Thursday 12 September 2013

Putin The BBC To Rights

Returning tonight, Question Time has surpassed itself, with David Aaronovitch and Colleen Graffy on the same bill.

But no one from the TUC. Perish the thought.

Russia Today, that Freeview-borne and largely London-based bastion of Anglophilia with its growing and politically engaged audience in the United Kingdom, needs to look into providing some kind of balance to this.

As also to Newsnight a few hours ago, when, entirely typically, Lord Finkelstein, Baroness Grender, Baroness Morgan and Princess Emily Maitlis all sat around arguing, if that was the word, in favour of the privatisation of the Royal Mail as an inevitability and as a self-evident good.

Newsnight is still living in the old Blairite one-party Britain, just as Question Time is still living in the old neocon one-party world.

Over to RT.

Controlled by Putin? No, it isn't. And even if it were, after this week, Putin deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. It has quite recently been awarded for a very great deal less than he has managed.

6 comments:

  1. Russia Today is a state propaganda organ which regularly hosts 9/11 conspiracy nuts, among others.

    I can see why you want 'press regulation' if Russia Today is your idea of a free press.

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  2. You mean that, unlike the BBC, it doesn't only ever have you and yours on it, to scream "Bomb it! Bomb it!" at the mention of any country, real or imaginary.

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  3. Your confusing me with someone else.

    I'm the UKIP contributor who agrees with you entirely about the war in Syria-and about every other neocon war.

    That doesn't mean that I don't know how evil Putin is (see the horrors he inflicted on Chechnya to get the full measure of the man) or that I don't know Russia Today is a Putin-controlled propaganda megaphone.

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  4. If Russia Today is a propaganda organ then was is Fox News? Just to be fair I'll throw in MSNBC as well.

    Putin is no saint but I think many people in the West fail to understand just how bad things were in Russia under in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin and his gangster-oligarch allies. "Shock therapy" caused at least one million excess deaths, maybe even more.

    See http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2009/090115.html

    Should Yeltsin and the architects of shock therapy be considered criminals?

    I am not a big fan of Putin and Russia still has many problems but he did a lot to save the country from complete disintegration. He is acting as a counterbalance to U.S. power, which is a good thing because we saw what happened when the American political class felt impervious on the international stage. We got the Iraq War and other disasters.

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  5. Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union have experienced three demographic catastrophes in the course of the 20th century: WWI-Revolution-Civil War 1914-21; WWII 1941-5; and the reintroduction of capitalism post 1991. Only the first two attract the attention of the Western media.

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