We are the last ones who should be pointing fingers over the quality of another country’s pundits.
No joke!
...and entering into endless, pointless, and fruitless wars.
It’s not the quality of the propaganda or the pundits that I care about. It’s the messages they’re sending.
For all its faults American news isn’t making an active pitch to nuke Russia, or incite famines to force Russia to the negotiating table, or erase all traces of Russian history and culture, or exterminate 5-20% of the Russian population to keep the rest in line.
These are all things that Russian television DOES discuss - as legitimate war tactics - and the goal that they’re setting out goes far beyond sorting out a civil war between separatists and Nazis in Ukraine, or dealing with biolabs that they’ve known about for 20 years amd offered hardly anything more than mild diplomatic rebukes over.
If one supposes that Russian MSM is far more honest than its western counterparts are, then it suggests we’re all missing the bigger picture.
Russia is effectively telling its own people, all these things are peripheral elements of a Great Patriotic War that it’s been waging ever since Chechnya stood up to Russia, and that war would’ve been waged regardless.
In effect, the REAL Causus Belli is, the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain came down, people like Putin saw that as an intolerable humiliation, and the reconquest of those ornery separatist states is their way of restoring Russia to greatness.
Can we really afford to ignore that?