Zigfeld’s Latest

Over on the powerful and influential American Thinker website, Kim Zigfeld has two recent pieces shedding further light on the outrageous misconduct of the Putin regime.

In the first, she reveals a breathtakingly united barrage of criticism from not one, not two, but three different highly respected international organizations aimed at Putin’s obscene crackdown on the press in his neo-Soviet state.

In the second, she reveals horrifying new evidence of the failure of the Obama “reset” policy towards Russia, including that which indicates the Kremlin knew far more about the Boston attacks than it cared to tell U.S. law enforcement.

 

Elder and Ioffe, the Laurel & Hardy of Russia Reporters

There they go again.

Julia Ioffe and Miriam Elder, the two worst Russia reporters on the planet, are at it once again.

On her Twitter feed, Elder was shocked to find Russians making Georgian wine, that is until a Moscow Times reporter explained to her that “Saperavi” does not refer to a wine being Georgian, it refers to a kind of grape that anyone can grow and make wine with. It was as if she had accused California of cheating consumers by selling wine made from grapes they also use in France.

Interestingly, as an aside, what’s actually correct is that Georgian mineral water, the famous Borjomi brand, is no longer truly Georgian though made in Georgia, because the company has been purchased by Russia (the reason it was suddenly deleted from the Russian blacklist).

Then Ioffe reported on the New Republic website that Monday’s protest had begun with a moment of silence to commemorate the anniversary of the Bolotnaya uprising a year earlier.  In fact, as the LA Times reported, the moment of silence was for a worker who was killed while setting up the staging for the Monday protest.

This is the same comical pair who breathlessly reported a year ago that the protest movement was sweeping Russia and changing it forever.  Instead, what the world actually saw was the movement wither on the vine.  Barely a quarter the support is now turning out for public demonstrations, and not one real political objective has been achieved.  Navalny’s speech before the most recent throng was disjointed, incoherent and uninspiring to say the least, but we still don’t hear anything remotely like the full truth from either Elder or Ioffe, much less to we hear anything remotely like a mea culpa for past misreporting.

With “friends” like these, Russia needs no enemies.

Liar, Liar, Putin’s Pants are on Fire

Vladimir Putin recently concluded  a four-hour press conference in Moscow.  There were some interesting, even startling, developments.

Putin made a lengthy opening statement to the assembled press, including the following remark:  ”I want to point out the stability of state finances despite the existing problems, of which we have many and I am sure we will discuss them later.”

During the press conference, the following exchange then occurred:

QUESTION: Sergei Brilyov, Moscow, Rossiya TV channel.

Mr President, at the beginning of the news conference, you spoke about stability.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: Did I? I hadn’t said a word about it.

QUESTION: You did.

At the end of your current term as president, you will have been in power so long that children who were born in your first year as President will become adults. Financial stability is a wonderful thing. But these 18 years – this is a special figure in Russian history; aren’t you concerned that stability could turn into stagnation?

In essence, the journalist called Putin a liar to his face.  Or maybe senile, unable to remember what he had said a few moments before?  Then the bold reporter went on to challenge Putin’s central premise, that he should be congratulated for achieving stability.  He confronted him with the question of whether Putin had actually given Russia stagnation.

One was reminded of Putin’s breathtaking gaff (or lie) when he claimed that a Pussy Riot member had participated in an anti-Semitic demonstration when in fact the event was pro-Jew. Is Putin losing it?

There was more. As Power Vertical reports:

A telling moment came when Putin addressed an adult journalist, Maria Solovyenko, by the diminutive, “Masha.” She came right back at him, addressing the Russian head of state by his diminutive, “Vova.”

Just. Wow.  Russian journalists standing up to Putin in this manner is unprecedented. One called him either a liar or a senile fool, while the other called him a child.

Of course, there was also plenty of fawning; one female journalist, for instance, gushed over Putin’s attractiveness and softballed him as to how anyone could claim he was sickly.  Between the two, they agreed it was obviously an opposition plot.

