We are now officially in the Alice in Wonderland Through the Looking Glass territory when a prominent German writer and blogger uses a Russian propaganda outlet to attack the United States for suppressing freedom of the press.
Albrecht Müller, publisher of the NachDenkSeiten, has long believed that the United States is the source of all misery on the planet, and that the New York Times is controlled by the US government. So RT Deutsch was more than happy to provide Herr Müller with a platform to go after the NY Times:
Die New York Times (NYT) arbeitet auf das Engste mit der US-Regierung zusammen. So unterstützte die Zeitung laut Ray McGovern den illegalen Angriffskrieg gegen den Irak, indem sie z.B. im Auftrag der Regierung gefälschte Hinweise auf ein Atomwaffenprogramm veröffentlichte. Dieser Krieg kostete Hundertausenden Menschen das Leben. Das hält den damals verantwortlichen Reporter, Michael R. Gordon, nicht davon ab, heute desinformierende und bewusst irreführende Artikel zur Ukraine zu schreiben, die Russen und Präsident Putin zu dämonisieren und damit erneut Propaganda zu verbreiten, die einen Krieg mindestens billigend in Kauf nimmt. Seine Kollegen in der Redaktion stehen ihm in nichts nach.
Fast täglich veröffentliche die NYT Falschmeldungen im Auftrag anonymer Regierungsquellen
It is true that the New York Times did some bad reporting in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But to insinuate that the publisher of Pentagon Papers is controlled by the US government is absurd. Exactly one year after the invasion, the New York Times published a mea culpa concerning its earlier reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:
But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.
The New York Times was a loud and consistent critic of the Bush administration's Iraq War policy and the War on Terror.
More importantly, with respect to the broader issue of press freedom in the United States, fully one third of US newspapers opposed then President Bush's push for war with Iraq. How many Russian media outlets opposed Putin's Anschluss of Crimea, or his active intervention in eastern Ukraine with weapons and troops? None. But that is not important to Albrecht Müller.
By lending his name and his writing to RT Deutsch, Albrecht Müller spits on the graves of Anna Politkovskaya, Ilyas Shurpayev,Yury Shebalkin,Konstantin Borovko,Leonid Etkind and scores of other journalists - all of whom were murdered by Putin's thugs for daring to report on the widespread corruption in Russia. And, according to Freedom House, the situation for journalists has gotten much worse following the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine:
Physical assaults on journalists were reported in a range of Russian regions in 2014. Several reporters investigating the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine were threatened and attacked. In August, Lev Shlosberg, a Pskov-based newspaper publisher and member of the opposition Yabloko party, suffered a serious assault that left him unconscious. Shlosberg said the attack was related to his paper’s investigation into the secret deployment of Russian troops from the Pskov region to eastern Ukraine.
I won't go into the dire position of journalists in Crimea following its "liberation" by Russian forces in 2014. Suffice it to say that all reporters critical of the situation in Crimea have been either beaten into silence or imprisoned.
But the truth is, Albrecht Müller doesn't really care about press freedom. He has lost most of his credibility and is seen by most serious journalists in Germany as a conspiracy nut. To lash out at his former colleagues he has gone over to the dark side - and in the process become a latter-day Lord Haw-Haw.
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