{"id":139588,"date":"2014-09-23T15:25:22","date_gmt":"2014-09-23T15:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=139588"},"modified":"2014-09-23T15:25:22","modified_gmt":"2014-09-23T15:25:22","slug":"high-cost-bad-journalism-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/war-terrorism\/high-cost-bad-journalism-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Robert Parry<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The costs of the mainstream U.S. media\u2019s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged \u201cRussian aggression\u201d by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/09\/22\/us\/us-ramping-up-major-renewal-in-nuclear-arms.html?ref=us&amp;_r=0\">article<\/a> justified these modernization plans by describing \u201cRussia on the warpath\u201d and adding: \u201cCongress has expressed less interest in atomic reductions than looking tough in Washington\u2019s escalating confrontation with Moscow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But the Ukraine crisis has been a textbook case of the U.S. mainstream media misreporting the facts of a foreign confrontation and then misinterpreting the meaning of the events, a classic case of \u201cgarbage in, garbage out.\u201d The core of the false mainstream\u00a0narrative is that Russian President Vladimir Putin instigated the crisis as an excuse to reclaim territory for the Russian Empire.<\/p>\n<p>While that interpretation of events has been the cornerstone of Official Washington\u2019s \u201cgroup think,\u201d the reality always was that Putin favored maintaining the status quo in Ukraine. He had no plans to \u201cinvade\u201d Ukraine and was satisfied with the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, when the crisis heated up last February, Putin was distracted by the Sochi Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than Putin\u2019s \u201cwarmongering\u201d \u2014 as the Times said in the lead-in to another Monday <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/09\/22\/world\/europe\/russians-protest-putins-stance-on-ukraine.html?ref=world\">article<\/a> \u2014 the evidence is clear that it was the United States and the European Union that initiated this confrontation in a bid to pull Ukraine out of Russia\u2019s sphere of influence and into the West\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n<p>This was a scheme long in the making, but the immediate framework for the crisis took shape a year ago when influential U.S. neocons set their sights on Ukraine and Putin after Putin helped defuse a crisis in Syria by persuading President Barack Obama to set aside plans to bomb Syrian government targets over <a href=\"http:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2014\/04\/07\/the-collapsing-syria-sarin-case\/\">a disputed Sarin gas attack<\/a> and instead accept Syria\u2019s willingness to surrender its entire chemical weapons arsenal.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2014\/09\/22\/high-cost-of-bad-journalism-on-ukraine\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Parry The costs of the mainstream U.S. media\u2019s wildly anti-Moscow bias in the Ukraine crisis are adding up, as the Obama administration has decided to react to alleged \u201cRussian aggression\u201d by investing as much as $1 trillion in modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. On Monday, a typically slanted New York Times article justified [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":131539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-139588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-war-terrorism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}