Mainstream media and the Ministry of Truth

With the latest tweaks to the Google algorithms that decide who might or might not happen upon this blog, I think my regular readership has dwindled down to Mum, Dad, my old pal Kipling, and Ken from BC. A blog that for several years had three to four thousand looks per month struggles to attract two dozen per day.

Why?

I don’t think the problem is the quality of the writing. Hell no! In fact, this blog is pure poetry compared to a lot of stuff out there!

No, I think it’s more about content… and there is no denying that a lot of stuff here falls afoul of the parameters set out by the freshly minted “Critical Election Incident Protocol Group,” also known as the Ministry of Truth.

Those are the folks charged with making sure the general public doesn’t get exposed to “fake news.” What is fake news? It’s anything that doesn’t jive with official Western ideology as promulgated by NATO, the Atlantic Council, and “mainstream” media.

Let me walk you through today’s Globe and Mail to provide a few examples of this phenomenon.

The Globe and Mail remains, pretensions of Postmaster Paul Godfrey aside, Canada’s “newspaper of record.” The front page today is the first of a five page nothingburger about Bad Vlad’s “seizure” of Crimea. A couple of thousand words into the story, Mark MacKinnon acknowledges that “most Crimeans did, and do, favour union with Russia.”

In other words, there’s no actual story here. You can call the Crimean referendum a “sham” all you want, but once you’ve acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans prefer being part of Russia to remaining part of Ukraine, there is no point in pursing this line of reasoning.

Elizabeth Renzetti’s service to objective journalism I’ve already dealt with, in a post that has garnered a grand total of one page view several hours after it was published.

In the “opinion” section, we’ve got Mr. Renzetti, Canada’s answer to Thomas Friedman, giving over his entire column to Bill Browder’s paranoid fantasies. Apparently Bill is disappointed that Canada has failed to take a leadership role in his campaign to slander Putin and glorify himself. We’ve done much, but we coulda done more!

Here’s how Doug characterizes Browder’s wholesale looting of the post-Soviet Russian economy; “Bill Browder… became very wealthy running an investment fund that profited from Russia’s awkward postcommunist transition.”

I guess that’s one way of putting it.

Not only did Browder make himself very wealthy on the backs of the impoverished Russian populace, he has been gifted with a CIA-supplied magic wand that opens up editorial board rooms of newspapers of record throughout the “free” world!

So, in this new era of post-truth Truths, you can bet that the fantasies of a Bill Browder will meet the truthiness criteria of the “Critical Election Incident Protocol Group” with flying colours, whereas any dissenting opinions will be well and truly buried.