Recycling NYT's shoddy journalism cheaper than producing your own

News-hungry hicks in these parts rush to the newsstands bright and early every Sunday to get their hands on The New York Times International Weekly, which comes as a supplement with the Sunday Star. This week we were rewarded with a front-pager titled “Deception Fuels Tilt To Nativism In Sweden,” which is a recycled version of this story which ran in the mother ship a week earlier.

The gist of the story is that anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden are due not to reckless immigration policies that brought in migrants in substantially greater quantities than could be readily assimilated. Nope, it’s not that… it’s Putin!

That’s right! Kremlin troll farms are doing their devious best to “…weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate,” thereby opening the eyes of the docile Swedes to the fact that some neighbourhoods in their country have become ghettos of dark-skinned people.

I’m no expert on Sweden, but I have a hunch the Swedes would have noticed that without prodding from Kremlin trolls. What we have here is not a news story per se, but just another exercise in Russia bashing.

Writer Jo Becker quotes an expert from the “Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit that tracks extremism,” to lend the story a sense of gravitas.

Here’s what you should know about the Institute for Strategic Dialogue Becker neglects to mention. Its “partners and funders” include:

•  Brookings Institution
• Chatham House
• Google
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Yale University
• British Council
• Open Societies Foundation (Soros)
• International Republican Institute
• US State Department
• UK Foreign Office
• Governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Canada