Putin orders Russian Media to portray US as Evil, and 50% must be 'good'

Watchmen is still super relevant you guys!

Easily. I forget who it was, but someone who has been close to Putin says that he truly does not believe that free media exists. He's sure that the USA really has a state controlled media, and just covers it up well.

And you don't believe that...?

I mean, I don't. But it is controlled (perhaps more self controlled than anything, because it's run by a bunch of pussies who care more about getting their paychecks than telling the American people the truth). Just not necessarily by the government.

...but we'll still tip-toe round this fascist shit - both your country and mine - to get big business deals done.

Putin sends Russia backwards and the rest of the world looks the other way, while China gets the Olympics for fucks sake.

But lets all concentrate on Iran and North Korea - they're much more dangerous because we cant make any money off them.

Fuck realpolitik thinking.

Fuck it hard

Here's the thing though, a lot of people think of Iran & North Korea as threats.

But virtually everyone I know also thinks of Russia and China as a burgeoning threat on the horizon, and they all talk about it. The only people who don't are the politicians, and everybody sees that. They probably won't mention it until a couple hundred tanks roll in through Alaska.

I seem to recall China being seen as a threat pre-911. The day those planes flew into NY tho, that all changed immediately - and lets not forget Putin taking full advantage of the War on Terror as well.

...and I mean come on, Im shocked Putin didn't pull this kinda crap sooner -he's taken his time a lot more in his complete consolidation of totalitarian power of Mother Russia than I thought he would - I thought he'd just crackdown in one fell swoop, instead he's done it, while not exactly subtly, he's done it gradually enough that the rest of the world now doesn;t really want to see trhe full ramifications of his actions.

But you can take the boy outta the KGB but ypu can't take the KGB outta the boy.

As a citizen of a small country I would welcome a renewed antagonism between the US and Russia or China. Everyone seems to be much more measured in their actions if their enemy actually has a chance of beating them.

I really don't believe that we are heading for Cold War 2 though. There's more money to be made when everyone is playing nice.

Bingo. And Putin's completely right about US media - it serves its master. Not that Putin's a saint, but the US can't exactly throw stones when it comes to freedom of the press.

So I guess Yeltsin's death counts as "positive", now?

I can't believe the guy gets buried within 2 days of croaking, isn't the usual deal to fawn and parade over the glorious corpse for a while? Guess they *really* want that guy out of the way, along with the memories his "acomplishments".

Oh, gotta love Putin describing Yelstin in the following way:


Yeaaaahhhhhhhhhh, I think my Moscow-raised friend might have something to say about that....amongst others.

Hey- we need Bond villains.

Actually,sounds to me more like back to the good old days of The Czars.
The sad fact is the Russian People have never really known anything like democratic government except for about six months in 1917,and then look what happened.

I have no love for the Mass Media in the US,but the amount of stuff that is Anti Bush I see every day tells me that freedom of speech is alive and well in the US.

You must not read any of the major city papers or watch any of the main broadcast networks and popular cable networks. The internet has, fortunately, opened up a whole new world of access to information but if you stick to the main news founts everything, even the most heinous of administration offenses, gets the softball treatment.

You know, I recently met a guy who lives in Washington but was orignally from the Mid East, and he opened my eyes a bit to that idea, when he talked about how positive all the news outlets are about the Iraq war.

Now this is just stupid. Seriously. I'm the first one to bitch about the cowardly US media and its corporate masters, but have you even bothered to read about what's happening in Russia? Blaming America IS a useful trait for totalitarian oppressors. Pretending otherwise is just dishonest.

The industrial military complex as you say, has much more varied interests than in the height of the cold war. Everyone has their hands in so many pots now that they can't afford to turn away customers. No one is going to turn his back on close to 2 billion consumers. The media will pay lip service to what mean and cruel regimes China and Russia have, but otherwise it will be business as usual.

Huh? I can't find the part in my post where I pretended that blaming America isn't a useful trait for totalitarian oppressors. I'm happy to argue but I need to get up to speed on my offenses. Thanks.

Come on, yt, don't do the semantic dance. You agreed with Putin, suggesting that he was in a position to criticize, and that the US was just as bad. That's just absolutely wrong. There are problems with the current US media system, but it mostly boils down to the people being obsessed with superficial trivia, or more interested in shouting matches than attempts to get at the truth. You can complain about Fox News until your lungs are sore and I wouldn't disagree, but that's one channel disgorging favouritism. It's not comparable to Putin (or Chavez, or Castro, or whomever) literally putting the media under the control of the state and dictating what can and can't be reported. The US media is nowhere near that far gone. And Putin's only criticizing it to excuse his own crimes, not because he cares about the truth.

Yes, both true.

