Mocking the Media

There’s a truck outside the Desmarais Building at the University of Ottawa, where I work, which has the words ‘Main Stream Media’ painted on its side, with a big red cross through them. The truck’s part of the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ that has been occupying much of our downtown for about three weeks now. I can’t say that I support it, and like most people I know I think it’s high time that the truckers drove off back to wherever it is they came from. But the truck I mentioned raises an important question – why the distrust of the ‘mainstream media’? If you want to know the answer, you have only to look at this week’s coverage of all things Russo-Ukrainian.

Take, for instance, this picture I took yesterday of the website of The Sun newspaper – not exactly highbrow, I know, but popular and thus influential. First off is a decidedly precise prediction of when Russia would invade Ukraine – 3am Ukrainian time this Wednesday – a prediction that has proven to be false. The fact that it was supposedly based off “HIGHLY placed sources” in US intelligence makes you wonder about their competence – either US intelligence is useless, or the Sun is lying, or perhaps both.

The fake prediction – echoed by similar incorrect prognoses by many other media outlets, highbrow as well as low – was not the only egregious article in this particular edition of the Sun. Along with claims that Russia “will invade Baltic States in Hitler-style grab,” and blood curdling stories about Ukraine’s mighty military, The Sun also gave us a piece entitled “Bad Vlad” by British MP Tom Tugendhat, who apparently has a neural link into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s brain, as he professes an intimate knowledge of what the Russian leader thinks. And what Putin thinks is not good, but pure evil.

In short, this isn’t news, it’s tub-thumping, hatred-inducing propaganda of the worst sort.

And it’s not just The Sun. It’s all around us. Tom Tugendhat isn’t the only one claiming to know the intimate secrets of Putin’s brain, and keen to tell us all how awful they are. Fellow British Conservative, and one time party leader, William Hague has a similar piece in the more up-market newspaper The Times, while here in Canada, we have our own equivalents for The National Post and the CBC.

In today’s National Post, Joseph Brean tells us with enormous confidence, “One thing is certain. He [Putin] wants Ukraine back.” (How does Brean know? Does he have a tap into Tugendhat’s neural link?) Brean then continues:

“He [Putin] has a tendency toward mystical views of history, and is known to be influenced by the 19th poet Vladimir Solovyov’s vision of Russia as a third way between East and West, and by the modern philosopher Aleksandr Dugin’s theory that Russia has a divine mission to rally the Eurasian “land” civilizations, especially America and Britain, which expand their empires by exploiting other nations.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop right there, Joseph old boy, before you go any further wrong. I guess you can call Solovyov a poet, as he did write poems, but he’s more famous as a philosopher. But anyway, he wasn’t a Eurasianist viewing Russia as being “between” East and West, but as far I read him, saw Russia as uniting the Catholic/Protestant West and Orthodox East in the “all-unity” (vseedinstvo). In any case, Putin as a disciple of Solovyov? Unlikely. He’s never cited him, or even shown any knowledge of him. As for Dugin as “Putin’s brain” –  phooey, phooey, phooey. Surely nobody’s still peddling that nonsense? Apparently, they are. But nonsense it is, as even Dugin has admitted (“I have no influence,” he told me when I met him).

In short, this article is total BS. So let’s look at the article on today’s CBC website. Is that any better? A little maybe, but alas not much.

Once again, the piece seeks to tell us “What Putin Wants” (If I had a dollar for every article claiming to answer that, I’d be a rich man.) And the answer is much what the National Post told us – Putin wants Ukraine. To prove the point, author Murray Brewster cites former Canadian diplomat Colin Robertson who tells us authoritatively:

“And I think, before he [Putin] leaves, he’s determined to restore as much of that [the USSR] as he can. He’s in his late 60s now and I think he’s determined to do it before he leaves – bring Ukraine back into Russia by force, if necessary, preferably by bluff.”

Has Putin ever said that that’s his intention? No. But let’s not let such little details fool us. Mr Robertson also has access to the neural link and knows better. So too, apparently, does Brewster’s next rent-a-quote, University of New Haven Assistant Professor Matthew Schmidt, who like Brean believes Putin to be a paid up member of the Eurasianist party. According to Schmidt:

“Putin is a subscriber to an early 20th century philosophical and political movement called Eurasianism – a creed that rejects Russia’s integration with Europe. Eurasianism died out during communist rule but rebounded in the early 21st century – and Putin has written about it.”

No, he hasn’t. If you’re in doubt, check the Kremlin website, which contains just about everything Putin has said or written in his 20 or so years as president. What will you find? Nada, that’s what. Besides which, Putin has never rejected Russia’s integration with Europe, but calls for a pan-European security architecture – i.e. a Europe (from Lisbon to Vladivostok, as they like to say) that includes Russia. And, just to be picky about facts, you can hardly say that “Eurasianism died out during communist rule,” when it didn’t even exist till the publication of Exodus to the East in Prague in 1921 and arose not in the Soviet Union, but in exile!!

Once again, I call BS. These people can’t even get very basic facts right.

And so it goes on. This is just a tiny sample of what’s been in the British and Canadian press over the past two days. Just two days. Multiple it many times over and you get a sense of the torrent of nonsense spewing out of what our Ottawa trucker calls ‘the mainstream media.’ And then you wonder why he doesn’t like it.

In another article today, this time in The Guardian, Andrew Roth notes that Russia journalists have been relentlessly mocking their Western counterparts for all the false stories about the “Russian invasion of Ukraine.” My response is pretty simple. If you don’t like it, do your job a bit better. Then nobody will be able to mock you. But if you don’t, expect the mockery to continue. It’s well deserved.