It's nice to see that "Baghdad Bob" found a new gig.
While hundreds of thousands were protesting in Ukraine at the weekend, a steely-voiced Russian newsreader dismissively told viewers that the protests had dwindled to a few hundred people and seemed to have run out of steam.In the end, Sunday's protest on Kiev's Independence Square, or Maidan, was likely the biggest in Ukraine since the 2004 Orange Revolution and the assessment of the anchor on Russian Channel One television rapidly went viral on the Internet.
The phrase "there are just a few hundred people on the Maidan" became a hit on Twitter as the protest swelled to hundreds of thousands and demonstrators spectacularly toppled a granite Lenin statue.
The almost farcical assessment of the protest was symbolic of Russian state television's clearly conscious move to downplay the scale of the massive Ukrainian protests.
The pro-Western protests broke out on November 21 over President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to reject a pact with the European Union in favour of promoting ties with Russia.
The main news channels are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and broadcast dogmatic Soviet-style scripts with a clear bias against the Ukrainian opposition.
Ukraine's 'paid-for' protests played down on Russian TV, EUbusiness, December 10, 2013.
It's nice to see that "Baghdad Bob" found a new gig.