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.

A girl dancing on a lawn in autumn in St. Petersburg, 2011. Little does she know the horror that awaits her.

But it wasn’t Wimbledon, that was last year, it was the Australian Open that took place yesterday, and saw Sharapova once again reaching the finals and collapsing just as spectacularly.   The match lasted just 82 minutes this time, even shorter than the last one, and Sharapova made a ghastly 30 unforced errors compared to just 12 by her opponent. She failed to win a single game in the second set and again saw her vaunted serve broken five times. Her second serve, supposedly one of the best in the game, totally failed, resulting in just three total points won in the entire match.  After reaching 3-3 in the first set, breaking her opponent’s opening service game, Sharapova did not win a single game the rest of the way through the match, losing nine straight.

By the numbers, here is now Sharapova’s Aussie Open performance stacks up against what she did at last year’s Wimbledon:

Time of match:  three minutes shorter.

Games won:  Four fewer.

First serve percentage:  14 points lower.

Aces:  two fewer.

Winning percentage on first serve:  five points lower.

In other words, she’s clearly getting worse, not better.

Though claimed as Russia’s top-ranked player, Sharapova hasn’t lived in Russia since she was a child and speaks English without an accent.  She learned how to play tennis in Florida, where she owns her own home. She’s about as Russian as apple pie.  But thank goodness Russia claims her, since every time she steps on the court she humiliates the country she plays for with banshee-like screaming as she strikes the ball followed by total, non-competitive failure.

And on the American Thinker, Zigfeld blasts Obama’s State of the Union address, which was as full of lies about Russia as a Politburo propaganda festival.

“All in the open, all the time. Secrets only reinforce stereotypes. Cold war over long ago. Our time to do differently.”

That was one of the first tweets by America’s new ambassador to Russian Kremlin, Michael McFaul. Just before that, he’d tweeted: “This is going to be fun.”

One has to wonder what news sources McFaul has been reading, if any.

Not his own country’s official mouthpiece, the Voice of America, surely. If he’d read that, he’d know that Russia was threatening war with the United States if the latter dared to send any troops to Russia’s bosom pal, Syria.

Nor the Washington Post, which reported that Russia was making similar threats in the event of any military incursion into Iran, Russia’s other bestie in the region.

Also not perusing Time magazine, which revealed that the Kremlin was accusing the U.S. of shooting down peaceful Russian spacecraft, just for spite apparently.

In fact, the news virtually overflows with conclusive proof that the cold war is far from over. Russia is ruled by a proud KGB spy who spent his life learning how to hate and destroy America. He is rehabilitating Stalin, he is restoring the Soviet national anthem, and he is engaged in an all-out assault on American values. He is massively increasing Russia’s military budget and aggressively seeking to reestablish the Soviet empire.

In fact, the only one who doesn’t know the cold war is still being waged is Barack Obama, whose propaganda line McFaul is eager to reiterate to anyone stupid enough to listen. Talk about an ugly American!

“Iran is our neighbour. And if Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security. We are definitely interested in the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But at the same time, we believe that any country has the right to have what it needs to feel comfortable, including Iran.”

That was newly promoted arch-nationalist Dmitry Rogozin, speaking to reporters in Brussels last week.  Now a deputy prime minister, just one of several new hard-liners brought into the Putin cabinet to support a crackdown in the run-up to presidential elections in March, Rogozin is speaking for the Kremlin.

And the Kremlin was saying, in other words,  not just that Russia supports Iran in its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, but that it will view an attack on Iran as an attack on Russia.

So much for the vaunted Obama “reset.”  The only thing that has changed since Obama became president is that Russia now sees it faces a weakling who will do nothing as Russia obliterates democracy at home and sows the seeds of discontent abroad, seeds which undermine the West and its values while at the same time working to drive up world oil prices so Russia can profit.

“You can’t have such strong capital outflow for so long.”

That was Russia’s Central Bank Chairman Sergei Ignatyev in April 2011, looking back on one of the most horrific fiscal quarters in Russian history.  But he promised the nation it could not continue, he promised that Russia would see capital inflows the rest of the year.

What actually happened was rather different.  The strong capital outflow did continue, and Russia recorded a net loss of over $80 billion in 2011, the worst year in Russian history except for 2008, when Russia’s stock market crashed and lost two-thirds of its value.  It was $5 billion more than “prime minister” Vladimir Putin predicted would be incurred in December, and $10 billion more than Ignatyev had predicted in November.

It was an absolute bloodbath, an utter repudiation of the Putin regime by Russian investors.

Why do the people of Russia continue to allow their chosen leaders to lie to them so brazenly, without consequences? Can’t they see that this exact form of misconduct is what destroyed the USSR? Don’t they realize that if their continue their reckless indifference to basic civic responsibility, their nation will be destroyed?

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.

