NYT Dishes More Ukraine Propaganda

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

07 July 14

s you read or watch the mainstream U.S. media’s accounts of the Ukrainian government’s military offensive against ethnic Russians in East Ukraine, it’s worth remembering that these MSM outlets have been feeding Americans a highly biased narrative of the crisis non-stop from the beginning.

For instance, New York Times correspondent David M. Herszenhorn included in a largely celebratory account of the Ukrainian blitzkrieg that overwhelmed ethnic Russian positions in the town of Slovyansk on Saturday this summary of the conflict’s background:

“The separatist rebellion is the latest, bloodiest chapter in a crisis that began in November after Viktor F. Yanukovych, then Ukraine’s president, rejected a trade accord he had promised to sign with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. Protesters took to the streets of Kiev, eventually driving Mr. Yanukovych from office. Within a week, Russia invaded Crimea, then annexed the peninsula.”

Herszenhorn, like nearly all his MSM colleagues, simply can’t find it within himself to display the journalistic integrity needed to present an evenhanded and unbiased explication of how this crisis unfolded. Instead, it’s all about blaming Ukraine’s elected President Yanukovych and Russian President Vladimir Putin for everything.

Always absent is the fact that the EU’s trade accord came with a draconian International Monetary Fund austerity plan attached, a prescription to inflict even more pain on the people of Ukraine who have suffered under a post-Soviet economic system dominated by a handful of corrupt oligarchs. The IMF plan would have simply hit the average Ukrainian even harder — with elimination of heating subsidies and devaluation of their currency – while the Ukrainian oligarchs and their Western financial backers would have escaped the pain, as usual. In rejecting the IMF scheme, Yanukovych opted for a more generous $15 billion loan deal from Moscow.

Blind to the Neo-Nazis

Herszenhorn’s narrative also excludes the key role of neo-Nazi militias that were organized in 100-man units to serve as the tip of the spear in the Feb. 22 coup that drove Yanukovych and his government from power. In recognition of their key role in the coup, the neo-Nazis were awarded several ministries in the new government, including the office of national security.

Then, there is the cherished MSM tale of the Russian “invasion” of Crimea, which – unlike every other “invasion” in history – did not involve military forces crossing an international border. Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea under an agreement with Ukraine’s government. And, the impetus for Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and rejoining Russia came from the local government and the Crimean people, not from Russian military force. But repetition of the words “invasion” and “annexation” is needed to elicit the desired revulsion from the American people.

It’s also never noted that after the Feb. 22 coup, the new regime dutifully approved the harsh IMF austerity plan that even Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – the new leader hand-picked by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland – acknowledged was “very unpopular, very difficult, very tough.”

All in all, the Ukraine case has been a curious example of U.S.–backed “democracy promotion” – overthrowing a democratically elected leader so a coup regime could impose a “very unpopular” austerity plan on an already suffering population. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukrainians Get IMF’s Bitter Medicine.”]

Among the Worst

The Times’ Herszenhorn has been among the most biased of a long list of biased MSM correspondents who have enforced the false narrative about Ukraine. Indeed, the oppressive “group think” – blending State Department propaganda with its amen chorus of the MSM – has made formulating any rational policy toward Russia and Ukraine politically impossible in Official Washington.

It seems that the safe career play is always to go for the most extreme examples of Russian perfidy. For instance, in mid-April, the Times published a front-page story by Herszenhorn excoriating Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev for engaging in clumsy propaganda.

In the article entitled “Russia Is Quick To Bend Truth About Ukraine,” Herszenhorn mocked Medvedev for making a Facebook posting that “was bleak and full of dread,” including noting that “blood has been spilled in Ukraine again” and adding that “the threat of civil war looms.”

The Times article continued, “He [Medvedev] pleaded with Ukrainians to decide their own future ‘without usurpers, nationalists and bandits, without tanks or armored vehicles – and without secret visits by the C.I.A. director.’ And so began another day of bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies about the political crisis in Ukraine that have emanated from the highest echelons of the Kremlin and reverberated on state-controlled Russian television, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.”

This argumentative “news” story spilled from the front page to the top half of an inside page, but Herszenhorn never managed to mention that there was nothing false in what Medvedev wrote. Indeed, as the bloodshed has grown worse and a civil war has become obvious, you might say Medvedev was tragically prescient.

It was also the much-maligned Russian press that first reported the secret visit of CIA Director John Brennan to Kiev. Though the White House later confirmed that report, Herszenhorn cited Medvedev’s reference to it in the context of “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.” Nowhere in the long article did the Times inform its readers that, yes, the CIA director did make a secret visit to Ukraine.

Now, as the Kiev regime celebrates its bloody conquest of the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, it might be advisable for Americans who don’t want to continue being deceived by U.S. government/media propaganda to recognize – and reject – these one-sided and false narratives. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, Though the US ‘Looking Glass’” or The Nation’s “The Silence of America’s Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities.”]

