Screengrab for RT's breathless trailer for Assange's Kremlin-sponsored talk-show.
No doubt as he is eating Sunday brunch, Robert Mackey, editor of The Lede blog and a journalist for The New York Times, tells his friends or partner that he "gets it from all sides". There's the loony left and the hard-core "progressives" and then there's that "neo-con" Catherine A. Fitzpatrick! Awful! And he, so faithfully reporting, well, what Jay Rosen calls "the view from nowhere" (with a sneer).
Well, I'm not a "neo-con" and I think the proper liberal critique and framing of news judgement about the propagandistic Kremlin TV was not made here -- and in part it's due to too much ducking and cringing against hard-left critics. It creates a language of defensiveness and thin-skinned ire that should be discarded.
Look, we know from the Times already that Assange stinks and the Kremlin stinks in the way it treats real journalists. So signal that, already. (BTW, I can't emphasize enough what amazing and important reporting Clifford Levy, Ellen Barry and others have done in this special series on the persecution and killing of Russian journalists, lawyers and human rights activists. It really grieves me that Clifford Levy wasn't the one reporting all these recent demonstrations.)
I utterly reject Rosen's "view from nowhere" thesis -- his claim that journalists in liberal papers like the Times are concocting artificial perspectives as if they have no opinions or politics, when in fact they do. But you can see how one can be tempted to indulge in this theory given the way Mackey himself talks.
I've defended him from the lefties in the past, for example, when Ethan Zuckerman of the Harvard Berkman Center took him down in 2009 for writing about an Iranian blogger supposedly working for the secret police. It was ok for everybody in the in-crowd around Global Voices and alternative social media to know or suspect this; it was another thing for the outs at the MSM to be saying it. I cried foul on that.
And Mackey does a good job of fending off the loons who show up to heckle him over his rightful characterization of the Kremlin-run propaganda station RT.
So why am I complaining and earning his thin-skinned petulant wrath along with the other commenters?
I'll admit that using the term "nearly gushing" may have not been the right fit for what he was doing with this piece on RT, especially given the hard time he got from the hard-left commenters (but one can't see them when one is commenting oneself until they're all moderated -- I wish the Times would get over its allergy to real-time comments).
However, here's how I could come up with that phrase:
o the very fact that the story of Assange on Kremlin TV was one that "had" to be a "big news story" and get so much space and oxygen even in the first place. In fact, it didn't need the horror-movie build-up;
o once deciding to run it, inevitably the Times becomes part of the long arm of the Kremlin's active measure with its agents of influence;
o when the Christian Science Monitor first ran with this same news story, despite its own tilt to the "progressive," it let us know in the first line that this was a Kremlin station and made its own judgement clear;
o meanwhile, Mackey, while he told the story factually, still invoked concerns, because there's no frame; there is no setting that lets us know a judgement about this Kremlin operation as not legitimate in the sense of an independent TV station engaged in legitimate journalism and commentary -- as distinct from propagandizing for the Russian government (that came later, in the comments). The reference to the station run by the Russian Information Agency is not enough to accomplish that:
-- the headline let us know that it was Kremlin TV, but the story doesn't -- instead, there's a kind of drumroll and merely a pasting from the Assange TV website: "“Today, we’re on a quest for revolutionary ideas that can change the world tomorrow.”
-- we're at paragraph three, and we still don't know there is something wrong with this picture -- more quotations leave the sense of "buzz" and as I put -- breathlessness about Assange's mission:
He also describes the WikiLeaks project as a kind of corrective to what he sees as the ills of traditional news organizations. Publishing “the full source material,” he says, “helps keep journalism honest.”
-- the text is interrupted with clips from RT itself which many will click on and never return to the story, telling the story obviously in one-sided fashion
-- in paragraph six, we finally get some frame:
Russia Today’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, said her network was “proud to premiere Julian Assange’s new project” because the network “is rallying a global audience of open-minded people who question what they see in mainstream media.” But the fact that the broadcaster was set up by the Russian Information Agency, a state-owned news media organization dedicated to improving the image of the Russian government, does make it seem like a strange partner for a man who usually celebrates popular protest movements.