But the open lack of fear and even contempt with which some journalists regarded Putin was compelling and heartening.  If it leads to more and better reporting on Putin’s faults and outrageous crimes (during the interview, he essentially characterized himself as infallible), then Russia may have a future after all.

The End of Journalism in Putin’s Russia

The latest barrage of reporting from LR/DR founder and publisher Kim Zigfeld focuses on journalism and the lack thereof in Putin’s neo-Soviet Russia.

On Pajamas Media, she looks at Putin’s efforts to silence journalism he doesn’t care for, with an example of a foreign reporter being expelled from Siberia for telling the truth about living conditions there.

On American Thinker, she exposes the fraudulent reporting of Putin’s propaganda machine Russia Beyond the Headlines, with an example focusing on their gross misreporting of the Leonid Razvozzhayev torture saga.

Putin is now openly seeking to revive every key totalitarian aspect of the USSR just as quickly as he can do so.  And front and center is his policy of wiping out reporters who tell the truth and elevating those who will lie on his behalf.  Meanwhile, like the sheep they are, the bleating “citizens” of Russia stand mute and allow him to do so at best, at worst they loudly cheer.

Weird Doings at the Moscow Times

“This is the first blog entry of many I’ll be making as I travel along the Russian side of the Russia-China border over the next four weeks, beginning in Chita and ending in Vladivostok.”

That’s what Moscow Times reporter Howard Amos had to say on November 20, 2012, on a special web page on the paper’s website created just for him

He posted every day until November 25th, then went totally silent. Between then and today, December 3rd, more than a week has passed with no hint of why.  A large link to the special web page still appears prominently on the MT’s home page, but readers had no way of knowing if the journey was even still underway.

The reporter’s Twitter feed offers a slight clue.  On November 29th he tweeted: “Goodbye Chita, and your zealous, zealous FSB. In 40 hours I’ll be in Blagoveshchensk.”  Blagoveshchensk is about halfway between Chita and Vladivostok, implying the reporter was continuing his journey to the East but perhaps had been ejected from Chita and his attempt to go close to the Chinese border.

But then the next day came this, out of nowhere:  ”That’s it, then. FSB + FMS + MT = total f**k-up. Back to Moscow.”  Since then, no further information on Twitter either.

The special web page is rather bizarre, in that comments are disabled and a map with a small person figure on the route seemed to bear no relations to the reporter’s actual whereabouts.

We wrote the MT editors and asked for an explanation. None was forthcoming.

It’s a pity the MT could not be a bit more transparent with its readers.  If Amos stopped tweeting due to serious problems, we wish him well with them. If he stopped due to pique, that’s a pity too.

UPDATE:  Finally the MT issued an explanation, very weirdly putting a date on the item earlier than it was actually published.

Julia Ioffe’s List of Bad Things About Russia

Upon leaving Russia, here is Julia Ioffe’s list of the nation’s faults:

(1) Horrific drinking, including drunken “journalists”

(2) Psychotic “thinking” and “debating”

(3) Racism

(4) Antisemitism

(5) Misogyny

(6) Purging of Jews, lack of diversity in religion and race

(7) Total distrust of institutions and people

(8) Lack of fathers/husbands

(9) Virtually no good bars or restaurants even in giant Moscow

(10) Paranoid fear of cold water and other Medieval belief systems

(11) Bad plastic surgery and incompetent medical treatment

(12) Need to prove identity everywhere you go

(14) Totalitarian bureaucracy

(13) Aggression

(14) Rudeness

We find it rather odd that in leaving Russia Ioffe does not feel compelled to reflect even for a second on how badly she misreported the Russian protest movement, which she said was changing Russia forever when in fact it was disappearing. We also find it very strange that she doesn’t list Russia’s #1 fault, its people, people who have blithely handed power for life to a proud KGB spy and looked the other way at the murder of Ioffe’s colleagues, like Anna Politkovskaya.  People who embrace racism and misogyny and the invasion of Georgia and the Cold War and who will not exert themselves for freedom or democracy.

