Mainstream US Media Is Lost in Ukraine
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-parry/54812/mainstream-us-media-is-lost-in-ukraine
Mainstream US Media Is Lost in Ukraine
by Robert Parry | March 17, 2014 - 7:42am
As the Ukraine crisis continues to deepen, the mainstream U.S. news media is sinking to new lows of propaganda and incompetence. Somehow, a violent neo-Nazi-spearheaded putsch overthrowing a democratically elected president was refashioned into a legitimate regime, then the interim government and now simply Ukraine.
The Washington Posts screaming headline on Sunday is Ukraine decries Russian invasion, treating the coup regime in Kiev as if it speaks for the entire country when it clearly speaks for only a subset of the population, mostly from western Ukraine. The regimes legitimacy comes not from a democratic election but from a coup that was quickly embraced by the U.S. government and the European Union.
Objective U.S. journalists would insist on a truthful narrative that conveys these nuances to the American people, not simply behave as clumsy propagandists determined to glue white hats on the side favored by the State Department and black hats on everyone that the U.S. government disdains. But virtually the entire mainstream press corps has opted for the propaganda role, much as it has in the past. Think Iraq 2002-03.
You also might remember the mainstream medias rush to judgment over the Sarin attack in Syria on Aug. 21, 2013. The State Department rashly blamed the incident on the Syrian government despite serious doubts inside the U.S. intelligence community.