O antigamente chamado 4º poder, revelando-se cada vez mais
incapaz de dar conta certa dos factos mais elementares – mais até por preguiça
ou inépcia que por vontade em os distorcer em favor de uma narrativa qualquer –
despreza a objetividade como se tivesse deixado de ser virtude maior e arroga
para si a função de interpretar a realidade. De contrapoder acomodou-se à
categoria de extensão de poderes executivos instaurando climas de unanimismo
mais próprios de estados totalitários que tratam a dissensão como delito.
Cresci a ler jornais. Ia comprá-los para o meu pai quase antes de os saber ler.
Já adulto, durante muitos anos, as manhãs de sábado eram ocupadas com a sua
leitura. Sinto saudades desse tempo que chegou ao fim. Vivemos outro. Em que é
chegada a altura de conceber e fazer vigorar instrumentos jurídicos que
imponham a transparência e conhecimento público de todas as fontes de
financiamento dos media. E, muito em particular, dos canais de televisão.
As receitas de publicidade explicam quase nada.
E isto é incompatível com verdadeiras democracias.
Na tentativa de compreender e informar-me sobre a guerra que agora atormenta a
Europa venho lendo textos que a precedem temporalmente, mas que sob imensos
aspetos explicam e antecipam o que agora vivemos. O texto que agora partilho
foi escrito em 2014 e foi coligido em obra publicada em 2019.
(se necessário, para maior conforto, o texto pode ser copiado e colado no
google translator sem que perca sentido. Não é poesia.)
_____________________________
“Distorting Russia
February 12, 2014
THE DEGRADATION OF MAINSTREAM AMERICAN PRESS Coverage of Russia, a country
still vital to US national security, has been under way for many years. If the
recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory
articles in leading newspapers and magazines-most recently about the Sochi
Olympics, Ukraine, and, as usual, Russian President Vladimir Putin-is an
indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.
There are notable exceptions, but a general pattern has developed. Even in the
venerable New York Times and Washington Post, news reports, editorials, and
commentaries no longer adhere rigorously to traditional journalistic standards,
often failing to provide essential facts and context; make a clear distinction
between reporting and analysis; require at least two different political or
"expert" views on major developments; or publish opposing opinions on
their op-ed pages. As a result, American media on Russia today are less objective,
less balanced, more conformist, and scarcely less ideological than when they
covered Soviet Russia during the preceding Cold War.
The history of this degradation is also clear. It began in the early 1990s,
following the end of the Soviet Union, when the US media adopted Washing ton's
narrative that almost everything President Boris Yeltsin did was a
"transition from communism to democracy" and thus in America's best
interests. This included Yeltsin's economic "shock therapy" and
oligarchic looting of essential state assets, which destroyed tens of millions
of Russian lives; armed destruction of a popularly elected Parliament and
imposition of a "presidential" Constitution, which dealt a crippling
blow to democratization and now empowers Putin; brutal war in Chechnya, which
gave rise to terrorists in Russia's North Caucasus; rigging of his own
reelection in 1996; and leaving behind in 1999, his approval ratings in single
digits, a disintegrating country laden with weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, most American journalists still give the impression that Yeltsin was an
ideal Russian leader.
Since the early 2000s, the media have followed a different leader-centric
narrative, also consistent with US policy, that devalues multifaceted analysis
for a relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts. If Russia
under Yeltsin was presented as having entirely legitimate politics and national
interests, we are now made to believe that Putin's Russia has none at all, at
home or abroad-even on its own borders, as in Ukraine.
Russia today has serious problems and many repugnant Kremlin policies. But
anyone relying on mainstream American media will not find there any of their
origins or influences in Yeltsin's Russia or in provocative US policies since
the 1990s-only in the "autocrat" Putin who, however authoritarian, in
reality lacks such power. Nor is he credited with stabilizing a disintegrating
nuclear-armed country, assisting US security pursuits from Afghanistan and
Syria to Iran, or even with granting amnesty, in December, to more than 1,000
jailed prisoners, including mothers of young children.
Not surprisingly, in January The Wall Street Journal featured the widely dis
credited former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, branding Putin's
government as one of "deceit, violence and cynicism," and the Kremlin
as the "nerve center of the troubles that bedevil the West." But
wanton Putin-bashing is also the dominant narrative in centrist, liberal, and
progressive media, from the Post, Times, and The New Republic to CNN, MSNBC,
and HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, where Howard Dean, not previously known
for his Russia expertise, recently declared, to Maher's and his panel's great
approval, "Vladimir Putin is a thug."
