By Max Jones / ScheerPost Staff Writer
In the aftermath of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, some corporate journalists offered relatively detailed analysis of the interview, while many did anything but. Most often, they dissuaded audiences from watching the interview by assuring them that “nothing new” occurred, painting Carlson as a Russian stooge and dumbing down the interview as nothing more than a piece of pseudo-journalistic propaganda. In what was meant to be, by any credible journalistic standard, an engaging debate about Putin’s claims, was replaced by a stenographic narrative that repeated the lines of the State Department.
It’s understandable why corporate media did this. Since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, they have repeatedly called the war “unprovoked (also see here, here and here)” and characterized Putin as an expansionist warmonger with whom no one could ever reason. Putin’s explanations of the U.S. and NATO’s provocations against Russia, his admitting how long he tried befriending the West, his accounting of the nearly completed peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that Boris Johnson blocked at the beginning of the war, his clear declarations that Russia has no plans to expand its military presence beyond Ukraine, and his calls for diplomatic settlement of the war should raise serious questions for any reasonable audience member about Western media’s characterizations of Putin.
Carlson’s interview should have challenged the media to examine the contradictions of these previous claims, and even some of the historical events that they have omitted from much of their analysis of the Ukraine war since its beginning. The most crucial among them is the 2014 U.S.-backed Maidan coup in Ukraine, which saw the CIA-enabled overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych.
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In a response to Carlson’s interview on her MSNBC show, former White House press secretary turned journalist Jen Psaki misinformed (or perhaps even lied) to her audience about the U.S. involvement in the coup. Specifically, after she described Carlson as a “noted conspiracy theorist” and a well-known “Kremlin mouthpiece,” she stated, “Tucker did not challenge Putin’s baseless accusation that the United States orchestrated a coup in Ukraine in 2014.”
Putin did not claim that the United States “orchestrated” the Maidan coup, but rather that the coup was done with the backing of the CIA. Psaki’s falsehood goes much deeper than a simple exaggeration, however.
What Psaki does not tell her audience is that the U.S. has dedicated more than $5 billion dollars to Ukraine to achieve its “European aspirations” since 1991, according to Victoria Nuland, Biden’s under secretary of state for political affairs. The Maidan protests were originally sparked as the result of a policy dispute — specifically about whether or not Yanukovych should accept an E.U. association agreement, or as the founder of Consortium News, the late Robert Parry, put it: “The issue was whether or not [Yanukovych] should accept an E.U. economic package that involved major concessions to the [International Monetary Fund], i.e. more austerity for Ukraine, or whether he would accept a more generous package of a $15 billion loan from Russia, which is already supporting Ukraine through discounted natural gas. It was a policy issue, not an issue of whether democracy would go forward.”
Further, the U.S. government funded NGOs that played a direct role in getting the protests that led to the Maidan coup started. According to the Financial Times, a project under the Ukrainian NGO Center of United Actions titled “New Citizen,” “played a big role in getting the protest up and running.” According to the Kyiv Post, funds from Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network accounted for nearly 36% of Center UA’s budget, while a USAID funded NGO called “Pact Inc.” covered 54%. The remaining funds were granted by George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose first director once told the Washington Post “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” and which has a long history of aiding U.S. regime change operations. The NED is funded by Congress.
The NED also funded 65 projects in Ukraine to the tune of more than $20 million in 2013. Among the focuses of these projects were “conflict resolution,” “accountability and governance” and “democratic ideas and values.” Curiously, according to Monthly Review, the longest continuously published socialist magazine in the United States, on Feb. 25, 2022, the day after the Russian invasion, “The National Endowment for Democracy deleted all records of funding projects in Ukraine from their searchable ‘Awarded Grants Search’ database….The archived [NED] webpage (captured Feb. 25, 2022 from 14:53) shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows ‘No results found’ for Ukraine.”
Further, the founder of Center of United Actions, Oleh Ryabchuck, told the Financial Post, “The Orange Revolution was a miracle, a massive peaceful protest that worked. We want to do that again and we think we will” (emphasis added). The Orange Revolution successfully overturned the election victory of Viktor Yanukovych in 2005.
Psaki also does not inform her audience that John McCain, Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) and Victoria Nuland all spoke to protesters on stage in Kyiv during the civil unrest, showing support for their cause that ultimately led to the (second) ouster of Yanukovych.
While speaking, McCain and Murphy shared the stage with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party in Ukraine. Oleh Tyahnybok and Ruslan Koshulinskyi, deputy head of the Svoboda Party, later met with an anonymous Western official and discussed how many Ukrainians needed to be killed by the Yanukovych government for the West to no longer recognize Yanukovych as Ukraine’s leader:
Oleg Tyagnibok : “I asked: we have four victims, why is there no reaction? – This is not enough. We will be able to react when there are 100 victims.”
Ruslan Koshulinskyi :“They talked about the first deaths – well, 5, 20… 100? When will the government be to blame? In the end, they reached the figure of one hundred. There was no pressure. There were no sanctions. They waited until a mass murder. And if there is a mass murder in the country, the government is to blame. , because…the authorities cannot allow mass murders.“
This was shortly before right-wing paramilitaries conducted what Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, a professor at the University of Ottawa and expert on the Maidan coup, called a “false flag mass killing of the Maidan protesters” that the West then pinned the blame on Yanukovych police forces and in result, facilitated the ousting of Yanukovych from the presidency of Ukraine.
Psaki also ignored crucial forensic evidence of the false flag uncovered by Dr. Katchanovski as well as testimony by five Georgian ex-military members that claimed to have direct involvement in the massacre that also implicated Maidan politicians. As Dr. Katchanovski reported for Consortium News,
“Testimonies by five Georgian ex-military members in Italian, Israeli, Macedonian and Russian media and their published depositions to Berkut lawyers for the Maidan massacre trial have also been ignored. They stated that their groups received weapons, payments, and orders to massacre both police and protesters from specific Maidan and Georgian politicians.” (emphasis added)
Nor does she mention that in a leaked phone call between Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, the pair talked about who should make up the post-coup Ukrainian government, and bringing representatives from the U.N. in to “glue” their handpicked Ukrainian administration together. In the call, Nuland made it clear that she wanted Areseniy Yatsenyuk to be the next prime minister of Ukraine. Sure enough, Nuland got her wish, and Yatsenyuk became the next prime minister after Yanukovych was ousted.
There is a reason Psaki’s analysis only consisted of ad-hominem attacks levied against her political opponents. If she engaged, for example, the substance of the Maidan coup debate, the narrative she ascribes to and helped create during her tenure at the White House would crumble.
In effect, the tendency of corporate journalists to smear counter narratives and characterize their ideological opponents in the most exaggerated terms possible (i.e. Psaki calling Tucker a “Kremlin mouthpiece”) works to create a media discourse centered on tribal alliances and partisan politics. This then divides audiences from each other, into the binary camps of anti-Russians and pro-Russians, right-wing and left-wing, good and bad.
From the perspective of the journalists who engage in the journalism that Psaki does, those are the kind that hurl insults and repeat talking points as opposed to those who question and investigate, partisan media is where they thrive. When politics become tribal like sports, it is unimportant whether journalists tell the truth to their audiences or not; so long as the journalist feeds their viewers the “right” information, even when it is as blatantly inaccurate as stating that the U.S. never backed the Maidan coup in Ukraine, their audience will return. This kind of journalistic venture does not hold power to account, or reveal the truth. Instead, it gives ideologically entrenched audiences the junk food they crave and grants institutions of power the division on which they capitalize.
If corporate media ceased this kind of journalism and began seriously investigating the truth, the illusions that create the hyper-partisan perspectives of media consumers would dissipate. Disillusionment would ensue, which would spell disaster for figures like Psaki. With it, the once blinded would suddenly see their neighbor…and their enemy.
Max Jones
Max Jones is a staff writer and video producer for ScheerPost. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Southern California, where he studied communications and screenwriting, he is following his post-USC plans to be an independent filmmaker and screenwriter, and a journalist at ScheerPost. He has covered various topics in both his web show Journalists for Sale and writing, focusing most heavily on issues of free speech, information warfare, and foreign policy.