Ukraine: Media not just ignoring reality but deceiving with naked propaganda

Following on from the previous post about the media ignoring what the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement actually does (clue, no, it’s not a mere trade agreement), we are increasingly seeing the media pushing a narrative that can only be described as outright propaganda that seeks to conceal the EU’s actions, behaviour and responsibility for the crisis.

Yesterday, without any journalistic integrity or commitment to sharing news rather than views, the Telegraph and its ‘experts’ grandly waded further into the Ukraine story with a podcast that can only be described as a rank perversion of the facts and a corruption of the historical record of events surrounding the Ukraine crisis.

The podcast was introduced on the page in the following way:

Power corrupts and it has corrupted Vladimir Putin absolutely. As the drama in Ukraine continues, we examine the mind and motivations of the man responsible.

Ian H Robertson, Professor in Psychology at Trinity College Dublin and author of The Winner Effect: How Power Affects Your Brain, explains how over time the need for power messes with the synapses and induces megalomania. The Professor tells us that the only way the West can get under Vladimir Putin’s skin is through practical sanctions.

Benedict Brogan and Con Coughlin discuss what those sanctions might look like, and if Britain even has the interest or clout to help resolve this dangerous crisis.

This is just staggering.  Describing Putin as the man responsible for the Ukraine crisis is ludicrous. We can but guess why the real culprit in this caper is being treated as if it doesn’t exist and has no bearing on events over recent months.

It was not Putin who was pursuing a policy designed to promote a gradual convergence on legal, social, foreign and security matters with the aim of ever-deeper involvement with Ukraine, it was the European Union.  The EU has a sole foreign policy (which means it is UK foreign policy) of enlarging itself so it can take control of more and more countries across the continent.

You’re ignoring me again!

The EU has already taken control of the Baltic countries, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia and they have also become part of NATO.  The EU had already started trying to do the same thing with Georgia and has been doing the same thing with Ukraine.  This has happened despite the west (NATO) promising Mikhail Gorbachev that they would not expand up to the Russian border.  But that is exactly what is happening.

It is laughable of Brogan and Coughlin to talk about power corrupting, and completely ignore that this defines what we are seeing with the EU.  It is equally laughable that they engage a professor of psychology to talk about how the need for power messes with the synapses and induces megalomania while ignoring the EU’s aggressive efforts to enlarge itself and take control of new countries.

As for practical sanctions supposedly being the only way to get under Putin’s skin, the evidence shows that bad faith, lies and broken promises are the way to achieve that – which is why the Russians have acted to secure territory that had long been sovereign Russian territory and is home to a Russian naval fleet.  Finally, asking if Britain has the interest or clout to help resolve this crisis, when we have been party to its creation thanks to this country’s support of the Association Agreement with Ukraine and readiness to ratify this power grab by our supreme government, is pure sophistry.

This is yet another compelling reason for the UK to leave the EU. We have no business furthering such an agenda.

How far the Telegraph has travelled from the days where it reported news and facts.  Now it is a tool of deception that treats its remaining (declining) readership with utter contempt.

Where is that?

Busy busy busy at the moment. But just spotted this in the Failygraph.  Is it any wonder sales are falling when the nation’s supposedly leading broadsheet boasts such basic errors as these?

If there is such an evident lack of attention to detail in the copy by highly paid professionals, how can we trust the paper not to lack attention to crucial details in its news reporting?

Year on year the Failygraph’s average daily circulation is down 7% to below 590,000.  It’s even worse at the Financial Times and the Guardian, where year on year average daily circulation is down 14.4% and 13.1% respectively according to the Press Gazette.  There are a number of reasons for the decline but it is not helped by the freefall in standards and factual news reporting.

December’s newspaper circulation figures…

Arctic Sea Ice – How Telegraph furthers eco spin against substance

Richard North, writing on his EU Referendum blog, has a stonking post that demonstrates the power of substance over spin – while underlining how far the media’s standards have fallen as it publishes assertions in letters columns that are demonstrably false; written by people posing as ordinary members of the public but who are in fact part of environmental organisations.

The letter (below, scroll down on this page), sent in by one ‘Roger Plenty’ from Gloucestershire, takes issue with Christopher Booker’s column last week:

North is having none of it, and rightly so, as the historical evidence-backed facts about the use of the North East Passage roundly pull to pieces Roger Plenty’s fanciful fiction.  North’s post is a triumph of substance over eco spin.

