13.10.2022

Journalism? What journalism?

Daniel Lazare looks behind the anti-Russia lies and spin and finds a corporate media that has no interest nor concern for the truth

When Russia blamed Ukrainian intelligence for the August 20 assassination of ultra-nationalist Darya Dugina after just 36 hours of investigation, the corporate press dismissed it out of hand.

Within hours, The New York Times came out with a report that the claim was unlikely, because the Russian intelligence service the FSB is “less a serious law enforcement agency than a political tool.”

“… like its Soviet-era predecessor, the KGB,” it said, “the FSB has been dogged for years by suspicions that it blames others for crimes it either committed itself, or had no real interest in solving because they involved well-connected Russians it dared not touch.”¹ The murder was thus the work of the FSB or some Kremlin higher-up - anyone, that is, except Ukraine. Not to be outdone, Vox dug up a Russian political expert at Syracuse University who said he was “having a hard time seeing” how the murder benefited Ukraine and that he was therefore inclined to believe it was “some kind of internal Russian” job.²

The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen agreed, although she speculated that it was not the Kremlin, but anti-Putin “non-state actors” who were responsible - either “a newly created group or a newly radicalised person”.³ The Daily Beast was content to quote assurances by Mikhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, that “Ukraine, of course, had nothing to do with this, because we are not a criminal state.”⁴ For what it is worth, Sean Matgamna’s Alliance for Workers’ Liberty chimed in with an article stating that the crime was “almost certainly not” the work of Kiev.⁵

So it was all but unanimous: everything indicated that Ukraine was innocent and that Russia was the guilty party. Except that now we know it was not.

In an extraordinary about-face, the Times announced in a front-page article on October 5 that “United States intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government authorised the car bomb attack near Moscow in August that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist.”⁶ The story - quickly confirmed by The Wall Street Journal and CNN - amounted to an admission that the Times was wrong to dismiss the possibility of Ukrainian involvement out of hand, and wrong as well to engage in silly conspiracy theories about Russian false-flag operations and the like.

And if the New York Times was wrong, then - surprise, surprise - the rest of the press was wrong too. But what the Times et al have not admitted is that they may have been equally wrong in other cases as well. The list of topics that the corporate media has scrupulously avoided is nearly endless. There is the question of Nazi influence in the Ukrainian government and military, for instance - a question that has gone down the memory hole, because it conflicts with the narrative about heroic little Ukraine fighting off evil Russian orcs. There is the issue of whether US-supplied weaponry is finding its way to the black market or the question of whether the state intelligence agency known as the SBU has had a hand in other assassinations, such as that of Denis Kireev, a participant in Ukrainian-Russian peace talks, who wound up dead when SBU agents arrested him in early March.

There is the infamous ‘Myrotvorets’ death list, which is apparently connected with the SBU and has been implicated in at least two deaths so far - that of dissident journalist Oles Busina and an ex-MP named Oleg Kalashnikov, both killed in 2015. Considering that Darya Dugin was on the Myrotvorets hit list and that her father, fascist theorist Alexander Dugin, still is, one would think that would be something the press would be eager to look into.⁷ But, since the Biden administration regards it as a no-go area, journalists are steering clear.

‘Russia done it’

Finally, there is Nord Stream. So far, the corporate media have stuck resolutely to the post-Dugina pattern by declaring that Russia is presumably guilty for the explosions that destroyed it on September 26, even though it is too early to be sure. It is not too early to indict Putin for the crime, it seems, but the west will have to give him a fair trial before marching him out to the gallows.

A day after the attack, The Washington Post reported that “some [European] officials blamed the Kremlin, suggesting the blasts were intended as a threat to the continent”.⁸ Vox said that, “unofficially, many in Europe are accusing Russia of the sabotage, given the EU believes the Kremlin has a track record of trying to weaponise energy”. But it added that Moscow “is likely gleeful at the percolating conspiracy theories that blame the United States”.⁹

Bloomberg News carried on in the same vein: “Conspiracy theorists always see the hand of the CIA in everything,” it said. “But that’s nonsense. The clear beneficiary of shutting down the Nord Stream pipelines for good is Russian president Vladimir Putin.”¹⁰ How Putin would benefit from the destruction of an $11-billion Russian investment was not explained, but clearly such questions are secondary.

The Brookings Institution was even more emphatic in denouncing anyone who dared deviate from the official ‘Russia done it’ line. “The spread of this narrative follows a familiar script,” it said:

Conspiracists in both Russia and the United States, each for their own purposes, seize on a news development ripe for spin. Both set to work and their ideas reverberate … That is in part because the Kremlin has a second order interest in amplifying the western influencers - or ‘fellow travellers’ - that make these kinds of conspiratorial claims, since their voices are likely to appear more legitimate and credible to audiences within the societies that Moscow targets and therefore may earn wider reach.¹¹

So journalists should be careful. If they deviate from the official line, then they are not only a paranoid conspiratorialist, but a Moscow dupe. With $507 million in assets and backing from Bill and Melinda Gates, JP Morgan Chase and Qatar, Brookings wants to make sure that dissidents remain a small and isolated minority.¹²

But, as the Dugina case shows, it may not be so easy.

