Democracy and the Press

I actually don't think that's right, and I'm glad you left posted the comic, because I think it gets to one of the reasons why I wrote on a subject that has been, in most senses, beaten to death.

I think the interesting thing here is that both the US and Russia are in "Brave New World" mode right now. But American sources of information tell us that we are the utopia gone wrong and they are the dystopia.

Russia, for all of its problems, is not "1984". Yes, Putin has quashed the most vocal dissenters since his re-election, but Russia is no longer a world of torture, arbitrary arrests, and mass executions. What’s more, the Russian people (at least those that remain in the country) truly love Putin, and it's not because he's Big Brother. It's because Putin is giving them exactly what they want. The vast majority of media manipulation in the Russian Federation was giving people access to the narrative they wanted to hear. As I wrote, until very recently -- all the critical investigative journalism one could read was freely accessible to any Russian with a computer. But no one accessed it.

That's not to justify any of Vladimir Vladimirovich's actions (with media or otherwise). But it underlines just how similar our problems are. Americans want the narrative that's pumped in through CNN because that narrative speaks to how they want to see the world, just as Russians tune into Channel 1 because they want to be told that Russia is rising again to its position as a great power.

Of course, Russia may be becoming more Orwellian as this crisis drags on, but perhaps that's something that should be on our radar as well.

-- EliKeene - 01 Jun 2015