![\"CNN:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/CNN-Dugina-350x344.png\")
CNN<\/strong> (8\/27\/22<\/a>) used Darya Dugina’s assassination to talk about “Russia’s vast disinformation machine”\u2014citing Dugina’s website<\/a>, which was the 945,284th most popular<\/a> site in the world in July.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n CNN<\/b> (8\/27\/22<\/a>) ran an article to this effect, failing to characterize her murder as an assassination, instead stating Dugina was \u201con the front lines\u201d of Russia’s war effort, linking her to \u201cRussia\u2019s vast disinformation machine.\u201d NPR<\/b> (8\/24\/22<\/a>) reported that\u00a0 Dugina was a \u201cRussian propagandist\u201d whose killing signaled the war was coming to Russian elites in their own territory. Foreign Policy<\/b> (8\/26\/22<\/a>) called Dugina a \u201cdead propagandist\u201d whose \u201cmartyrdom\u201d did more to achieve her goals in death than she could have hoped for in life.<\/p>\n It is certainly true that during her life, Dugina, who espoused the philosophy of Russian Eurasianism<\/a>, an expansionist political doctrine veiled as an objective analysis of Russian interests, had very little impact on Western audiences. This is true of most Russian journalists, despite the frequent warnings<\/a> in US corporate media about the threat posed by Russian media messages. For instance, RT<\/b>, often considered the foremost Russian outlet in the West, accounted for only 0.04% of Britain\u2019s total viewing audience in 2017 (New Statesman<\/b>, 2\/25\/22<\/a>), and reached about 0.6% of the UK\u2019s online population<\/a> from February 2021 to the start of 2022\u2014and this was before Western media platforms sharply restricted<\/a> access to RT<\/b> and other pro-Moscow outlets in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n Far more prevalent for Western viewers is the constant barrage of pro-NATO, pro-Western propaganda that vastly overstates the significance of Russian disinformation. Such was the case when CNN<\/b> noted that Dugina ran a \u201cdisguised English-language online platform<\/a> that pushed a pro-Kremlin worldview to Western readers.\u201d By \u201cdisguised,\u201d CNN<\/b> is suggesting that the site she worked for, United World International<\/b>, engaged in outright deception by not disclosing its Russian origins\u2014much like CNN<\/b> does not describe itself<\/a> as a US-based outlet, but rather as a “world leader in online news and information.”<\/p>\n Whether UWI<\/b> is purposefully misleading or not, CNN<\/b>‘s underlying assumption is that Western audiences are so fickle that the most minimal exposure to pro-Kremlin viewpoints represents a threat to national security. It’s this stance that turns journalists with foreign ideologies into the equivalent of enemy combatants.<\/p>\n If CNN<\/b> thinks disclosure is what separates journalism from propaganda, it might have disclosed the biases of the sources it used to contextualize Dugina\u2019s murder. The article mostly relied on information from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and the Center for European Policy Analysis, both of which are \u201cused to promote the information interests of the US-centralized power alliance in Europe and North America\u201d (Transcend.org<\/b>, 9\/5\/22<\/a>) and are funded<\/a> by<\/a> the US government, European allied nations and weapons manufacturers.<\/p>\n ‘An appropriate target’<\/b><\/p>\n CNN<\/strong> personalities were fervent defenders<\/a> of the US invasion of Iraq and the lies that justified it. Did that put them “on the front lines” of the war effort, negating their civilian status?<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Whether or not one agrees with what they are saying, journalists of every nationality deserve protection from those who would use violence to silence them. So when CNN<\/b> or other Western media downplay the assassination of Dugina on the grounds that she spread Russian propaganda, or even disinformation, that supported a war of aggression and other war crimes, they are setting a standard that puts their own colleagues at risk. (The exceptionalism that holds that US institutions can avoid the consequences faced by others is, of course, a central pillar of US propaganda.)<\/p>\n US corporate media have a long track record of advocating for illegal US aggression while knowingly parroting their government\u2019s false pretenses. The New York Times<\/b>, for instance, hasn\u2019t opposed a US war since its tacit disapproval of Ronald Reagan\u2019s invasion of Grenada in 1983 (FAIR.org<\/b>, 8\/23\/17<\/a>). The Times<\/b> advocated for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (8\/8\/01<\/a>, 2\/12\/03<\/a>); the CIA\u2019s attempted regime change in Syria (8\/26\/13<\/a>); and US drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (2\/6\/13<\/a>). With the body count from these conflicts far surpassing that of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, how would the assassination of a New York Times<\/b> editorial board member differ from Dugina\u2019s murder? Aside, of course, from the fact that Dugina supported Washington\u2019s geopolitical adversary.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time US journalists have been less than sympathetic about the targeting of journalists from nations adversarial to the US. During the Iraq War, human rights groups condemned the US bombing of Iraqi TV<\/b> in Baghdad, emphasizing that it is not permissible to bomb a news outlet “simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda” (Amnesty International, 3\/26\/03<\/a>). But prior to the bombing, Fox News<\/b>‘s Bill O’Reilly argued, “\u201cI think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television.” His colleague John Gibson wondered: “Should we take Iraqi TV <\/b>off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?\u201d (Extra!<\/b>, 5\u20136\/03<\/a>). After the bombing, New York Times<\/b> reporter Michael Gordon said on CNN<\/b> (3\/25\/03):<\/p>\n Personally, I think the television, based on what I\u2019ve seen of Iraqi television, with Saddam Hussein presenting propaganda to his people and showing off the Apache helicopter and claiming a farmer shot it down, and trying to persuade his own public that he was really in charge, when we\u2019re trying to send the exact opposite message, I think was an appropriate target.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the very same day in 1999 that NATO bombed Radio TV Serbia<\/b>, killing 20 journalists and other civilians (Extra!<\/b>, 7\u20138\/99<\/a>), Thomas Friedman argued in the New York Times<\/b> (4\/23\/99):<\/p>\n Let\u2019s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are \u201ccleansing\u201d Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted. Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Just a few weeks earlier, columnist Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post<\/b> (4\/8\/99) had cheered that NATO was “finally…hitting targets\u2014power plants, fuel depots, bridges, airports, television transmitters\u2014that may indeed kill the enemy and civilians nearby.\u201d Do such abhorrent, pro\u2013war crimes arguments turn these columnists from journalists into “propagandists,” unworthy of protection from assassination?<\/p>\n CNN<\/b> reported that Dugina\u2019s death \u201chas shone a light\u201d on the inner workings of a Russian media sphere that unquestioningly parrots Kremlin talking points as if they were true. But, lacking in self-awareness, CNN<\/b> and other US outlets relied heavily on Western government sources, exposing their own eagerness to toe the state line.<\/p>\n When US media report on Russia\u2019s disinformation apparatus, they are implicitly claiming that something similar does not exist in the US. But if you’re interested in how US reporting advances Washington’s \u201csoft power\u201d<\/a> objectives, the turning of a murdered journalist into an object lesson for “Russia’s vast disinformation machine” is a fine example.<\/p>\n The post US Media Held Murdered Russian Journalist to a Dangerous Standard<\/a> appeared first on FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on FAIR<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rather than treating Darya Dugina as a member of the civilian press, US media seemed to downplay her death as a casualty of war.<\/p>\n The post US Media Held Murdered Russian Journalist to a Dangerous Standard<\/a> appeared first on FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15959,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1303,259,1230,24,376,262,263],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15959"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810553"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":816041,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810553\/revisions\/816041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"CNN](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/CNN-HQ-350x467.jpg\")