A close reading of the Times suggests that more is going on behind the scenes than officials are letting on. Times prose can be stilted due to the paper’s determination to be neutral, objective and at the same time properly deferential to official US authority. When such goals get in the way of one another, as they frequently do, the paper hems and haws, as it squeezes out a few hundred words of constipated prose.

But the October 5 article was even more stilted than most. Usually, the Times provides one or two details about its sources to add to the general veracity. Stories are thus attributed to “a well-placed intelligence official”, “a high-level Pentagon source”, and so on. But in this instance, it was only “officials said …”, which means that the tip could have come from a presidential aide, the CIA or someone lower down on the Washington food chain.

Why so coy? The article went on to say that the officials in question stressed that the US “took no part in the attack,” that “they were not aware of the operation ahead of time” and that they would have objected, had they been forewarned. While “parts of the Ukrainian government authorised the car bomb attack,” it said that “officials who spoke about the intelligence did not disclose … whether president Volodymyr Zelensky had signed off on the mission.” But, if Zelensky did sign off, it would mean that the government acted not in part, but in toto. So why did the Times say the former when it evidently does not know? The story said:

… the United States is concerned that such attacks - while high in symbolic value - have little direct impact on the battlefield and could provoke Moscow to carry out its own strikes against senior Ukrainian officials. American officials have been frustrated with Ukraine’s lack of transparency about its military and covert plans, especially on Russian soil.

Does that mean that anonymous intelligence agents are using the Times to send a warning to Zelensky to knock it off? Is the White House torn over whether to tell him directly? The article said that “US officials also lack a complete picture of the competing power centres within the Ukrainian government, including the military, the security services and Mr Zelensky’s office”. This is a hell of a thing to say about a government that has received $12.9 billion in US military assistance since the start of the war and is scheduled to receive $13.7 billion more.¹³ Yet the recipient of all this largesse is apparently more of a black box than officials have disclosed.

As Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist who was the first to zero in on such details, points out,

… you don’t know if you’re reading a piece of news leaked by someone in the White House in defiance of the intelligence officials who wrote the assessment, or if it was leaked by someone in the intelligence services in defiance of the White House. It also could be a unified front of officials who brought the story to the Times to send a message to Ukraine, Russia or both. It could be the US government expressing general displeasure, both with whichever of the ‘competing power centres within the Ukrainian government’ was responsible for the assassination, and with whatever ‘parts of the Ukrainian government … may not have been aware of the plot’.¹⁴

Disarray

It could be all those things and more. But it is an indication, perhaps, that there is more disarray behind the scenes than the public has been led to expect.

If so, the big question is whether there is disarray behind the scenes with regard to other issues as well - Nord Stream first and foremost. On October 9, a German government spokesman reported that Joe Biden and chancellor Olaf Scholz engaged in a phone call in which they assured one another that both countries condemned the Nord Stream attack, that both viewed such disruptions as unacceptable, and that both agreed that similar incidents would meet with a united US-German response.¹⁵

Sounds quite businesslike. Except that at virtually the same moment, some 10,000 protestors calling for an end to anti-Russian economic sanctions were massing outside the German chancellery before a sign reading, “Repair, launch and secure Nord Stream”. Did Scholz inform Biden of the protest, which was led by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland? Did he pass along growing disgruntlement over the fact that the US is charging “astronomical prices”, according to economics minister Robert Habeck, for liquified natural gas that now accounts for 45% of European LNG imports - up from 28% in 2021?¹⁶

If he did not, is disarray growing behind the scenes in Berlin as well? With Nord Stream out of the picture for the duration, US economic ascendancy appears to be complete. So it is hard to imagine that members of the Scholz government are not discussing how and why all this is taking place at German expense.

The same goes for Italy, where incoming neo-fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni is still toeing the ‘see no evil’ pro-American line, but whose coalition partners - Matteo Salvini of the Lega and Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia - clearly sympathise with the Russian point of view. What is going on behind the scenes as the big three negotiate to form a new government? How is the disarray going in Rome?

Assuming it is shooting upwards, what happens when The New York Times publishes another front-page mea culpa that it was wrong about Nord Stream and that unnamed officials now confess that the United States was behind the attack? How will Germany respond? What will Meloni do? Or, unlike the Dugina murder, will the Biden administration this time succeed in keeping the operation under wraps?

Curious minds cannot wait to find out.