Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
People see their own nation, and foreign nations, through the filter of the press that\u2019s available to them; so, if that filter is systematically distorting (distorting in ways that most of the others similarly do), then democracy cannot function, public opinion can be manipulated and warped; and wars might even start that shouldn\u2019t \u2013 something Americans have tragically been experiencing lots of, during recent decades, such as when we invaded Iraq in 2003 (just to cite the most famous of many examples).<\/span><\/p>\n A typical Reuters \u2018news\u2019 report will be examined here, in order to determine how high the journalistic standards of the Reuters \u2018news\u2019 organization actually are. Reuters is an internationally respected \u2018news\u2019 organization, as reliable as any major \u2018news\u2019 organization in the U.S. and Europe \u2013 thus, it\u2019s a good source to provide a case-example.<\/span><\/p>\n The particular report, dated Thursday, April 16th, is titled\u00a0“Russia blames U.S. for security crises and turmoil in Ukraine.”<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Its first sentence is a simple and true statement of fact:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Top Russian officials accused the United States on Thursday\u00a0of seeking political and military dominance and sought to put blame on\u00a0the West for international\u00a0security crises, including the conflict in\u00a0east Ukraine.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The second sentence is anything but factual: it is instead contemptuous of the Russian speakers and of what they said, yet offering no evidence that what they said was false, nor is it offering evidence in support of the report\u2019s own contemptuous attitude toward them:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Evoking Cold War-style\u00a0rhetoric, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said a drive by the\u00a0United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West was a\u00a0threat to\u00a0Moscow and had forced it to react.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n This sentence implicitly accuses Russia of \u201cEvoking Cold War-style rhetoric,\u201d with supposedly no reason for Russia to do so. The secondary implication here is that Russia and not the U.S. instigated the current restoration of Cold War between the U.S. and Russia. It also implicitly asserts that there was and is no real “drive by the\u00a0United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West,\u201d and no real \u201cthreat to Moscow\u201d that really \u201chad forced it to react\u201d against America\u2019s takeover of Ukraine as a client-state hostile towards Russia next door.<\/span><\/p>\n This second sentence is, unfortunately, a string of lies, as will now be documented:<\/span><\/p>\n Here<\/a><\/span>\u00a0is proof that Victoria Nuland of the U.S. State Department told the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on 4 February 2014 whom to get to be appointed to rule Ukraine once the then-sitting democratically elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, will be\u00a0overthrown, which occurred 18 days later<\/span><\/a>, on 22 February 2014. In other words: 18 days before the overthrow, she actually chose Yanukovych\u2019s replacement. <\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, the founder of the \u201cprivate CIA\u201d firm Stratfor has called this overthrow of Yanukovych\u00a0\u201cthe most blatant coup in history.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0All knowledgeable and honest people acknowledge that this overthrow was a U.S. coup that installed the current pro-U.S. and rabidly anti-Russian client-state-government in Ukraine. No one denies that Ukraine borders Russia, and that to Russia it would be an extremely dangerous place for the U.S.\/NATO to place nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow ten minutes away. No one denies that when the Soviet Union\u2019s dictator Nikita Khrushchev tried to do something similar to this in the opposite direction (i.e., against the United States), in 1962, by placing missiles in Cuba, that was then validly taken by U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be an existential threat to the United States, and cause for nuclear war unless reversed by the Soviet leader. Consequently, this sentence by Reuters is, essentially, a vicious lie, a historical distortion, against Russia, covering up for a U.S. government that really is taking aggressive actions against Russia (the overthrow of their next-door-neighbor and subsequent arming of it and economic sanctions against Russia), to which Russia is defensively responding \u2013 as it must do.<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, no one denies that Obama\u2019s agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, has\u00a0even acknowledged (7:43 on this video) that \u201cwe have invested over five billion dollars\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to prepare this coup to yank Ukraine into the U.S. orbit. Furthermore, when, right after Yanukovych\u2019s overthrow, the EU sent its own investigator to Kiev to find out whether Yanukovych\u2019s government had initiated the violence that had caused his downfall, they found, to their shock, that it was instead\u00a0\u201csomeone from the new coalition [that had already replaced Yanukovych]\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who actually did it; i.e., Washington \u2013 definitely not the EU itself, but also not<\/i> the Yanukovych government (whom we blamed for it).<\/span><\/p>\n Furthermore, the day before the wikipedia account says that the Maidan demonstrations against Yanukovych even started, a member of Ukraine\u2019s parliament actually\u00a0had already described in detail the operation that already was functioning inside the U.S. Embassy to organize<\/span><\/a>\u00a0the coming Maidan demonstrations; organization of those demonstrations had actually begun in the Spring of 2013, well before the alleged start, and even before the alleged precipitating event.<\/span><\/p>\n The rest of the Reuters article quotes what it alleges to be provocative allegations from the Russians, such as a Russian\u2019s statement that, \u201dIt’s\u00a0clear that measures taken by NATO to strengthen the bloc and increase\u00a0its military capabilities are far from being defensive.\u201d No actual evidence is presented that\u2019s contrary to any of those Russian allegations against NATO.<\/span><\/p>\n Then, it closes with a vague statement from NATO, alleging “Russia’s\u00a0aggressive actions in Ukraine\u201d \u2013 \u2018aggression\u2019 that\u2019s unsupported in this \u2018news\u2019 report.<\/span><\/p>\n So, the article closes with an entirely unsupported allegation of “Russia’s\u00a0aggressive actions in Ukraine,\u201d which comes at the end of a string of innuendos and unsupported propaganda to cause uncritical readers to believe that Russia is instead the side that\u2019s spreading unsupported propaganda \u2013 against the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n But, obviously, if Russia were to be spreading propaganda here, then it is actually extraordinarily well-supported on a factual basis, including even videos of the events themselves \u2013 irrefutable and unrefuted high-quality documentation. And this means that it is truthful \u2018propaganda,\u2019 if it can authentically be called propaganda at all (which is a question of how one would define that term).<\/span><\/p>\n It is up to the reader here to determine \u201cHow Reliable Is Reuters?\u201d and “how high the journalistic standards are of the Reuters \u2018news\u2019 organization.\u201d My purpose has been simply to supply the evidence on the basis of which those questions can be rationally answered: they can be rationally answered only upon the basis of the evidence, which has been presented here \u2013 and which the Reuters \u2018news\u2019 report ignores altogether.<\/span><\/p>\n ———-<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse People see their own nation, and foreign nations, through the filter of the press that\u2019s available to them; so, if that filter is systematically distorting (distorting in ways that most of the others similarly do), then democracy cannot function, public opinion can be manipulated and warped; and wars might even start that shouldn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":137489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,32,96,535,59,526,524,55,523,49,76,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-145977","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-cover-up","13":"tag-global-news","14":"tag-military","15":"tag-propaganda","16":"tag-russia","17":"tag-uk-news","18":"tag-ukraine","19":"tag-usa-news","20":"tag-warfare","21":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}