[Media-watch] The revolution televised

John Meed johnmeed at britishlibrary.net
Mon Nov 29 09:22:58 GMT 2004



http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360951,00.html

The revolution televised

The western media's view of Ukraine's election is hopelessly biased

John Laughland
Saturday November 27, 2004
The Guardian

There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the right
stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more. This week
both the anti-war Independent and the pro-war Telegraph excitedly announced
a "revolution" in Ukraine. Across the pond, the rightwing Washington Times
welcomed "the people versus the power".

Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or
Ukraine now, our media regularly peddle the same fairy tale about how
youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime, simply
by attending a rock concert in a central square. Two million anti-war
demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically
ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be
"the people", while the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental
institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.

The western imagination is now so gripped by its own mythology of popular
revolution that we have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double
standards in media reporting. Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in
support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are not shown on
our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters are
denigrated as having been "bussed in". The demonstrations in favour of
Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound
systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange
clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.


Or again, we are told that a 96% turnout in Donetsk, the home town of Viktor
Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of over 80%
in areas which support Viktor Yushchenko are not. Nor are actual scores for
Yushchenko of well over 90% in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved only
in two. And whereas Yanukovich's final official score was 54%, the
western-backed president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled
96.24% of the vote in his country in January. The observers who now denounce
the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it
"brought the country closer to meeting international standards".

The blindness extends even to the posters which the "pro-democracy" group,
Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a jackboot crushing a
beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its opponents.

Such dehumanisation of enemies has well-known antecedents - not least in
Nazi-occupied Ukraine itself, when pre-emptive war was waged against the Red
Plague emanating from Moscow - yet these posters have passed without
comment. Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students
having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister organisations in
Serbia and Georgia, Otpor and Kmara - Pora is an organisation created and
financed by Washington.

It gets worse. Plunging into the crowd of Yushchenko supporters in
Independence Square after the first round of the election, I met two members
of Una-Unso, a neo-Nazi party whose emblem is a swastika. They were
unembarrassed about their allegiance, perhaps because last year Yushchenko
and his allies stood up for the Socialist party newspaper, Silski Visti,
after it ran an anti-semitic article claiming that Jews had invaded Ukraine
alongside the Wehrmacht in 1941. On September 19 2004, Yushchenko's ally,
Alexander Moroz, told JTA-Global Jewish News: "I have defended Silski Visti
and will continue to do so. I personally think the argument ... citing
400,000 Jews in the SS is incorrect, but I am not in a position to know all
the facts." Yushchenko, Moroz and their oligarch ally, Yulia Tymoshenko,
meanwhile, cited a court order closing the paper as evidence of the
government's desire to muzzle the media. In any other country, support for
anti-semites would be shocking; in this case, our media do not even mention
it.

Voters in Britain and the US have witnessed their governments lying brazenly
about Iraq for over a year in the run-up to war, and with impunity. This is
an enormous dysfunction in our own so-called democratic system. Our tendency
to paint political fantasies on to countries such as Ukraine which are
tabula rasa for us, and to present the west as a fairy godmother swooping in
to save the day, is not only a way to salve a guilty conscience about our
own political shortcomings; it also blinds us to the reality of continued
brazen western intervention in the democratic politics of other countries.

Š John Laughland is a trustee of www.oscewatch.org and an associate of
www.sandersresearch.com






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