Punching Gloria Steinem: Inside the Bizarre World of Anti-Feminist Women

By Jessica Valenti, Guardian UK

07 July 14

How do you make sense of women who think the Hobby Lobby decision is 'great', college rape is 'inflated' and pay gaps don't exist? Just don't let 'em stop you

very so often, one woman engages with me on Twitter who is against women's suffrage. That's right - she believes women shouldn't have the right to vote. I always hoped it was a fake account, but no - this anti-suffrage enthusiast runs a blog where she writes about religion alongside recipes. It seems the only thing we have in common is a love of beets.

When men are against feminism, it's frustrating, if ultimately predictable - groups with power have always been loathe to give it up. But when women come out against gender justice, it feels worse: no matter how fringe, the rise of the anti-feminist woman is not just baffling but a betrayal.

Obviously "women" aren't a monolith, and neither are the issues that they care about or believe in. But anti-feminist organizing is based on a deep hypocrisy and selfishness - an ideology built to assure conservative women that as long as they are doing just fine, other women will make do. And they're putting up roadblocks to progress right in the middle of a renewed feminist awakening, with retrograde sexism that's ultimately not too different than that of their male counterparts.

Last week, for example, the US supreme court's Hobby Lobby decision left most women's groups livid. Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, called it "a shocking disregard for women's health and lives." The co-president of the National Women's Law Center, Marcia Greenberger, said the ruling gave companies "a license to harm their female employees in the name of religion."

But the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) - a conservative women's group with at least a quarter-million dollars in financial ties to Rush Limbaugh - called the decision "undoubtedly good news". The group's director of cultural programs, Charlotte Hays, told a crowd outside the court, "This is a great day," and called the ruling a victory "for anyone who believes in freedom of conscience." This from the same woman who has written that women shouldn't be astronauts and that rape culture on college campuses is all "inflated numbers" and "hysteria".

This latest crop of female anti-feminists - powerful, Washington-based organizations like IWF and Concerned Women for America - want to repeal the Violence Against Women Act and argue that pay inequity doesn't exist. These organizations, along with a handful of popular writers and authors, want to convince women that it's men who are the underserved sex. They want to convince you that inequality is just a trade-off.

And as much as feminists are accused of obsessing over women's sexuality - as if by putting so much effort into abortion and birth control, we're reducing women's issues to those below the belt - it is the well-funded, poorly researched anti-feminists who can't seem to get their minds off sex.

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, for example, had a campaign to "bring back the hope chest", and published a short booklet for college women called Sense and Sexuality, which doles out advice – in pink cursive writing – like this: "The rectum is an exit, not an entrance." (As you can imagine, neither of these campaigns went viral.)

And IWF, a group that claims not to take a stance on social issues, runs a campus program dedicated to shutting down performances of the Vagina Monologues and funds research into how "hooking up" hurts women.

Ronnee Schreiber, author of Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics, thinks the anti-feminist focus on sexuality is a throwback to the issue of "respect". "The idea is that men will treat women better if we present ourselves respectfully," Schreiber tells me. In fact, much of the anti-feminist work – new and old – has been based on the idea that if women aren't on a pedestal - sexual and otherwise – then men will act out.

As for all those rights won by so many feminists on behalf of so many more American women, the sad truth is that they fought other women every step of the way. Indeed, we live in a country with a long history of anti-feminist women: Before we had women like Christina Hoff Sommers and Katie Roiphe arguing that feminism was hurting men and that date rape wasn't real, respectively, women were leaders in in the anti-suffrage movement of the early 1900s. And it was a woman - Phyllis Schlafly - who led the charge against the Equal Rights Amendment in the '70s. Schreiber points out that some of the debates against the ERA were about "masculinity run amok": "Phyllis Schlafly said if we were are treated as equals, then men will shirk their responsibilities," she notes.

Remind me: Who are the man-haters again?

Between the last presidential election and the next one, between the feminist social media explosion and even Beyoncé coming out in our corner, right now is one of the most exciting times for feminism in decades. Yet here we have female anti-feminists - emboldened by Sarah Palin's faux-feminist movement - raining on our progress parade. And it is especially irritating given that they're using their gender as part of their organizing strategy. "It's an identity politics angle that they criticize but often invoke," Schreiber says.

Women stopping the progress of other women – especially those who don't have the power and prestige to work for DC think-tanks or pen anti-feminist books - stings much more than when men do it. That may be a double standard, or naive - I don't believe in an all-encompassing sisterhood, after all – though it does remind me of how powerful feminists really are: we've taken on not just the men in our way, but the women as well.

"If I saw Gloria Steinem," the Fox pundit Andrea Tantoros likes to say, "I don't know if I'd hug her or punch her." I don't know about you, but I’m putting my money on Gloria.