Monday, January 08, 2018
CBS Takes on RT; Falls on its Face
I honestly don't think it's my preexisting bias to say that Margarita Simonyan, Editor-in-Chief of RT, absolutely destroys CBS' Leslie Stahl in this interview. Stahl does a great job parroting U.S. accusations but little else, starting with an unimportant but basic factual error ("RT" no longer stands for "Russia Today", just like "KFC" no longer stands for "Kentucky Fried Chicken") and going on from there.
Although only a tiny number of Americans can actually watch RT on their televisions, Stahl tries to scare us by letting us know that RT videos have had up to 2B views on YouTube. Sounds like a lot right? That's for all their videos combined. Gangnam Style has had 3B views all by itself. She accuses RT of broadcasting "a steady diet of violent protests and racial conflict." Does it occur to her they could only do that if there were a steady stream of such news? And, by the way, cops killing Black people isn't "racial conflict", it's cop terror.
Stahl slams RT for broadcasting white supremacists like Richard Spencer but he and people like him get orders of magnitude more exposure on FOX News, or even on CNN (e.g., here). And as for broadcasting people slamming Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, again as if those broadcasts had the tiniest fraction of the views of identical criticism of Clinton on FOX News.
In what I thought the most amusing moment, Stahl also criticizes RT for interviewing…wait for it…actors! Yes, you never see that on American news channels.
I'll close by asking a simple question. If RT had been "in the tank" for Hillary Clinton, and had broadcast a steady stream of glowing news stories about Clinton and negative ones about Trump, and Clinton had won, or even if Trump had still won, is there anyone who thinks that "Russiagate" would be a thing now? Not a chance, even though in that hypothetical case alleged Russian interference would have been just as great (or, in my postulated scenario, even greater and more clear cut).
Russian "interference" is an excuse invented by the Clinton camp to provide a convenient excuse for their loss and to ward off the ascension of the Sanders wing of the party, and picked up and amplified by the entire establishment because it helps elevate an "enemy" that can be used to justify a trillion dollar war budget (as I've said before, ISIS doesn't have a navy or an air force or even anti-aircraft guns, so justifying advanced weaponry based on ISIS or Al Qaeda as your main foe just doesn't cut the mustard). And those of you who are on that bandwagon are doing your part, however inadvertently, to join in that justification, and the simultaneous destruction of the social fabric of this country (because that trillion dollars has to come from somewhere, and it sure isn't coming from taxing the rich or the corporations). Which is a particular shame coming from those of you who are "Sandernistas".
