[lbo-talk] US Journalism Continues Descent Into Abyss

[Sean Andrews]

I may be a complete dolt, and I hardly know enough about the facts
he's discussing to judge their truth or objectivity, but I read the
article and it seemed mostly concerned with the issues around the
deaths of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko.  Though I can see the banality
of the "liberal" journalists he claims to be in touch with in the
context and the sheer dissmissal he seems to have for the ability of
ordinary Russians to even desire muchless change things, the real
upshot seems to be that Putin is a major asshole.  Berezovsky barely
figures into the narrative and when he does, he hardly seems like a
good guy--just an opponent of Putin who is both bad and in control of
the state, thus even worse.  As for racialized hatred and genocidal
fury, I am obviously innocent of any knowledge of Russian politics
becase I thought the article was mostly about how hard it was to
actually report on the truth of what was happening to the Chechens..

I have no way to quibble with any of your assessment below, but on the
whole the article seems like standard US journalism and a pretty
mainstream account of what is going on in Putin's Russia.  So not only
did I not share your violent repulsion upon reading it, but I can only
see minor threads of it that even resemble your judgment below.  I
know it might be a lot to ask, but would you care to explain what I
should have found repulsive about the article?  On the one hand I'd
like to know what you think and, on the other hand, it seems that what
you think is directly related to what you think people on the list
think, at least in terms of present conditions in Russia. On the
whole, most of what he says (except for his seeming agreement with the
idea that Kremlin poisoned Litvinenko) seems to gel with much of what
people have said about Putin, etc. on the list.  What has this guy got
so wrong that four walls are three too many for him?  Or, more
precisely, what takes him to a deeper level of the abyss?  For now, I
am far from convinced that he deserves any kind of award.

-s

On 2/10/07, Dennis Redmond <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> I know it's still early in the year, but I hereby nominate Michael
> Specter's "Kremlin Inc." in the January 27, 2007 issue of the New Yorker
> as the most egregiously awful piece of craptastic, xenophobic, lickspittle
> piece of US-propaganda-masquerading-as-journalism of the year. Beneath
> Specter's pro-democracy patter, salted with homilies from that patron
> saint of humanity, Boris Berezovsky (I couldn't make this up if I tried),
> lurks an abyss of racialized hatred and genocidal fury at the failure of
> neoliberalism's victims to simply roll over and die.
>
> -- DRR
>
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