American media therefore eagerly await Putin's downfall-due to his
"failing economy" (some of its indicators are better than US ones),
the valor of street protesters and other right-minded oppositionists (whose
policies are rarely examined), the defection of his electorate (his approval
ratings remain around 65 percent), or some welcomed "cataclysm."
Evidently believing, as does the Times, for example, that democrats and a
"much better future" will succeed Putin (not zealous
ultranationalists growing in the streets and corridors of power), US
commentators remain indifferent to what the hoped-for "destabilization of
his regime" might mean in the world's largest nuclear country.
For weeks, this toxic coverage has focused on the Sochi Olympics and the
deepening crisis in Ukraine. Even before the Games began, the Times declared
the newly built complex a "Soviet-style dystopia" and warned in a
headline, "Terrorism and Tension, Not Sports and Joy." On opening
day, the paper found space for three anti-Putin articles and a lead editorial,
a feat rivalled by the Post. Facts hardly mattered. Virtually every US report
insisted that a record $51 billion "squandered" by Putin on the Sochi
Games proved the funds were "corrupt." But as Ben Aris of Business
New Europe pointed out, as much as $44 billion may have been spent "to
develop the infrastructure of the entire region," investment "the
entire country needs."
Overall pre-Sochi coverage was even worse, exploiting the threat of terror ism
so licentiously it seemed pornographic. The Post, long known among
critical-minded Russia-watchers as Pravda on the Potomac, exemplified the media
ethos. A sports columnist and an editorial page editor turned the Olympics into
"a contest of wills" between the despised Putin's
"thugocracy" and terrorist "insurgents." The "two
warring parties" were so equated readers might have wondered which to
cheer for. If nothing else, American journalists gave terrorists an early
victory, tainting "Putin's Games" and frightening away many foreign
spectators, including some relatives of the athletes. The Sochi Games will soon
pass, triumphantly or tragically, but the potentially fateful Ukrainian crisis
will not. A new Cold War divide between West and East may now be unfolding, not
in distant Berlin but in the heart of Russia's historical civilization. The
result could be a permanent confrontation fraught with instability and the
threat of a hot war far worse than the proxy one in Georgia in 2008. These
dangers have been all but ignored in highly selective, partisan, and inflammatory
US media accounts that portray the Euro pean Union's "Partnership"
proposal benignly as Ukraine's chance for democracy, prosperity, and escape
from Russia thwarted only by a "bullying" Putin and his
"cronies" in Kiev.
Perhaps the largest untruth promoted by most US media is the claim that
"Ukraine's future integration into Europe" is "yearned for
throughout the country." Every informed observer knows-from Ukraine's
history, geography, languages, religions, culture, recent politics, and opinion
surveys-that the country is deeply divided as to whether it should join Europe
or remain close politically and economically to Russia. There is not one
Ukraine or one "Ukrainian people" but at least two, generally
situated in its Western and Eastern regions.
Such factual distortions point to two flagrant omissions.... The now
exceedingly dangerous confrontation between the two Ukraines was not
"ignited," as the Times claims, by President Viktor Yanukovych's
duplicitous negotiating or by Putin-but, as I pointed out, by the EU's reckless
ultimatum, in November 2013, that the democratically elected president of a
profoundly divided country choose between Europe and Russia. Putin's proposal
instead for a tripartite EU-Ukraine-Russia trade arrangement, rarely if ever reported,
was flatly rejected by US and EU officials.
But the most crucial media omission is Moscow's reasonable conviction that the
struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West's ongoing, US-led march
toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the late 1990s with NATO's eastward
expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia,
a US-NATO military outpost in Georgia, and missile defense installations near
Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington Brussels policy is wise or
reckless, it-not Putin's December 2013 financial offer to save Ukraine's
collapsing economy-is deceitful. The EU's "civilizational" proposal,
for example, includes "security policy" provisions, almost never
reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.
Any doubts about the Obama administration's real intentions in Ukraine should
have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top
State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The
media predictably focused on the source of the "leak" and on Nuland's
verbal "gaffe" "Fuck the EU." But the essential revelation
was that high-level US officials were plotting to "midwife" a new,
anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing Yanukovych, the
democratically elected president-that is, a coup.
Americans are left with a new edition of an old question. Has Washington's
twenty-year winner-take-all approach to post-Soviet Russia shaped today's
degraded news coverage, or is official policy shaped by the coverage? Did
Senator John McCain stand in Kiev alongside the well-known leader of an extreme
nationalist party because he was ill-informed by the media, or have the media
deleted this part of the story because of McCain's folly? Whatever the
explanation, as Russian intellectuals say when faced with two bad alternatives,
"Both are worst."”
Stephen F. Cohen, “War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump &
Russiagate”, Hot Books, 2019, pp. 35-38
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