Greenwald Criticized as Being Blind to Russia Today Whitewashing

Hawaii Political Info introduction: Writer Cathy Young criticizes Glenn Greenwald for not criticizing Russia Today.

HPI readers have noticed that we have been running a number of RT (Russia Today) stories for a long time now. Many feel that anything funded by the government of Russia, as RT is, is suspect. That is a fair point to keep in mind. But the reality is that the American mainstream media is doing a terrible job of covering the news, particularly wars, the most life-threatening issue we face. Americans don't trust our own media, and for good reason.

Meanwhile, RT honchos, being no fools, appear to be well aware of the skepticism in an American audience, and have been careful to offer good sources, much of them American, and solid evidence, such as the leaked conversations on the riots and takeover in the Ukraine that are enormously revealing. If not for that, many of us would be at sea in trying to make sense of what the U.S. and EU intended to be their sub rosa involvement in Ukraine. On the other issues as well, it's helpful to get information along with viewpoints from RT and other foreign outlets that our mainstream media is either not offering or to which it is giving precious little airtime.

Further, Russia was the only country that bucked the U.S.'s express wishes and gave asylum to whistleblower Edward Snowden, although it might have been reluctantly – in any event, they were not quick about it, keeping him at the airport for several weeks. Snowden benefited Americans immensely in upholding his oath to support the Constitution and reveal the NSA's shredding of it, regardless of what his old government bosses might think, but not say, about "the law" taking precedence over the Constitution. The entire episode of Snowden's flight from the clutches of the U.S., including the flip-flop of the president of Ecuador on Snowden's amnesty after a phone call from Vice President Joe Biden, and the forced landing of Bolivian president Evo Morales' presidential plane in Austria because Snowden was suspected by the U.S. of being on board, gave us and the peoples of the world a more concrete idea of the awesome, and ruthless, might of the U.S.

Cathy Young, the writer of the following article, does not indicate it, but she is a Jew who emigrated from the USSR when she was 16, later matriculating at Rutgers University sometime around the mid-1980s. In some parts of the USSR at least, Jews were vilified. She is staunchly anti-Communist. Young writes that she thought of her old home country as "the evil empire."

The problem with the following article is that although she writes that television in Russia is entirely government controlled except for one wobbling independent, no corroborating evidence is offered. Nor does she offer specific, evidence-based instances of the alleged whitewashing on the part of Russia. If she has them, why doesn't she put them forth?

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Newsday

By Cathy Young

Do some critics of U.S. government policies that may encroach on civil liberties give anti-American foreign states a pass on far worse abuses?

The latest subject of such a controversy is Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who has worked with whistle-blower Edward Snowden to disclose the National Security Agency's surveillance of personal communication records. Given that Snowden received asylum in Russia, Greenwald has been accused by his detractors of colluding with a regime notorious for its police-state tactics -- especially since, two years ago, he defended the Kremlin-run TV channel RT (Russia Today) after it gave a show to his ally, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Unfortunately, Greenwald's most recent defense of Vladimir Putin's propaganda network does little to counter the charge of double standards.

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