Pro-Russian Hysteria in the Western Press

Joshua Foust at Registan.net is one of my favorite bloggers, even when I disagree with him. Two things he has written recently are worth a look: a critique of the rather poor blog coverage, in his opinion, of the Russian invasion of Georgia in the Columbia Journalism Review, and a new post which vents some of his fury over the misplaced hysteria as expressed in a recent Wall Street Journal op/ed by Matthew Kaminski. Foust believes that in “the last few months the WSJ has been particularly disconnected from reality.”

Ignorant American opinion makers shaking in their boots at the strong and unstoppable Russian advance? Check. The entrenchment in conventional wisdom of Russia as strong and worthy of respect and fear? Check. The willful ignorance of Russia’s many structural political and economic problems because it overran a military 25 times smaller in a battle anyone could have predicted? Check. Deliberately misrepresenting the conflict in Kosovo as a brave, peaceful, small country being destroyed by its brutish powerful neighbor, and so therefore Georgia is the new Kosovo? Check. Seriously, he gets paid to write this. I don’t think it’s possible to write something more strongly pro-Russia, yet Kaminski is trying to say he opposes Russian expansionism. The blind are leading the blind in American punditry these days.