Now, isn't that enough? Well, it's awfully gingerly. Dedicated to "improving the image"? Couldn't the word *propaganda* be used here? It never is. And it would be more than fine to use!
Uh, "strange partner"? Well, how about a link to a story from Bill Keller or *anything* that would cue us in on the troubled relationship the Times itself had with Assange, where it finally dropped him? That's because the Times made *a news judgement* that Assange was *a source* who was very troublesome. And that's all he is: a source. He's not a journalist; his role as a talk-show host for the Kremlin is *propaganda*. Not some thrilling new pioneering form of media that will "set us all straight" because we are all hopelessly, um, brainwashed by American network TV.
See what I mean? No, you probably don't. But there's more.
What really torqued me, which was the air time for Simonyan, the toxic queen of agitprop.
Just how toxic she is I'm freshly aware from having watched the hour long talk show interview of her by Minaev.
Oh, the two of them, such posturing smooth operators, talking smugly of their "projects" -- as if TV agitprop for Putin is some sort of fine art, and they are exquisite auteurs. Ridiculous.
And Simonyan pulverizing anyone who dares to question what she does, and mouthing what is by now a very set piece from her propaganda primer to the effect that people who think the Kremlin is responsible for killing their own people in the apartment explosion are "like" the truthers in America. Except they aren't "alike". And here she does it again in an interview with Moscow Times cited by Mackey:
She added that giving airtime to “truthers” was morally comparable to Western media coverage of the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and two other cities that killed 293 people. “What about Western media reports saying that Vladimir Putin was behind the bombings?” she said.
Spoiler alert: I personally don't make a lot of the apartment explosions. That is, there is a lot to ask about them and people should demand an investigation, but I think there are just so many other things that we have solidly documented that we can raise as human rights and moral concerns that I don't think we have to lead with that, as a certain group of conservatives and activists do.
But what you can do in presenting this material is to indicate that Simonyan's claim that these were "morally comparable" isn't accurate *in factual terms*.
In the comments, replying to me, Mackey huffily lets us know he "can't" argue with Simonyan because his blog, while a blog, isn't bloggy, but supposed to be "newsy" and "mixes" local and international stories and encourages people to add news they have themselves.
But this isn't news; this is a press release about a Kremlin active measure. That means what it needs is analysis, not cutting and pasting.
Sure, there may not be space to go into Simonyan's claim, but in a half line, you can say that unlike numerous "truther" conspiracists in the US who are free to rant on their blogs or in newspaper comments, those Russian journalists and parliamentarians who have tried to research the apartment explosions have ended up dead or silenced.
Instead, Simonyan in fact *does* moralize, even though he swears up and down his column isn't about "blogging" as in "opinion expression":
Since the Russian channel does so regularly feature American and British pundits from the far left of the political spectrum, who praise repressive government in the Middle East and Latin America as champions of the resistance to “western cultural imperialism,” the network might have found it easy to accommodate Mr. Assange, whose work has been focused almost entirely on exposing the secrets of the American government.
This is what he imagines isn't opinion, but it isn't enough of a news judgement. That is, it has enough of an opionated feel to piss off the lefties because it has no names and addresses, but not enough relevance -- i.e. one specific mention of Chavez or Hamas might have done it. The problem isn't that Assange only focuses on America -- most people who show up for these arguments, disturbingly, think America is the worst thing in the world. The problem is that he does this with the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" routine that should have died out in the Cold War -- but never did.
(And in fact, by the next day, on reflection, Mackey started invoking the obvious issue of murdered journalists like Politkovskaya, to accommodate the bad-faith moral equivalency practiced by Simonyan.)
Finally, in paragraph seven, Mackey puts what I think (and the journalists at the CSM thought) should have gone in the nut graph at the start:
Given that the Kremlin-financed channel finds fault with Vladimir Putin’s government about as often as Fox News produces exposés on the Republican Party, it will be interesting to see if the guests include any Russian, Syrian or Iranian dissidents.
Oops, but this overdue cue-card to let us know a *news judgement* about the Kremlin's TV caper comes wrapped in a morality sandwich, so that we, um, sage folk reading the New York Times can "get it" that "our own TV is bad".