But we are comforted by the fact that the world’s Russia IQ will now rise considerably with Ioffe no longer reporting on the Land of Putin.

Julia Ioffe and her Campaign of Lies about Russia

Julia Ioffe

EDITORIAL

Julia Ioffe and her Campaign of Lies about Russia

If there were to be a photograph next to the paragraph in the Pajamas Media Wikpedia entry that explains why PM was formed, it should be a photograph of New Yorker “reporter” Julia Ioffe, who also writes for Foreign Policy.  She’s the very worst MSM Russia journalist on the planet. She’s the disease, and PM is the cure.

Hilarious “Reporting” on Astrakhan

If you are a New York Times reader, then you believe 1,500 people protested for fair elections in Astrakhan today.

But if you rely upon Reuters or the Associated Press, then you think it was 2,000.

On the other hand, if you’re an AFP person, then you understand it was 4,000.  Of course, that depends on which AFP reporter you are talking to, because some of them say it was actually 3,000.

Let’s put it this way. If MSM journalists can’t even count consistently, what chance is there that anything else they say will be even vaguely correct?

Allesandra Stanley, Braying Jackass of Lies and Ignorance

Allesandra Stanley, Braying Jackass

Reporter Allesandra Stanley of the New York Times recently took a little trip to Moscow in order to report on what they are showing on Kremlin-controlled broadcast TV.

She states:

The government can’t effectively censor the Internet, and it doesn’t bother with opposition newspapers and some radio stations — a little criticism has long been tolerated to give Russia’s disaffected intelligentsia a place to blow off steam. It’s a little like a rich father who gives his daughter’s snooty, hipster boyfriend a job: He may hate the kid, but it’s one way to get some peace and quiet at home.

Oops! Guess she didn’t care to read the Moscow Times, which reported on the same day:  ”Gazprom-Media, the owner of liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, has demanded the early resignation of the radio station’s board of directors, Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov said Tuesday.”

Next Stanley writes:

Now, brisk updates on voter fraud, anti-Putin rallies and opposition candidates share a news hour with long, choreographed tableaus that showcase Mr. Putin as prime minister, hard at work inspecting factories, raising pensions, scolding lazy bureaucrats, and doing what it takes to preserve stability and spread prosperity. He has taken to publishing long mission statements for Russia’s future; each one is framed on the news like a tablet from Moses.

Oops again! Looks like she failed to read her own newspaper, which reported just days before:

European election observers say that presidential hopefuls running against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin face “biased” reports by Kremlin-controlled media and constant government pressure. Tiny Kox, who heads the Council of Europe mission to Russia, said Saturday that all four candidates complain that Putin’s government is using its “administrative resources” to influence voters, while Russian television extensively covers Putin’s activities.

New York Times coverage of Russia is hopeless mess. This reporter is,very obviously, totally unqualified to write about Russia (one wonders if she even speaks the language, and if she does why she hardly ever does any other reporting about Russia).

Her reputation for incompetence precedes her. Gawker says that Stanley is known for ”trademark glaring inaccuracy.” That’s the mother of all understatements. The fact that, with presidential elections only weeks away, the nation’s so-called “paper of record” would send a goon this idiotic and incompetent to report on the crucial issue of state-controlled media in Russia tells you all you need to know about whether you can think of the Gray Lady as a significant resource on Russia.

More Idiotic Gibberish about Russia on the Pages of the New York Times

The Gray Lady has published yet another ludicrously inane piece of disinformation about Russia.  On Sunday, Andrew Kramer wrote about a recent Kremlin effort to Photoshop opposition leader Navalny next to Boris Berezovsky under the headline “Smear in Russia Backfires, Online Tributes Roll In.”

The article is misguided at its core.  The fraudulent photograph was not published online but in the physical press, and its purpose was not to undermine Navalny with his online supporters.  To the contrary, it had the exact opposite purpose, to destroy any vestigial support Navalny might have with the mainstream press and in the general, non-virtual, population.