The Guardian appears to run an online editorial policy that there should be a least one article daily painting Russia as a dark and unsavoury place full of chauvinist post-Soviet half-wits and controlled by sadistic mafia hordes. The type of place that is a threat to the civilized world which we might need to control via tighter sanctions, regime change, or all-out war.
If they don't have Shaun Walker poking fun at Russian cheese "Congealed Tipp-Ex to odour of gym - Russia's cheese fakers fail the taste test", then there is always a choice specimen from their bizzare New East Network section, which runs heavy on Russia attack pieces from Radio Free Europe (an unabashed US government propaganda outlet which makes RT seem balanced in comparison), Mikhail Khodorkovsky's vitriolically Russophobic Interpreter, the CIA front-show Window on Eurasia blog, George Soros' Russophobic Eurasianet, and the Russia-bashing Moscow Times and Kyiv Post. There is not a single outlet with views sympathetic to Russia in all of the 23 contributors listed. Not one.
That the Guardian runs, word for word, attack pieces against Russia paid for by Soros, Khodorkovsky, and the US government, without any disclaimer or counterpoint, makes a mockery of their credibility and will eventually destroy their brand. I suppose this is what they mean when they claim that their mission is to publish "high quality, independent journalism".
Comment: The following articles give background information on the corrupt activities of these two criminals who are funding some of this anti-Russian propaganda.
(The Guardian's "New East Network" is a story for the ages for aspiring investigative journalists. There is an enormous amount of dirt about who is funding these outlets, and how it came to be that the Guardian agreed to lend its venerable name to front for them. Anybody interested in writing this up is welcome to get in touch with us, we would love to print it. - RI Editors.)
Here is a recent example from the Moscow Times which tells the story of a man hit by rebel fire but omitting key details from the original article, like the victim's belief that the rebels were returning fire initiated by the Ukraine Army checkpoint just beside his home.
But this Sunday at 22.00 hrs CEST we got the pièce de résistance: #1 on that day's most-read articles list was Luke Harding's "Russian Bears use Graveyards as Giant Refrigerators" - a gruesome little piece about hungry bears eating corpses in Russia's Komi Republic.
The most interesting part for us propaganda spotters is that the article may well be 100% true, but it was not published like the rest of the top 10 in the list that day, nor in the days or weeks before, but in October 2010!
This may well be the result of a lonely soul searching for articles on grave-digging bears and tweeting their 10,000 followers.
Or it could be that the Guardian is scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to making Russia look worse than our trans-Atlantic madhouse with refugees flooding in from our pointless wars, economic uncertainty, and the run-up to the US elections.
There was a documentary on French TV programme ARTE, called Putin's Propaganda. How propagandic that program was.
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