That's awful. Not because Fox isn't biased. But because there isn't an equivalence between Fox News and the Kremlin. Fox News is privately owned. You may dislike its content, but you have to distinguish between a freely-associated corporate TV station with its own viewers and advertisers and the Kremlin, paying for its own agitprop. Furthermore, the news shows of Fox are not the tendentious manipulations that RT is -- it's the *talk* shows on Fox that most people object to (i.e. O'Reilly, Beck, who isn't on there anymore, etc.) But on RT, it's not just the tendentious talk show hosts (i.e. Peter Lavelle, a long-time apologist for Moscow) but the news selection, too.
But you have to take your criticism of the Kremlin where you can get it, these days, and it's as good as it gets with the Times liberals. They will feel they have to genuflect and beat their chests that "we're bad, too" if they say anything bad about Russia -- because they know they're going to get trounced in the comments.
It's too bad that when the column is marked "updated" the material that is actually added isn't indicated, but I'm fairly certain that what got updated from April 13 to April 14 is the next graph:
When asked by The Lede if WikiLeaks had any qualms about working with a network owned by the government of Russia — a country where 52 journalists, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been killed in the past two decades for questioning the powerful — the organization’s Twitter feed, which is apparently under the control of Mr. Assange, replied only by attacking The New York Times.
Too bad this didn't go into the original piece -- again as a frame that mitigates against moral equivalence.
This is an awful lot of exegesis to give to a simple column that is already yesterday's newspaper and thrown out, so to speak, but as in fact it's constantly updated and Mackey keeps arguing in the comments with everybody, I have to say more:
o this tone he takes in "setting people straight" REALLY has to go -- it makes me want to complain to Arthur Brisbane, the ombudsman. Over and over, with people with different perspectives of left or liberal or center, he crabs that they haven't read him correctly, or they haven't clicked on a link that he thinks would make it all clear, or they haven't studied enough background on the subject. It's unacceptable to talk to readers like that. Stop it. There's no need to be a snotty ass, as you set people straight; you can just *make your argument* without pretending that somebody's opinion is a result of their "misreading" or "misunderstanding". It really does mean literally removing that kind of hectoring throat-clearing and self-justification. Instead of "You clearly didn't click on the link and discover that I made a whole study over here" or "you haven't studied this topic sufficiently to have an opinion," he could say simply "I linked to this other piece to make the following point" or "it's important to point out what else the Times did on this" etc.
o Mackey does this kind of hectoring twice to me -- but he does it to everybody else, too. And that's ridiculous. We can read and we can click. We don't need remedial tutorials. He hasn't framed the story sufficiently, in my view, and I've made the case here (and there) as to why. The others tried to nail him on their belief in the Time's evil, pernicious past as "Bush lapdogs" -- but he does a good job of setting them straight in their own terms, even while he leaves a troubling door open.
And that is his insistence that the Times isn't a monolith, and there is a variety of voices, and that we can't pin him for somebody else's pro-Bush reporting.
Oh, but wait. Papers do have a "line"; this one does. And reporters can have different *opinions*. But you told us this isn't an opinion column, Robert. And you imply that whether someone is pro-Bush or anti-Bush is going to affect their *reporting* and that isn't supposed to happen at the Times.
As I said, I don't buy Jay Rosen's arrogant experience-free assessment of journalism (he has never worked in a news room and his managed student-run publication is pathetic). What I've always respected about the Times is the way the journalists will layer up 5 or 8 different perspectives from any given story. There's this eyewitness or that neighbour or that State Department official or this protestor -- there is always a variety of voices with different perspectives and it layers up to enable you, the reader, to judge. Take any Times story and you can see the formula at work and it's a good one.
But you have to layer it up -- and I don't feel this column did enough of the layers -- Mackey gets all the leniency for his work afforded by being a blog, yet he insists he isn't an opinion column and just a kind of "real-time news-gathering pin board" or something. So his single-voice piece, which also unfortunately gives a lot of air time to the Kremlin's PR flacks and Simonyan's dreadful moral equivalency, leaves us with just too many points scored by their team because he fears the ankle-biters coming from the left.
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