The Atrocity of Western Mainstream Media
My 2017 book,
Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda (Routledge), chronicles the absurdly one-sided tunnel vision of Western mainstream media reporting on the 2014 “Euromaidan”
coup d’etat in Kiev. This toppled a duly elected, democratic regime (albeit doubtlessly corrupt — we are talking about Ukraine), one that was scheduled to present itself, again, to due electoral process within only months, and forcibly replaced it with one that was deeply unpopular with most people in eastern Ukraine as well as with a good many in western Ukraine. The administrations of the ensuing coup regime and its successors under Presidents Poroshenko and Zelenskiy, were far more corrupt, incompetent, and undemocratic (as in intimidation of the press, press closures, persecution, and assassination of dissidents, etc.), than their predecessor. They could claim “legitimacy” only by banning major political parties that opposed them. They were unduly compliant with the fascist militia that had provided the muscle behind the 2014 street demonstrations and that had fired on and killed dozens of protestors in an effort to smear Yanukovych’s security forces. They even absorbed some of these, such as the Azov battalion, into the army.
All this happened, we are told by Western mainstream media (WMM), because the people of Ukraine yearned to be members of the EU and of NATO. The majority at the time were not in favor of NATO membership, rightly regarding it as a threat to their security. There was genuine disappointment among Euromaidan protestors that duly elected President Yanukovych who at one time was moving towards acceptance of an EU package of economic aid was, in my view, rightly advised to go with a competing Russian package which had far fewer strings and would have been more respectful of Ukrainian sovereignty than the neoliberal agenda of the EU leadership would have tolerated.
The 2014 coup leaders were aided and endorsed by the USA which invested $5 billion in regime-change shenanigans while another $5 billion was provided by intervener-extraordinaire, George Soros. Xenophobic in spoken comments and legislative intent towards Russian language, culture, and media, the coup quickly sparked counter-protests, as in Odessa, that were put down in massacres perpetrated by fascists. The situation so terrified the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea that they almost immediately held and passed a referendum in favor of secession from Kiev. They had never shown much happiness with being part of an independent Ukraine in the first place, but this was foisted on them in the turmoil of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Crimeans passed a second referendum that agreed to a request for annexation by Russia. WMM claims that the referenda were somehow catapulted by Russian “little green men” are propaganda. Russia had perfectly legal internationally-acknowledged entitlement to use of the Black Sea port of Sevastopol and to maintenance of many thousands of troops in its defense. All valid polls have since indicated a high level of popular support for transition of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukrainian to Russian control, with the notable exception of an element of the mainly Islamic Tatar minority. In similar fashion, the pro-Russian or Russian language speakers in the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk were so spooked by the new Kiev regime that almost immediately they declared themselves people’s republics. They made no formal request to be annexed by Russia, nor did Russia encourage such a development, knowing that the majority aspiration in the Donbass was for greater autonomy within the absurdly centralized political structure of Ukraine (given the distinctive cultural differences between West and East), an autonomy that was promised them by the international Minsk agreements of 2014-2015 but never honored by Kiev.
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