How ‘Western’ Media Select Their Foreign Correspondents
DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
A temple of shameless disinformation.
Did you ever wonder why 'western' mainstream media get stories about Russia and other foreign countries so wrong?
It is simple. They hire the most brainwashed, biased and cynical writers they can get for the job. Those who are corrupt enough to tell any lie required to support the world view of their editors and media owners.
They are quite upfront about it.
Here is evidence in the form of a New York Times job description for a foreign correspondent position in Moscow:
Russia Correspondent
Job Description
Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.
It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.
If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.
To be allowed to write for the Times one must see the Russian Federation as a country that is ruled by just one man.
One must be a fervent believer in MI6 produced Novichok hogwash. One must also believe in Russiagate and in the multiple idiocies it produced even after all of them have been debunked.
One must know that vote counts in Russia are always wrong while U.S. vote counting is the most reliable ever. Russian private military contractors (which one must know to be evil men) are 'secretly deployed' to wherever the editors claim them to be. Russia's hospitals are of course always much worse than ours.
Even when it is easy to check that Vladimir Putin (the most evil man ever) is at work in the Kremlin the job will require one to claim that he is hiding in a villa.
Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above nonsense. But the description is not for a position that requires one to weigh and report the facts. It is for a job that requires one to lie. That the Times lists all the recent nonsense about Russia right at the top of the job description makes it clear that only people who support those past lies will be considered adequate to tell future lies about Russia.
No honest unbiased person will want such a job. But as it comes with social prestige, a good paycheck and a probably nice flat in Moscow the New York Times will surely find a number of people who are willing to sell their souls to take it.
Interestingly the job advertisement does not list Russian language capabilities as a requirement. It only says that 'Fluency in Russian is preferred'.
'Western' mainstream media are filled with such biased, cynical and self-censoring correspondents who have little if any knowledge of the country they are reporting from. It is therefore not astonishing that 'western' populations as well as their politicians have often no knowledge of what is really happening in the world.
h/t Bryan MacDonald
Posted by b at 19:06 UTC
SELECTED COMMENTS
Hilarious. Don't need no stinking Operation Mockingbird anymore. Just put out a want-ad and plenty of brainwashed folks will come flocking. Propaganda works.
Soomeone said:
In this case "everything else is propaganda."
The job title is really 'Anti-Russia Propagandist'.
Posted by: powerandpeople | Nov 20 2020 19:29 utc | 2
This is such an odd job description with very few specific requirements and none detailing how much experience or what level of knowledge or skill is required (in the form of X number of years worked in some area requiring Russian language skills or university qualifications obtained) that I almost wonder if this advertisement is for real.
One notices also that "Vladimir Putin's Russia" is presented as a story. Everything else that follows in the second paragraph of the advertisement is also a story. Indeed everything in the news media industry is a "story" as if instead of employing investigative reporters on the beat grimly searching for hard facts like old pulp fiction detectives, the media now only wants Hollywood script writers or graduates straight out of creative writing courses.
But then I suppose whoever gets the job at the NYT can hardly do worse than what the hack Luke Harding did as The Fraudian's Moscow correspondent nearly 15 years ago, so much so that the Russian govt must have suspected that he was more than just a bad paranoid plagiarist ... he must have been a spy as well, that it would initially refuse to renew his visa. One would like to see the job specifications for the position of The Fraudian's Moscow reporter that Harding held for a number of years.
Posted by: Jen | Nov 20 2020 19:31 utc | 3
Incredible. What the acronym 'SMH' (shake my head) was invented for.
It's no wonder I switched off CBC radio, our national broadcaster here in Canada. Their music programs were okay, but every hour they had a news update, and those were stomach-turning. Superficial, biased, Empire-friendly nonsense...
Posted by: JimmyG. | Nov 20 2020 19:32 utc | 4
Norman Solomon wrote about this problem fifteen years ago in his book “War Made Easy, How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death”
. . .from Amazon: In War Made Easy, nationally syndicated columnist, media critic, and author Norman Solomon cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key “perception management” techniques that have played huge rolls in the promotion of American wars in recent decades.
p.116
. . .The attitudes of reporters covering U.S. foreign policy officials are generally similar to the attitudes of those officials. "Most journalists who get plum foreign assignments already accept the assumptions of empire," according to longtime foreign correspondent Reese Erlick. He added, "I didn't meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the U.S. and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraq government by force. They disagreed only about timing, whether the action should be unilateral, and whether a long-term occupation is practical." After decades of freelancing for major U.S. news organizations, Erlich offered this blunt conclusion: "Money, prestige, career options, ideological predilections--combined with the down sides of filing stories unpopular with the government--all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You don't win a Pulitzer prize for challenging the basic assumptions of empire."
Posted by: Don Bacon | Nov 20 2020 19:32 utc | 5
Gee B I am awfully sorry, I just don't think you qualify for the advertised job?
What exactly is misleading and misdirected propaganda.. No one can earn a Nobel prize in either speciality without at least a good definition. To earn a Phd in misdirected propaganda one needs to be able to adjust a compass so it will become confused about the directions of N and S, prove a credit score of 20 or better, and be able to distinguish a tall mountain from a tall building.
To earn a Phd in misleading propaganda one needs to believe and promote that the world is square, have passed at least three courses in the basics of deception from an accredited university and be a direct decedent of Pinoccio ..
Posted by: snake | Nov 20 2020 19:48 utc | 6
JimmyG. @4,
I also live in Canuckistan - these days I can barely listen to NewsNetwork (or CTV, or Global, or CP24, or...) when they cover anything other than domestic politics for the same reason. I recall the good old days in the sixties when we had shows like "This Hour Has Seven Days" with Laurier Lapierre and Patrick Watson. And Canada would criticize the US on occasion: famously in 1983, PET, facing criticism from an American official for the PM's arms reduction proposals, said he wasn't going to listen to a "Pentagon pipsqueak." It's gone straight downhill since and we're now a NATO (i.e., US) lapdog.
Posted by: spudski | Nov 20 2020 19:48 utc | 7
Thank you b.
Now here is a fine journalist they could simply contract for sane reporting on China. Plus excellent Russian analysis as well.
Good read with a link or two to consider.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Nov 20 2020 20:02 utc | 9
@8
So NYT's writers need to worry, since we can already automate their primary skill, the ability to write even though you have no understanding of the real nature of the world.
Posted by: Fnord13 | Nov 20 2020 20:04 utc | 10
The term that Paul Craig Roberts often uses, "presstitute", comes to mind.
Echoing JimmyG. @4 and spudski @7, in Canada, our taxpayer-funded state news agency's flagship program "The National" gives us regular Two Minutes Hate pieces currently being churned out every two weeks or so by Moscow correspondent Chris Brown who fits this article's description to a T.
I've lost count of how many times he and CBC The National's editors have singled out Russia's handling of COVID-19 for criticism, when so many other countries have far worse per capita fatality numbers than Russia.
While decrying Russia's COVID-19 deaths, they, of course, never mention the fact that Canada has had more COVID-19 deaths per capita than Russia ...
Posted by: Canadian Cents | Nov 20 2020 20:21 utc | 12
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"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard )"b") started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Posted by: gottlieb | Nov 20 2020 19:21 utc | 1