This is where I would argue with you. That's like saying penguins are obsessed with fish. You eat what is available to you in abundance. The US government, and the corporations it serves, have a vested interest in keeping Anna Nicole in the headlines, as opposed to Iraq. Feeding this frenzy conveniently keeps any more politically charged issues out of the spotlight and also, as Quint would say, keeps things on a paying basis with advertising. It's a win-win for the news outlets, not so much for the people who rely on them.

If this sounds like bullshit to you, there's nothing I can say or do to change your mind. All I ask is that you contrast what's on display in the US media with what the rest of the world sees in terms of news.

I disagree. What's the difference between state-censorship and this?

And:


Regardless of why Putin criticizes it, I still believe it's an important point, and the sooner people stop flocking like lemmings to the non-news, the sooner this country will wake up to the repulsive crimes against us perpetrated by corporate America and especially the current administration.

The argument that the media just provide what people want (crap, that is) is the oldest "get out of jail" card used by demagogues around the world.

The people are bombarded with non-stories, fluff shoved down their throats 24/7, pushing the real stories aside and resulting into folks who couldn't possibly know better becoming unable to understand that government corruption or ineptitude are a much bigger deal than a C-lister ODing or Britney getting a divorce and a haircut.

Not to mention that a media culture which thrives on scandal and gossip and the near-instant rotation of stories is not a nurturing environment for investigative journalism.

If you want to take a look at how low the media have fallen, take a look at Larry King. He was always an ignorant asshole but he used to be an ignorant asshole who interviewed presidents and statesmen. Now he's interviewing American Idol contestants. The poor slob who watched this sycophant back in the 80's and 90's actually had a chance to learn something about the world and current affairs. Now he's just sedated some more.

But news that's damaging to the administration and to large corporations still gets reported. That's what I meant by mentioning superficial trivia and shouting matches. They can cram a lot of superficial crap down our throats, yes. They can shuck and jive and obsfucate. But the government doesn't step in and control the content of what's reported. It just gets "buried"--which is why I can't absolve the common American media consumer as easily as you can. The facts about the Bush administration or corporate malfeasance are out there if you care to look. Meanwhile, the Anna Nicole Parade is really quite easily avoidable--I've managed to do so. If you get your news from Jay Leno and Entertainment Tonight, of course you're to blame, not the media. The system could be easily fixed if people would bother to educate themselves.

Obviously it's a little awkward to be put in the position of defending the excesses of the media, which I honestly don't mean to do, but to suggest that there's an equivalency between the screwed-up but still functional American media and the state control and mafia-like tactics of Russia and other totalitarian states is ridiculous. In Russia, Jon Stewart would have long since died of Polonium poisoning, Keith Olbermann would have mysteriously jumped out a window, and Michael Moore would have been found hanging by his genitals in Red Square.

Our opinions appear to differ in shades of gray. I don't think Soviet-style suppression is cool, but I do equate it with the corporate/governmental oversight of the 6 media companies controlling the news. That said, how much of the following stories did you read/see/hear about this year?

Top 25 Censored news stories of 2007
(these are just headlines, and granted not all of it is headline news, but a lot of it is serious enough to make one question how it could be so easily shitcanned. To understand the stories behind these headlines, follow the links at Project Censored)

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran

#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US

#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo

#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy

# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq

#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act

#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall

#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US

#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner

#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court

#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda

#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story

#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever

#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem

#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers

#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed

#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe

#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

Yt, if you seriously can't see the difference between "journalists not doing their jobs" and "people being murdered for speaking out against a power-hungry totalitarian leader", then no, there's not much point discussing this.

The fact that corporate control of the media is a bad thing does not make it AS BAD as Putin's squelching of freedom of speech.

Fine, but I'm not talking about journalists not doing their jobs. That's like blaming the torture at Abu Ghraib solely on the individual torturers and not on the Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney torture policy.

And yes, I do equate our censorship with Soviet-style censorship. Thousands of people have died in Iraq for lies the media supported because anything less was considered by the corporations to be "unpatriotic." Most people aren't even aware of what a meat grinder Iraq is because if they were to see the suffering that is a direct result of the Bush admin's greed/incompetence, they'd never stop throwing up.

Hundreds of species will die out because Dow Chemical and Exxon Mobil prefer that the media portray the earth's destruction as a pretend boogeyman. The most vulnerable people -- children -- die everyday because the world is kept ignorant of their suffering -- whether it's a result of US trade policies, fossil fuel exploitation, gun-running or toxic dumping.

How is that any less heinous than murdered/imprisoned journalists? The truth dies either way.

NY Times reporters, for example, have blood on their hands for reproducing the government propaganda leading to the invasion of Iraq. It was their job to investigate the validity of the claims made by Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Powell. They didn't bother to and instead sold the war to the public.

This appears to be a very interesting adjunct to our discussion on Soviet-style press suppression versus homegrown Bush administration-style suppression, coming in at #8 in Naomi Wolf's "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps" in the Guardian: