Sycophancy toward the Power
Every now and then, we post an exclusive translation from the RBK daily website, which puts up a pretense of being a legitimate business periodical but often tends to get carried away with its fawning sycophancy towards the power. We recently posted an excellent analysis by Neil Buckley entitled “The Three Unwritten Rules of Russian Television“. The first of these rules was “give only the Russian side of the story“. Well, it seems that this rule applies to other media as well, not just to television. Below is an article from RBK Daily about the South Ossetian conflict. If you don’t have any background knowledge, you would be forgiven if, as you read this article (especially the first paragraph), you came to the conclusion that it’s about the legitimate government of some faraway sovereign country you’ve never heard of that is being mercilessly attacked by the Republic of Georgia, which has even tried to install its own puppet on a sliver of territory it has managed to wrest from the control of the legitimate government in the capital of Tskhinvali.