Sunday, August 28, 2016

New York Times story about Russian disinformation campaigns

You read this long article and there is not one evidence to substantiate the claims of the story.  And here are the sources: "numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect".  Don't you like "numerous analysts"?  Can you imagine an undergraduate using such language for a source in a research paper?  And now this passage about the innocence of US government: "The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War."  Why not write something like this: the US government can never tell a lie.  But this is the best part: when the New York Times attributes negative perceptions of the US in Czech republic to...Russian disinformation; that there could not be another reason for such negative perception: "poll this summer by European Values, a think tank in Prague, found that 51 percent of Czechs viewed the United States’ role in Europe negatively".  And the article concludes by maintaining that any person, left or right, who deviates from US narrative of world affairs is merely a victim of Russian disinformation.  Increasingly, US media remind me of media back home in the Middle East.  The subtlety of the propaganda has all but disappeared.