The Dumbed-Down
New York Times
A New York
Times columnist writes Americans are so
“dumbed-down” that they don’t know that Russia
“invaded” Ukraine two years ago, but that “invasion”
was mostly in the minds of Times editors and other
propagandists.
By Robert Parry
August 30,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Consortium
News
"
-
In
a column mocking the political ignorance of the
“dumbed-down” American people and lamenting the
death of “objective fact,” New York Times columnist
Timothy Egan shows why so many Americans have lost
faith in the supposedly just-the-facts-ma’am
mainstream media.
Egan states
as flat fact, “If more than
16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on
a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when
Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it —
two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.”
But it is
not a “fact” that Russia “invaded” Ukraine – and
it’s especially not the case if you also don’t state
as flat fact that the United States has invaded
Syria, Libya and many other countries where the U.S.
government has launched bombing raids or dispatched
“special forces.” Yet, the Times doesn’t describe
those military operations as “invasions.”
Nor does
the newspaper of record condemn the U.S. government
for violating international law, although in every
instance in which U.S. forces cross into another
country’s sovereign territory without permission
from that government or the United Nations Security
Council, that is technically an act of illegal
aggression.
In other
words, the Times applies a conscious double standard
when reporting on the actions of the United States
or one of its allies (note how Turkey’s recent
invasion of Syria was just an “intervention”) as
compared to how the Times deals with actions by U.S.
adversaries, such as Russia.
Biased on Ukraine
The Times’
reporting on Ukraine has been particularly dishonest
and hypocritical. The Times ignores the substantial
evidence that the U.S. government encouraged and
supported a violent coup that overthrew elected
President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014,
including a pre-coup intercepted phone call between
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and
U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt discussing
who should lead the new government and how to
“midwife this thing.”
The Times also
played down the key role of neo-Nazis and extreme
nationalists in killing police before the coup,
seizing government building during the coup, and
then spearheading the slaughter of ethnic Russian
Ukrainians after the coup. If you wanted to detect
the role of these SS-wannabes from the Times’
coverage, you’d have to scour the last few
paragraphs of a few stories that dealt with other
aspects of the Ukraine crisis.
While leaving
out the context, the Times has repeatedly claimed
that Russia “invaded” Crimea, although curiously
without showing any photographs of an amphibious
landing on Crimea’s coast or Russian tanks crashing
across Ukraine’s border en route to Crimea or troops
parachuting from the sky to seize strategic Crimean
targets.
The reason
such evidence of an “invasion” was lacking is that
Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea as
part of a basing agreement for the port of
Sevastopol. So, it was a very curious “invasion”
indeed, since the Russian troops were on scene
before the “invasion” and their involvement after
the coup was peaceful in protecting the Crimean
population from the depredations of the new regime’s
neo-Nazis. The presence of a small number of Russian
troops also allowed the Crimeans to vote on whether
to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, which they
did with a 96 percent majority.
In the
eastern provinces, which represented Yanukovych’s
political base and where many Ukrainians opposed the
coup, you can fault, if you wish, the Russian
decision to provide some military equipment and
possibly some special forces so ethnic Russian and
other anti-coup Ukrainians could defend themselves
from the assaults by the neo-Nazi Azov brigade and
from the tanks and artillery of the coup-controlled
Ukrainian army.
But an
honest newspaper and honest columnists would insist
on including this context. They also would resist
pejorative phrases such as “invasion” and
“aggression” – unless, of course, they applied the
same terminology objectively to actions by the U.S.
government and its “allies.”
That sort
of nuance and balance is not what you get from The
New York Times and its “group thinking” writers,
people like Timothy Egan. When it comes to reporting
on Russia, it’s Cold War-style propaganda, day in
and day out.
And this
has not been a one-off problem. The unrelenting bias
of the Times and, indeed, the rest of the mainstream
U.S. news media on the Ukraine crisis represents a
lack of professionalism that was also apparent in
the pro-war coverage of the Iraq crisis in 2002-03
and other catastrophic U.S. foreign policy
decisions.
A growing
public recognition of that mainstream bias explains
why so much of the American population has tuned out
supposedly “objective” news (because it is anything
but objective).
Indeed,
those Americans who are more sophisticated about
Russia and Ukraine than Timothy Egan know that
they’re not getting the straight story from the
Times and other MSM outlets. Those not-dumbed-down
Americans can spot U.S. government propaganda when
they see it.
Robert
Parry is an American investigative journalist best
known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra
affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek,
including breaking the Psychological Operations in
Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the
Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA and Contras cocaine
trafficking in the US scandal in 1985. He was
awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting
in 1984 and the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic
Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2015.
He has been the editor of Consortiumnews since 1995 |