Attention to the Unseen

Nick Cohen writes: If the west could find the courage, it would order an immediate freeze of Rupert Murdoch’s assets. His Fox News presenters and Russia’s propagandists are so intermeshed that separating the two is as impossible as unbaking a cake. On Russian state news, as on Fox, bawling ideologues scream threats then whine about their victimhood as they incite anger and self-pity in equal measures. Its arguments range from the appropriation of anti-fascism by Greater Russian imperialists – the…

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The New York Times reports: As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far. “No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said. While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s conservative audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the…

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Politico reports: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is open to a neutral status for his country and a “compromise” on the contested Donbas region as part of peace negotiations with Russia, he said in an interview with several Russian outlets on Sunday. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are prepared to go through with it,” Zelenskyy told Russian news organizations Meduza, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain, speaking in Russian throughout the interview. For Ukraine, neutrality would…

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The Guardian reports: Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has praised Fox News for its coverage, appearing on the Russian state-controlled RT network to hail the right-leaning US cable channel, whose primetime host Tucker Carlson has played down the invasion. “We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the western countries to manipulate media, we understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media,” said Lavrov, speaking in English in a studio…

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Yair Rosenberg writes: Douglas Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s go-to foreign policy expert. In recent appearances on the channel, he has argued that the U.S. should not sanction Russia and that Vladimir Putin should be allowed to annex as much of Ukraine as he wants, which is why many today consider Macgregor to be less a neutral observer than a Russia apologist. What they may not know is that he’s…

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Mother Jones reports: On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson. “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine,…

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The New York Times reports: The New York Times said on Tuesday that it was temporarily removing its journalists from Russia in the wake of harsh new legislation that effectively outlaws independent reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Russia’s new legislation seeks to criminalize independent, accurate news reporting about the war against Ukraine. For the safety and security of our editorial staff working in the region, we are moving them out of the country for now,” a spokeswoman for…

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Masha Gessen writes: Whenever TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television channel, was broadcasting live, the lights in its vast loft were dimmed and conversations were hushed, because its studio was cordoned off from the rest of the space only by partial-height glass partitions. When I got to the loft just before ten on Tuesday night, the lights were low, as usual, but the noise level was veering into risky territory. Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a Friday-night news-analysis program, was in…

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CNN reports: RT America will cease productions and lay off most of its staff, according to a memo from T&R Productions, the production company behind the Russian state-funded network, which CNN obtained. Misha Solodovnikov, the general manager of T&R Productions, told staff in the memo that it will be “ceasing production” at all of its locations “as a result of unforeseen business interruption events.” “Unfortunately, we anticipate this layoff will be permanent, meaning that this will result in the permanent…

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