"Putin's Way" excerpt: PBS documentary on "Russia's 9/11", tied to ex-KGB, that put Putin in power

[newthinking]

1. Et Tu, Frontline?

OpEdNews Op Eds 1/25/2015 at 15:30:48
Et Tu, Frontline?
By Patrice Greanville


Putin by DonkeyHotey (via flickr)


Hatchet job on Putin only demonstrates the conformist spirit permeating US journalism
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Frontline sees itself as an implacable observer of political and social reality, an uncompromising witness to contemporary history. The truth is often a lot less flattering.

As a legendary liberal franchise, Frontline has frequently produced interesting and even controversial reports on a variety of topics, including the NRA's intransigence to gun control, the abortion wars, JFK's assassination, the modern KKK, "Bush's War" (somewhat critical of the Iraq War's genesis as something of a botched, incompetent affair, but not scandalized by its sheer immorality, arrogance, systemic roots or broader purposes), and a host of other issues, but when it comes to foreign policy questions in which the American empire is again competing with some invidiously designated foe (these days the villains are again Russia and China), it behaves, conceits aside, like the rest of the conformist pack, as little more than an stenographer to power.


Given that thinly-veiled script, it doesn't take long for the show to deliver an unrelenting cascade of innuendo against Putin. Apparently the show's producers could not refrain from vacuuming up and regurgitating just about every negative cliche disseminated by the Western media since the official demonization of the Russian leader began, except that in this case, Frontline being Frontline, the closest equivalent to the New York Times on television, the weapon of choice is not so much the bludgeon favored by Fox News' crude propagandists, but the scalpel and the stiletto, the half-truths and omissions of truth, and the decapitation of context, in short the far more subtle, insidious and highly effective natural tools of the centrist corporatist liberal.

The first few minutes set the tone:

ANDREY ZYKOV, Former Police Investigator: [through interpreter] Well, of course, there has always been corruption in Russia, but building it into such a meticulous system was something only Mr. Putin has managed to do. Could Putin be held criminally responsible based on the evidence that has already been gathered? Absolutely, yes.

From that point on, it only gets worse.

Students of American propaganda usually have a problem: not the scarcity of items to prove their case, but precisely the opposite, the overabundance of material. Practically everything said or shown on mainstream media that concerns American foreign policy, especially on television, is riddled with so much bias and outright falsehood that codifying and answering such outrages on a case by case basis is simply an impossible, gargantuan task, a fact that --besides their monopolizing the mainstream media--prevents any meaningful or timely response by genuinely impartial observers.

Full story, links, and transcript:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Et-Tu-Frontline-by-Patrice-Greanville-Condemnation_Journalism_Media_Propaganda-150125-684.html