ISSUE #93: CBS News is the most recent example of the Western media's failure at journalism.
CBS News - a New York based media outlet recognizing itself as the “source for original reporting and trusted news” - released a documentary titled, “Why military aid to Ukraine doesn't always get to the front lines: "Like 30% of it reaches its final destination."” It documented that out of the billions of dollars worth of weapons being sent to Ukraine, only 30% make it to the front lines.
"All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30% of it reaches its final destination," said Jonas Ohman, founder and CEO of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that has been meeting with and supplying frontline units with military aid in Ukraine since the start of the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in 2014.
"30-40%, that's my estimation," he said in April of this year.
Undoubtedly, this claim goes against the mainstream Ukraine narrative and it was sure to receive some backlash from the empire officials and its spinmeisters, and guess what, IT DID.
Following its release, the media outlet received outrage from the Ukrainian government as they listed their objections to the report on a government website, and the CBS news took its investigative report down after the criticism.
“Welcome first step, but it is not enough,” said Ukraine’s Foreign Minister in a tweet.
“You have misled a huge audience by sharing unsubstantiated claims and damaging trust in supplies of vital military aid to a nation resisting aggression and genocide. There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why,” he added.
The original report can be found here, and the documentary here.
Here’s the short clip if you are not interested in watching an entire documentary:
This report raised voice over the similar concerns echoed by CNN’s April report in which the source said the equipment that's being sent "drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time." It just so happens that Ukraine is also one of the most corrupt nations in Europe and don’t try to tell yourself that the Western elites were unaware of this fact before making a decision to use taxpayers money for the purposes that benefits neither the Americans nor the Europeans but the military-industrial complex.
The mainstream media doesn’t represent journalism.
CBS taking down its investigative report critical of the mainstream Ukraine narrative is a breach of the journalistic ethics. Journalism is when you report the ground reality irrespective of whether or not it’s convenient for the power structures, and propagandism is when you report the news in such a way that it serves the interests of the powerful. The CBS or any other mainstream media outlet fits into the latter.
If we believe the media’s job is to act as a check on the powerful, then they absolutely suck at their job. Let me repeat it with all caps - THEY ABSOLUTELY SUCK AT THEIR JOB. Not to mention that this was not the first time the Western media’s unjournalistic approach to either international or domestic events was highlighted. If we consider the war in Ukraine only, the Western media track record looks horrifyingly bad.
“The western media will uncritically report literally any claim made by the government of Ukraine in bizarre instances like the recent report that Russia was firing rockets at a nuclear power plant it had already captured, or its regurgitation of claims that Russians are raping babies to death from a Ukrainian official who ended up getting fired for promoting unevidenced claims about rape,” writes Caitlin Johnstone in her latest post.
The media outlets which paint themselves as the epitome of journalism are the propagandists of top rank, but their propaganda power is so strong that people literally think of them as the epitome of journalism.
The mainstream media and journalism are not synonymous. We should stop thinking like that. NOW.
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