covered. But..where's the interview with the police? Where's the effort to get the train driver to talk? How about even a hand in your camera's lense as you go to the FSB and ask them what they think about a bomb under their doorstep?

It is widely considered to be “a Kremlin project to improve Russia’s image around the world” and accused of airing obscure conspiracy theorists to promote an anti-Western agenda.

I think that would be an accurate description -- and your effort to prettify it by seeming to look at it loftily from that oxygen-less cloud I discussed earlier doesn't count as condemnation of what it is.

Yet its outspoken young boss Margarita Simonyan remains unapologetic:

And so, by the way, do you, by quoting her without any commentary (remember, you're in a blog here, not a wire service).

“We offer an alternative to the mainstream view,” she told The Guardian. “I don’t believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position. The BBC says it openly promotes British values.”

Whoah there, little doggies. The BBC promoting "British values" (undefined) is "like" the Kremlin's propaganda tool? The *BBC*...? We're *quite* a long way from Fox News now, Vadim, and you know it. Please. The alternative isn't to the *Kremlin*. And that chimera of "the biased Western mainstream media"!

Let's get this story straight here: it's not a problem if the Kremlin has a TV station. It's common outside the U.S. for governments to have their own TV stations with the uninterrupted state line. We all get that. It can be done effectively, for what it is. But this idea that the Kremlin view belongs as some kind of rightful and intellectually-valid proposition within the intellectuals' discourse East and West? Why? That is, it's one thing to *cover* government positions; but you are saying something different -- that the official view of the Kremlin gets to "correct Western bias" by dressing itself up as an independent pundit among pundits. It's not. That media isn't the biased creature you think; meanwhile RT remains discredited -- little distinguished from the top hits of Vladimir Posner in the Soviet era.

At the same time, ’she gets quite emotional when asked whether national television is an example of a rollback of media freedom.

“Yes, but only if we exclude the Internet, newspapers, magazines, radio, regional and private television,” she says. “How can national television eclipse thousands of other media outlets?’
That station was Russia Today, recently rebranded RT, one of whose anchors, Yulia Shapovalova, was herself an eyewitness.

We all appreciate your little service in helping to "reach" audiences with her point of view that is oh-so-beleaguered. But, excuse me...Is she on tablets?!  The TINY media outlets like Ekho Moskvy or polit.ru or somebody's Live Journal are candles in the wind compared to the Russian national media blanketing every household. As I noted, this is a country with 30 percent access to the Internet; of that 30 percent, a very big chuck is pro-government and aggressively so. Thousands? And...regional private television has...taken on the Kremlin's version of metro29? Do send me the Youtube link. Can't wait!

One other way in which RT sometimes fulfills its remit to offer an alternative view of Russia is its interviews with people such as Katrina Vanden Heuvel, whose radical views are not well represented in the Western mainstream media’s coverage of Russia.

Sigh. Again, Katrina has all the coverage she needs not only on her own widely read and influential magazine (Alexa traffic rank 129,000 in the U.S.) and in the Huffington Post, but national TV shows. I think you have to realize, from your perspective, that valued figures giving the "considered...nuanced Russian government point of view" are not going to be seen as valid here -- that's why if it really wants to be subtle and effective, Russia Today can't, well, try too hard.

But I have to say that Katrina strikes me as really not a) so "considered" and uncritical as you might believe her to be -- unlike RT she speaks robustly of the courage of Estemirova and b) is not so preoccupied with Russia, either, despite her long-time interest because she has other fish to fry -- here she is this week on that, er, cramped, marginalized samizdat chronicle called The Washington Post pushing Obama to do more. Not every important discussion takes place in the magnetizing field of Russian-American relations.

Katrina is a figure who "fits" into the desirable panel of voices organized by the Kremlin on Russian and world affairs. Can you find me someone *like Katrina* who says the same sorts of things to Putin about tepid reforms in Russia?

It’s definitely not Pravda, but it could easily be an official Russian version of Fox News.
Fox also has clear political agenda, and features some guests and anchors (Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham) who espouse extreme views (eg. encouraging the Tea Party protests) and spout bizarre, conspiracy theory-laden rants.

I've discussed Fox above, and I think here, you'd be hard pressed to describe Glenn Beck as extreme, or the Tea Party as extreme, when extreme is this and talk show hosts are nothing remotely like those loons.

I think you need to get out the 64-colour crayon box to describe these "considered" and "nuanced" views, Vadim, because you're colouring in black and white.

That is why the demise of the Exile was such a tragedy.

"Commentary is excessive," as the Russian saying has it. You would think, after everything you've said, that the Exile's "demise" was caused by the failure of American liberals to support "considered...nuanced" journalism at home and abroad, the way they probably don't send in enough subscription checks to The Nation or sign up for thse cruises with Katrina and Victor Navasky (sorry, guys! I'm tapped out). But I thought the Exile "demised" because Kremlin thugs closed them down. Did I miss a memo here? Matt Taibi seems to have landed on his feet and now takes on less violent targets like The Catholic Church. Is there a guy like that at RT?

However, as I have emphatically stated in the past, a state-run pro-Kremlin channel is hardly the best way to fill that niche and reverse these negative narratives because the truth should be strong enough to stand up on its own.

You would think. Can it do that when the "slender reeds" such as yourself (to use Boris Kagarlitsky's term) will not stop apologizing for and even gracing the pages of the propagandistic and odious RT and stop promoting it as some "legitimate part of the discourse" when it cannot discus Estemirova -- and at least go on the pages of The Nation where you can?

Comments

[Bill O'Reilly]

wow this is pretty dumb, learn to read lady

or just watch fox news, whatever