The reporter totally ignores the fact that a recent poll showed Navalny with absolutely no electoral support for president, and with voters even rejecting the central tenant of his political platform, rerunning the December parliamentary elections.  He totally ignores the obvious actual purpose of the photo campaign, choosing instead to set up a straw man argument which perpetuates the ridiculous narrative about “revolution” being ginned up in the Western press.

If the Kremlin wanted to smear Navalny among his Internet supporters, wouldn’t the Kremlin have published the smear online? And if the NYT wanted to show the smear didn’t work, shouldn’t it have looked evidence offline, where the actual smear was published?

The article does make one good point, at least, and one wonders why that wasn’t the headline:  This altering of photographs to smear opponents dates back to Soviet times.  So it’s hardly surprising to see it reappear in the reign of Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy who has reinstated the national anthem music played in Soviet times.  But are Navalny’s tactics, focusing on the Internet and calling a protest once a month, really up to confronting the other Soviet traditions, like political incarceration and murder?

It appears, then, that very little has changed in Russia since Soviet times. The country is ruled by a proud KGB spy and the vast majority of Russians reject religion. Those who do not are closely supervised by governmental forces. If there is one change, it is that now Russia’s rulers rather than seeking to wipe out the church are instead seeking to manipulate  it for their own purposes.  Thus, even though Patriarch Kirill warned the Kremlin to heed the concerns of the protesters, he also issued a stern warning to the protesters: “If demonstrations ahead of the 1917 revolution had ended in the expression of peaceful protests and had not led to a bloody revolution and a fratricidal war, Russia would have had a population of more than 300 million and would have challenged or maybe even surpassed the United States from the point of view of economic development.”

Ellen Barry

There she goes again.

Via “reporter” Ellen Barry the New York Times is publishing some of the worst Russia journalism to be found anywhere these days.

We already reported on two other egregiously misleading articles by Barry in the NYT, and now we have a third. On New Year’s day, Barry published “A Dilemma for Russian Leaders, to Suppress Protests or Not” and the NYT touted it as a main feature on the home page of its website.

Ironically, that same day the Moscow Times reported that the Kremlin had ordered mass arrests of protesters just the day before. No dilemma here, folks. When Putin wants to arrest, he does so.

And that wasn’t the only key fact Barry totally ignored.  She also chose not to mention that protest activity in Moscow other than the 12/10 and 12/24 rallies organized by nationalist Aleksei Navalny were dismal failures (we refer specifically to the rally Yabloko organized and the demonstration in support of opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov — in both cases, only a tiny fraction of the Internet support materialized on the streets, and organizers were embarrassed).  Moreover, she ignored the fact that the protests on 12/24 were not remotely national in scope; Navalny was exposed as being unable to generate support of that kind.

Barry also chose to ignore recent polls that clearly show Russians rejecting both the message and the messenger where Navalny is concerned, and those that show support for Putin rising markedly the more Navalny works to discredit him.   Far from calling for “political rights” as Barry inaccurately reports, the only thing the protesters have asked for has been rerun of the parliamentary elections so that the communists and nationalists can collect (even) more votes.

Barry’s attempt to link the Moscow protests to the revolution that toppled the Tsar is so ludicrous as to bespeak mental illness. Navalny has not even tried to become a candidate for office, much less does he preside over anything remotely like a national political movement. And for good reason:  He doesn’t have a national base of support, just a clique in Moscow that follows him on the Internet.  He’s a Russian version of Joel Osteen or Howard Stern.

Then Barry just starts lying. She writes: “ The crowd is pausing now, as for a deep breath.” That’s totally false. The reason the crowd is pausing is to drink itself silly for several weeks in celebration of the New Year’s holiday. It’s pretty telling that Russians care more about a drunken party than they do about their country’s future.  Also pretty telling how aggressively Barry seeks to rationalize this failure rather than expose it.

One has the distinct impression that, at least subconsciously, Barry knows that the lack of arrests on 12/10 and 12/24 is not good for her narrative about revolution in Russia, a narrative which just so happens to call for her Russia-reporting services to become much more important and sensational (only a coincidence, of course). So she’s eager to invent a rationalization which has Putin fretting and worried about what to do next.  But the fact is that the protesters are simply not that scary, and Putin can’t be bothered to confront them.  The protesters don’t have a dog in the March presidential race, just as they didn’t have one in the parliamentary elections in December.  They don’t have a credible agenda, and they don’t show real revolutionary fervor (they won’t demonstrate at all in the month of January).  Putin is not the least bit unclear about when to order arrests and when to ignore the protesters. It is the protesters who are fretting and worrying, and Putin who is smiling.

Quite simply, this is not journalism, it is  self-interested cheerleading, and Ms. Barry ought to be ashamed. We call for her to apologize and begin telling the truth about the protests in Moscow.