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Last Monday, the ABC’s Media Watch did something surprising. Its presenter, Paul Barry, cast a critical eye on Aussie media coverage of the Ukrainian war. The event catching Barry’s attention was the missile that hit a Polish town, killing two farmers.
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Unless you were comatose, you must have seen the veritable procession of “experts” coming out of the woodwork to pontificate on the latest Russian outrage.
It’s hard to pick a winner, but after much thought my vote for the most idiotic comment must go to Greg Sheridan, The Australian’s
“It’s hard to imagine that anyone else fired the missile except the Russians”, said Sheridan. “Joe Biden said it didn’t seem to come from Russia, so presumably it was fired from Donbas or Crimea or perhaps from the sea. Russia fired 100 missiles on Ukraine in a day. No one else was firing missiles on Ukraine”.
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Barry rightly castigates the unexamined assumption common to all those irresponsible boofheads and their equally stupid media enablers: that the Russkies fired that fucking missile (even though the Ukrainians also use the same damned missile; indeed even as people like Biden, Stoltenberg and Co had already cautioned that the missile had probably been launched by the Ukrainians).
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Barry puts that failure down to stories developing faster than journos can follow them. There may be something to that, but I don’t find his explanation fully persuasive: the Russians were quick to deny responsibility. Aussie journos either dismissed their denials as lies or did not even consider them.
But then, he really jumps the shark. He thinks that The Australian was particularly slow to correct itself because its former editor-in-chief had suddenly resigned.
The elephant in the room that Barry cannot see or is unwilling to admit is that merely hours after the event hit the headlines, Zelensky had already concluded beyond any doubt that it was all Russia’s fault and that it vindicated his repeated and unhinged warnings that Russian
And he knew that his cheerleaders in the Western media, including those in the ABC, sharing his Russophobia, would automatically, uncritically accept his word as Gospel truth.
Zelensky wanted Poland to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. The missile was just the right pretext. Tough luck for the world it that means the start of World War III. That is why he insists, against all reason, that the missile is Russky.
The problem for Zelensky is that his American masters are rational enough to not want a direct military confrontation with Russia: it could turn nuclear in no time at all. Instead, the Yanks are happy to fight the Russkies to the last Ukrainian in a conventional warfare.
Learn your place, Volodya Z, you are not Biden’s peer or friend, you are his puppet, his proxy. The President of the Ukraine may be hot shit in the Ukraine, but it is just small fry to Biden.
And you, Biden, realise that you are playing a very dangerous game. Things could go out of hand very quickly. This is just an example.