13 thoughts on “_ collecting evidence of media bias _”

1. For the beginning a short selection of articles related to that topic..

   RFE/RL: “Press Watchdog: ‘Fantastic Lies’ Dominate Russian Coverage Of War”, available at: http://www.rferl.org/content/Press_Watchdog_Says_Fantastic_Lies_Dominate_Russian_Coverage_of_War/1190789.html

   Claire Bigg: “The War At Home — Spinning The Conflict In Russia”, available at: http://www.rferl.org/content/War_At_Home_Spinning_Conflict_In_Russia/1190090.html

   Robert Coalson: “South Ossetia Sinks Into The Spin Zone”, available at: http://www.rferl.org/content/South_Ossetia_Sinks_Into_The_Spin_Zone/1189760.html

   Robert von Lucius: „Am Boden, in der Luft und im Cyberspace“, available at: http://www.faz.net/s/Rub97F2F5D596354F4BBE619038133D791F/Doc~EB325699A332B4BE3BBBF11590AB85EA4~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

   Conor Sweeney: Russia and Georgia wage PR battle for hearts and minds, Reuters , August 10, available at: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKLA53600320080810

2. Always worth a look in that respect: http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/wm2021.cfm

   Saving Georgia

   by Ariel Cohen, Ph.D.
   August 12, 2008

3. “Unter der Führung Polens treten vor allem jene Länder, die über Erfahrung mit dem sowjetischen Imperialismus verfügen, für eine härtere Linie gegenüber dem Kreml ein. Doch auch Großbritannien spricht schon offen über die Möglichkeit, den EU-Russland-Pakt zu beenden.”

   http://www.orf.at/080814-28407/index.html

4. I was following Russian media and Euronews and I was not surprised that even Euronews in Russian language was mainly showing Russian comments… To my surprise there were Russian newspapers which were trying to be objective, line Novaya Gazeta (http://www.novayagazeta.ru/). Among the TV channels I was told about RenTV and MIR TV company to be less biased. The most weird fact for me is the number of dead people which was in Russian media between 1600 in the beginning and “thousands” these days. It’s funny also that Putin being in Vladivostok was speaking about dozens of dead people and Medvedev about several thousands, this was in the first days of conflicts.

   P.S. Thanks a lot for the book! It’s really relevant nowadays.

5. Specifics of my work requires contacts with dozens of Russian and international media daily. The tragic events in South Caucasus, however, caught me in the middle of vacation – away from usual access to information and almost all modern means of communications. A promise made to myself to stay away from newspaper booths and news websites was not destined to be kept.

   —-

   The cell phone was soon turned back on, TV and Internet. Of course, as all Russian young people brought up in a turbulent, though romantic, age of Perestroika I did not limit myself with Russian version of events unfolding in South Ossetia.

   —-

   Liberation, Le Mond, BBC, CNN, Corriere della Sera, Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, ZDF, ORF, Die Presse, Independent, The Washington Post, Reuters, FA, etc… I think these days we all were consuming information in gigantic volumes.

   —-

   I also read all “major” Russian newspapers: Kommersant, Vedomosti, Izvestia, RBC daily, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Interfax information agency. Magazines: Itogi, The New Times, Vlast, Ogoniok. TV: NTV, 1 channel, RTR, Ren-TV, Vesti-24, SPb-5 channel, Euronews. Georgian media – I could not watch or read, as I speak only some basic words of this langauge – greetings, counting, etc… – whatever my Georgia-born grandmother taught me in my childhood (along with a couple of patriotic Georgian poems :). So, in this posting, I’ll leave Georgian media off. South Ossetian, I assume, was understandably out of the question as well, as there simply was hardly anyone to write under the bombings in Tskhinvali – the reason, my Reuters friend gave me as a reply the question – why the world saw nothing that was happening in Tskhinvali during georgian air and artillery raids on it in the first phase of the military conflict.

   —-

   Vacation surrended to this flood of events and information about them.

   —-

   In general, my observation was that US and most UK media was strongly pro-Georgian in this case, European journalists seemed a bit more neutral, but this “neutrality” was very fible. Of course, the tone of the European (including UK) media went a bit down towards the end of the conflict, but still remained mostly one-sided.

   —–

   The Russians were mostly pro-Russian.