But perhaps there is more to this story.  It seems Plenty’s flight of fancy on the Telegraph’s letters page can be attributed to misleading ‘news’ reporting by the Telegraph itself.  Booker’s inconvenient truths have got under Roger Plenty’s skin before because this isn’t the first time Plenty has been motivated to send a letter to the Telegraph in response to Booker on the subject of Arctic Ice.  In September 2007, Plenty contributed this letter (below, scroll down on this page) citing a source for his inaccurate claim:

So it is not just sloppy fact checking by the letters editor, the Telegraph’s news editor let misleading information through into publication.  Small wonder the eco activist Roger Plenty felt on safe ground to make his assertion four years on.  Granted he is referring to the North West Passage back then and the North East Passage today, but there is a reason they are both known as ‘passages’ – namely that shipping could transit through them, which is a matter of record.

What this shows is that the media has a lot to answer for, publishing information without context, or omitting key facts, that falls apart under scrutiny of the evidence.  To his credit, North was making this point in respect of the Telegraph back in 2008.  But it is time we found out whether it is mere sloppiness or if the Failygraph is deliberately complicit in furthering the spread of misinformation?

Regardless, Roger Plenty and his ludicrous claims have been completely discredited, which is an important part of ensuring more people get the facts and are reminded not to believe everything they read in the press.

Our lazy press and its appeals to authority

Scenario.  You’re a highly paid journalist working for what is considered by many as a heavyweight broadsheet with an international reputation.

The world economy is convulsing and an entire currency is sliding towards collapse, barely being held together by political interventions and actions that increasingly bind nations using that currency into fiscal and political union.

You secure an interview with one of the chief architects of that currency to talk about how this currency crisis came to be and whether he got it the design wrong.  It is time to prepare.

Do you:

a) Revise by looking back in detail as far as the interviewee’s report in the 1990s which formed the plan for the currency

b) Go back to the origins of the bigger project of which the single currency was merely a milestone, and the method of implementing change without stirring the people into revolt

c) Rock up to the interview with pad and tape recorder, ask if he got it wrong and accept whatever answer he gives as truthful fact and report it accordingly

If you answered ‘c’ then the Barclay Brothers might be interested in hiring you to work on their comic. It would explain the uncritical acceptance of the comments made by Jacques Delors in this piece by very grand Charles Moore (whose bio states he covers politics with wisdom and insight!), which is notable for the lack of any challenge of the points Delors makes.

There is a reason this blog describes the Telegraph as the Barclay Brother Beano, and Richard North’s tour de force on EU Referendum brings it into sharp relief.

While Moore faithfully relays the answers Delors provided to his lightweight questions – demonstrating a classic appeal to authority and lack of journalistic rigour – North does the job Moore should have done and gets into the history, the detail and the methodology to put into proper context what is happening now and why.

It puts a very different hue on Delors’ deceptive attempt to rewrite history and keep the masses in ignorance of the nature of the beast he loves and cherishes.

Update:  The BBC News is leading with the Delors interview furthering the ‘faulty execution’ line.  This is the derivative, unthinking media at its worst.

But what really stands out is how UKIP’s Nigel Farage has jumped into the story – spectacularly missing the point of the strategy behind the plan – to use Delors’ interview comments as evidence that the Euro was always destined to fail.  When Farage blows it this badly it vindicates my decision not to support his party.

Europlastics – Giving it to Telegraph readers straight

The best way to counter misrepresentation and falsehood is to present the facts.  Online readers of the Telegraph’s latest ludicrous ‘prop up the Tories’ editorial have been treated to some facts this morning by The Boiling Frog and yours truly.

It is all well and good using our blogs to tell people the reality – and with increasing visitor numbers our message is reaching more people. But when compared to the huge readership of the Telegraph site we cannot hope to challenge the propaganda anywhere near as much as we need to.  So we need to make use of the comments sections, when they are provided, and give it to readers straight. Presenting facts in a robust and responsible manner will ensure more people question what they are being told and perhaps look deeper to uncover the reality for themselves.

What are you waiting for dear reader? Away to the Telegraph site and firmly but politely give it to them straight.