By Roger Annis, New Cold War.org, April 12, 2016
CBC News, the state broadcaster in Canada, has for some months assigned one of its top journalists, Susan Ormiston, to report from and about Russia. Viewers and listeners of the radio and television network may be forgiven if they believe that nothing but bad news and alleged scandals happens in that vast, neighbouring land to Canada lying on the other side of the North Pole and Pacific Ocean.
The most recent installment of Ormiston’s reporting from Russia brings us… the latest apparent sex scandal. Complete with glimpses of risqué, titillating, film footage that grossly violates the privacy of the people allegedly involved.
Ormiston spices up the latest report even further with an assertion that ‘maybe’, ‘somehow’ Russian President Putin has a hand in the scandal.
Prior to this latest barn-burner of a report, the CBC’s Ormiston has brought us stories of alleged doping scandals involving Russia athletes. Before that, she provided a sympathetic portrayal of the Ukrainian extreme-right paramilitary Nadiya Savchenko, who was convicted in a Russian court last month of accessory to murder in June 2014 of… several of Ormiston’s media colleagues who happened to be Russian.
There is much which could be reported from Russia. The government’s political and military intervention in Syria has resulted in a spectacular setback to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, showing the U.S. and its allies to be driven by nothing more than ‘regime change’ plans to sow further chaos, paralysis and human misery in the region.
Russia’s economy is in difficult shape due to low world oil prices and the effects of a Western economic embargo. In Crimea, the people and government are embarked on ambitious plans for economic renewal following 25 years of post-Soviet Union, economic malaise while in an enforced union with Ukraine dating back to 1954.
Russia is in conflict with Turkey. Moscow has condemned NATO-member Turkey’s human rights record before the world, including Turkey’s bloody war against the Kurdish people whose historic homeland includes eastern Turkey (that war does not exist, if Western media silence is to be taken as an indicator).
Russia is bitterly protesting Poland following the lead set in Ukraine during the past two years of destroying or dismantling monuments commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War Two.
All this and much more could be reported from Moscow by CBC. Instead, we are treated to doping scandals, sex scandals, anything provided it meets the guiding criteria of: negativity, and ‘maybe the president of the country is somehow involved?’.