   —-

   For the ones, who like to point the fingures, I would name Izvestia (http://www.izvestia.ru/) as being the most one-sided in this case (among the “major” newspapers). Traditionally liberal Kommersant, Vedomosti and Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Vedomosti, btw, are published jointly with Financial Times and Wall Street Journal) tried to stay more balanced. Balanced, from my point of view, meant absence of cold war language.
   As for international ones, of course, BBC and CNN by the way they used “picture”, intonation and selected participants of their discussion would, no doubt, be heading the top list of the best cold war tradition inheritants. Most of the ones, who read this blog enjoyed the luxary of being informed by those two, but lets turn to a couple of others:

   Daily Telegraph

   Russian military moves towards Tbilisi in defiance of Nicolas Sarkozy’s peace deal

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/2551632/Russian-military-moves-towards-Tbilisi-in-defiance-of-Nicolas-Sarkozys-peace-deal.html

   or

   Associated Press

   ROAD TO TBILISI, Georgia – Fifty battered Russian army trucks and armored personnel carriers roared without warning down the highway toward the country’s capital, making it clear that a day-old cease-fire would not keep Russia from moving freely through Georgia.

   http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080813/ap_on_re_eu/georgia_road_to_tbilisi

   http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=34083

   this one was circulated widely by all types of media: tv, internet, etc…

   —-

   What were the usual misperceptions, that the naive international reader could get out of this?

   1. Russia was the first to attack innocent Georgia.
   2. Russian tanks head for Tbilisi.
   3. Georgia withdrew its forces right after Russians attacked this peacefull country.
   4. Saakashvili agrees to R-F plan to settle the conflict.

   etc, etc, etc…

   In addition, the internet community was astonished by the staged pictures made by Reuters in Georgia – with one and the same dead man photographed in different locations, poses and surrounded by different people.

   —-

   You know Russian media being biased – does not surprise me much. Same goes for Georgia. They were parties of the conflict. What really surprises me is bias of the US and European media, which turned their countries into another side of the conflict, unconditionally allying with Mr Saakashvili, who was anything, but a democrat and a peacekeeper, after his brutal attacks on his own citizens on November 7th, 2007; mysterious political murders (e.g., Georgian prime-minister Zhvania, businessman Patarkazishvili – both were in various levels of opposition to the current Georgian President, the second even went to exhile, which, however, did not rescue him from “heart desease” and death).

   —-

   One of the lessons Russians should learn from this event is, what i already told earlier: current conflicts are as much media, as they are military.

6. postings, die andere poster beleidigen, werden nicht online gestellt. Daher wurde zultzt ein Kommentar nicht online gesetzt.

7. ad Beleidigungen)

   Weshalb veröffentlichen Sie dann Olga Kamenchuk: “What were the usual misperceptions, that the naive international reader could get out of this? 1. Russia was the first to attack innocent Georgia.”

   Immerhin beleidigt das die Intelligenz aller anderen Leser hier!

8. ad personam Beleidigungen sind für die Debatte nicht hilfreich, aber auch gänzlich unnotwendig.

9. Auffallend ist in vielen deutschsprachigen Medien die Nutzung des Begriffs ‘Blitzkrieg’, der assoziative Verbindungen zwischen Russland und Adolf Hitler’s Nazideutschland herstellen soll.

   Eine ganz außergewöhnliche Entgleisung habe ich gerade auf http://www.orf.at/080816-28495/index.html entdeckt. Dort wird die Überschrift verwendet: ‘Georgier müssen Strassen putzen’ – sofort stellt sich die Assoziation mit den Juden her, die in Wien unter dem Gelächter österreichischer Nazis die Gehsteige mit zahnbürsten putzen mussten. Im text von orf.at steht dann aber ‘lediglich’, dass die Georgier die Strassen in Zchinvali ‘aufräumen’ (sic) müssen.

10. Dies alles fällt in das Kapitel “Propagandakrieg” bzw. “Krieg der Worte”, in den sich auch die westlichen Medien nur allzu gerne haben einspannen lassen. Übrigens nichts Neues: Man denke nur an die “embedded” Berichterstattung aus dem Irakkrieg.

11. Dieser Krieg zeigt ein erschreckendes Versagen journalistischer Seriosität. Die Freiheit der Medien kann auch durch unwissende und unprofessionelle Journalisten beschädigt werden.

12. One of the most oustanding examples of inexistent professionalism and below-all-possible-levels respect for “Intelligenz” of the audience is – the infamous Fox News episode with the Ossetian girl, who was shut up as soon, as she started to tell smth, that did not go in-line with the mainstream information. Coughing and mooing, clearly, is all those “journalists” are capable of, when it gets to them standing for the expected truth and objectivty.

    Does anybody still believe in freedom of speech?

    Unfortunately, such cases, rob the Russian liberal camp off the last remnants of support. One of the strongest blasts came after high “grades” Saakashvili elections got from international observers along criticisms of unfair RF electoral campaign. The second was indeed not very doubtfull, although the first being an example – is hardly the case… The recent events, unfortunatelly, set the liberal idea in Russia even further away from reality? as well as its messengers -from perspectives to win any votes of Russians, no matter how fair the campaign is.

    With gentle greetings to intelligent and non-naive Fox-style news fans…

    http://video.yandex.ru/users/bogalub/view/6/

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