In Putin's pocket

Jake Rudnitsky, a columnist for the almost-certain-to-be-shut-down-soon Moscow alternative paper The eXile, thrashes Western leftists so blinded by anti-Bush hatred that they believe Ukraine's Orange Revolution is an Anglo-American plot. In particular, he notes that The Guardian's Jonathan Steele has been treated very, very well by the Kremlin:

They'd have it that US putschists rather than massive electoral fraud and state corruption inspired Ukraine's protests. Most of these reports have one thing in common -- they're all within a couple of degrees of separation from the Guardian and Jonathan Steele, probably the single most corrupt Western journalist writing about this region today.

Taking money or favors to write articles is pretty much the bukkake shot of journalism. It is the most debasing thing a journo can do. And Steele, the Guardian's senior foreign correspondent, wasn't content just having several splashes drip down his face; he did it for cheap.

Steele has gone on at least two 5-star Kremlin-sponsored junkets in the last four months, and not surprisingly, he is also taking the Kremlin's line. Yet he keeps getting printed in the Guardian and in The Nation. His first junket was the Valdai Discussion Group in early September, in which several journalists and Russia experts were invited by the state-owned RIA-Novosti news agency to a plush conference that featured meetings with Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Ivan Ivanov. Steele, who at the time was criticized by Evgenia Albats in Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, defended himself on Johnson's Russia List by writing, "There is no blanket ban [on accepting paid trips at the Guardian]. If they provide unique access which would not otherwise be attainable, they are acceptable -- provided the invitation is acknowledged at some point in the material which arises from it."

So, what "unique access" was offered during his expense-paid October trip to Kiev? As Steele admitted in the Guardian, this trip, taken in between the first and second rounds of the Ukrainian election, was paid for by the Russia Club. (Note that he didn't say who paid his way when writing for The Nation.) What Steele did not mention in the Guardian is that this club was a Russian-financed think tank created this spring exclusively with the goal of getting Viktor Yanukovich elected. It was the brainchild of Gleb Pavlovsky, the powerful Kremlin spin doctor and one of the chief propagandists of the Yanukovich campaign. Any doubts about what the Russia Club's agenda was should be erased by the fact that, after months of organizing weekly roundtables, it has completely vanished in the weeks following the elections.

Pavlovsky probably picked Steele because he's an old school America basher. His pet issue these days is dismantling NATO and creating a pan-European force in its place. Pavlovsky must have calculated that Steele already had an anti-American disposition that only needed a little coddling at the Premier Palace Hotel to toe his line. Not surprisingly, Steele's articles, "Where the cold war never died," "Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat," and, in The Nation, "Ukraine's Untold Story," completely parrot his sugar daddy. One indication that Pavlovsky was pleased with his investment in Steele was that gazeta.ru, a site linked to the spin doctor, published an article summing up Steele's writings that gleefully led, "The Western media's views of the political crisis in Ukraine have become less single-minded." Steele's articles have been quoted repeatedly on Russian TV as proof that the Orange Revolution is little more than an American coup d'etat, that the events in Ukraine were illegal and the result of a vast anti-Russian conspiracy. These same reports give little mention the massive falsification that caused the protests in the first place, or the hundreds of millions that the Kremlin poured into Yanukovich's campaign. Steele's article, not surprisingly, also downplays the electoral fraud in favor of evil American conspiracies.

(via Le Sabot Post-Moderne, found via InstaPundit)

Posted by damian at January 4, 2005 08:57 PM