December 19-20, 2013 -- Putin cracks down on Soros influence in Russian state media
Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken proactive measures against a Russian state media organization which had been infiltrated by journalists who could hardly be distinguished from the raft of paid propagandists who have been targeting the Russian government for years.
The English-language Russian state-owned news broadcaster RT, formerly "Russia Today," came under the sights of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors Walter Isaacson before the launching of the "Arab Spring" movement. Clinton and Isaacson bemoaned the fact that RT was trumping the U.S. propaganda networks in ratings, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Asia/Liberty at a time when the Russian and Western broadcast media were facing off in a way not seen since the Cold War. Alarming to the Obama administration was the fact that more and more Americans were seeking their news from news networks like RT and Al Jazeera and bypassing the traditional commercial and highly-controlled U.S. commercial news networks.
Soon, RT's studio in Washington, DC began regularly featuring guests and even hosts paid by pro-western think tanks and non-governmental organizations funded by anti-Putin hedge fund tycoon George Soros. Among these were the Center for American Progress, a pro-Barack Obama think tank funded by Soros and located around the corner from RT's studios. Many RT guests actually used and increasingly abused the network's airwaves to criticize Putin.
Under siege by the West in Kyiv's Maidan Square and facing boycotts and snubs at the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics, Putin acted swiftly. He announced that the parent of RT, the Russian Information Agency (RIA)/Novosti, which also ran the Voice of Russia, was being disestablished. Replacing RIA/Novosti was Rossiya Segodnya, which is Russian for "Russia Today," the same name that the RT English-language television news network once used.
RIA/Novosti and the Voice of Russia had been caught broadcasting anti-government content during the waves of 2012 anti-Putin demonstrations in Russia which were indistinguishable from that emanating from the Soros- and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/National Endowment for Democracy (NED)-funded media in Moscow and other cities in central and eastern Europe which once again followed the cookie-cutter recipes by Harvard’s Gene Sharp’s color revolution recipes which had been so successfully funded in a number of countries before. This editor's own experience with some Voice of Russia correspondents in the United States has been challenging, to say the least. In one instance, a West Coast Voice of Russia correspondent stooped down to calling a WMR story as a "conspiracy theory", the by now familiar buzzwords of mainstream media defamation of investigation of uncomfortable truths. Not surprisingly, an examination of the correspondent's background yielded a link to CIA activities. The same CIA links are apparent in the resumé of an RT host operating out of the network's Washington studio.
The new head of Russia Today is a popular news anchor on Rossiya 1 named Dmitry Kiselev. No sooner had Kiselev broadcast a news report featuring this WMR editor warning of a British embassy in Moscow plot to capture National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, Putin scrapped RIA/Novosti and named Kiselev the chief of the new Russia Today operation.
Putin not only signaled that he would no longer tolerate Russian state-paid journalists acting as ciphers for Soros and Western intelligence propaganda outlets, but he simultaneously telegraphed his confidence in Kiselev's reporting, including the report on the British embassy operation targeting Snowden.
On December 8, Rossiya 1 news anchor Dmitry Kiselev (left) broadcast a report on a British embassy spy plot to kidnap Edward Snowden that featured WMR editor. The next day, December 9, President Putin named Kiselev as the new head of a revamped state news organization called Russia Today, which combines the Voice of Russia, RT, and RIA.
Since his appointment, Kiselev has been denounced by the Soros- and U.S.-funded media in a far-reaching agitptop campaign throughout Russia, Europe, and the United States. He was immediately stereotyped with clichés from the Soros progressive linguistic war chest as a Cold Warrior, a homophobe, and a Putin lackey.
However, the Soros outlets fail to include the fact that Kiselev is the most popular news anchor in Russia and is viewed in the same manner by Russians that Walter Cronkite was once seen by Americans. Considering these strong characteristics, WMR warmly applauds the appointment of Mr. Kiselev and anticipates that the true voice of Russia will be restored and preserved and under his leadership will certainly not be replaced by the paid messages of Soros which are so common in the western world.
The purging of Soros-linked journalists from Russian state media will restore somewhat the checks-and-balances seen in global journalism during the Soviet era. The CIA constantly complained that the Soviet media continually placed "disinformation" in the western English-language media. However, these Soviet news stories, including those from Novosti and TASS, often exposed CIA and other U.S. covert operations that were largely ignored by the western media. Every time the CIA was caught involved in a clandestine operation, courtesy of the Soviet media, the U.S. State Department had to issue denial after denial. The fact that the stories were carried by the Soviet media did not make them untrue.
Some examples of the Soviet reporting of possible CIA misdeeds include:
- An alleged coup plot by the United States in Ghana in 1984.
- CIA involvement in the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi due to the CIA's role in bankrolling the Sikh uprising.
- Reports picked up by the Guyanese media that the CIA was behind the 1978 Jonestown massacre.
In an era when only a few corporations control most of the world's media, an aggressive Russian state-owned media is not only welcome but it is necessary.
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