Fact-Checking The Ukrainian Revolution
In 2008, while covering the Republican Convention, I bumped into Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow!, and I was star struck. When Russia Today announced that Julian Assange would get his own show, I thought that was brilliant and couldn’t wait to watch it. One of my more interesting email newsletter subscriptions comes from CounterPunch, a political website in Portland, Oregon—that lovable hipster Narnia. But now that my mainstays in alternative media are covering the revolution in Ukraine—a part of the world I have lived in and researched extensively for years—it’s left me heartbroken, and wondering: If Russia Today, DemocracyNow!, and Counter Punch are spreading misinformation about Ukraine, what else have they been wrong about? By sharing their articles in the past, have I helped them blur the truth?
Ukraine has a history of being the victim of media conspiracy. In 1933, the Western mainstream media deliberately covered-up Stalin’s genocide famine in Ukraine that starved to death many millions. Stalin, a great statistician himself, cited 10 million dead. Eugene Lyons, a reporter for UPI in Moscow, confessed to the cover-up in his tell-all memoir Assignment in Utopia. It was reviewed by Orwell and helped inspire ideas for 1984, namely the slogan: 2+2=5.
Before reading this article, had you heard of the famine? There’s a reason why most people still don’t know that many millions of Ukrainians were starved to death by their government in a single year; the Western media, confined to Moscow, was successful in ignoring “the rumors.” In one notorious instance some of the world’s most influential foreign reporters ganged up on a brave, young, independent journalist named Gareth Jones, by publishing articles full of lies that contradicted Jones’ fearless eye-witness reporting. The media’s silence or flat-out denials helped the Kremlin keep the truth of the famine locked behind the Iron Curtain. It eventually became reserved to the world of academia, where it was debated for generations.
Today the alternative media is the Kremlin’s little helper. Many Americans are infuriated with our government’s NSA spying and wars-for-profit, and obviously rightfully so. But their anger toward American neocons seems projected onto a revolution that would inspire free thinkers and freedom fighters. If only they could forgive The New York Times for Judith Miller, they would trust the incredible reporting the paper is doing on the ground in Ukraine. Yes, corporate media is fiercely generic and prefers covering shiny celebrity objects; but its ability to afford fact-checkers and travel budgets can lead to some damn good reporting.
Here’s what you need to be aware of as the situation in Ukraine develops:
Any article that links to Russia Today (RT) to cite a “fact” was written by a lazy journalist. It’s well-known that Russia Today was started by the Russian government, which has a history of imprisoning and killing investigative journalists.
Continues in link: http://thoughtcatalog.com/andrea-chalupa/2014/02/fact-checking-the-ukrainian-revolution/
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