For almost seven years, I have been following in parallel both corporate or “official” media institutions and independent ones, especially the left ones, because this is my perspective. I have significant media experience, some 15 years, and I know that every media corporation has an agenda. Even if it does not tip the political balance one way or the other, the media institution is in any case tributary to the customers who buy advertising. For example, Coca Cola can also put Cialis in its soup, that we will not see any report on television unless the handkerchief can be thrown on the drum in time. The only way in which the press can be independent, and therefore as objective as possible, is when the institution is supported directly by the money of the audience, through direct donations. I say how much because objectivity is an objective (pun intended) extremely difficult to achieve, being influenced by the most banal details, such as the placement on the page, the order of the news, not to mention the political orientation of the author. In fact, I don’t think there is an objective press, instead it is appreciated when the journalist is honest, even this being a rather rare case.
What does this have to do with Ukraine? For me it has because that’s how it started, around 2017, when I saw the first report about the neo-Nazis in Azov, made by two journalists from The Grayzone, an independent press platform in Washington. The background was that some Jewish associations had protested the fact that the Azov battalion had gotten into the habit of celebrating Stepan Bandera, with the permission of the Kyiv authorities. Moreover, the authorities had named after Bandera the boulevard leading to the memorial at Babi Yar, where the second largest massacre of Jews in World War II took place. (The first belongs to the Romanian army, the Odesa massacre, which is not talked about much, but don’t be afraid, we will remain the first).
Of course, until last year in February, not only the independent media outlets wrote about the Ukrainian neo-Nazi movement, but also the NYT or the Washington Post, but since Russia invaded Ukraine the official narrative has changed.
Then I also saw the speeches of Lindsay Graham and John McCain, Republican senators visiting the Azov region around 2017, and Amy Klobuchar, former Democratic presidential candidate, was on the same visit with them, and I understood that the American interest in Ukraine it is cross-party.
About a year ago, the telephone conversation that Victoria Nuland, who is currently Biden’s deputy secretary of defense, had in 2014 with the then American ambassador to Kyiv, in which Nuland practically made the post- Yanukovych (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k), to whose overthrow the USA put not only its shoulder but also its wallet.