The New York Times has a story about how the press in Russia behaves like Putin's lapdog. Maybe when the American press is done congratulating itself on how "free" it is, it will recognize how bought it has become.
Maybe you think I'm exaggerating. Here's a short story to perhaps dispel your doubts.
I know a woman who grew up in the DDR (East Germany). She experienced lots of unpleasantness that soured her about that government. Things like being arrested and questioned, the government preventing her from getting a high school diploma because she protested against medium-range nuclear weapons (something that I did in the US as well, with equally unsatisfactory results, although without the Draconian penalty that she suffered), and of course being spied upon by many of her neighbors. She knows about the spying because she has seen and read her government files. At the risk of making a dramatic understatement, she is no fan of dictatorship.
Two years ago, she went to New York for the first time. She was there for two weeks and this was and is her only direct exposure to the United States. We met not long thereafter and one evening she asked me one of the most striking questions I've ever been asked. "How do you get news in the US?" She went on to tell me how she had developed a variety of methods to discern what was happening in the world when she lived under a command dictatorship, but that when faced with the almost total lack of substantial information that is released in the American press, particularly television, she was at a loss. She describes it as "worse than a dictatorship, because in a dictatorship, you know they are controlling the information."
Posted by Alan at 17.02.04 12:23