Western media often interviews experts on news and reportage programmes. The idea is to give an appearance of objectivity. Viewers are led to believe they are seeing an independent and expert analysis of the situation. The reality is, however, that the “objective experts” are typically anything but. The following is an example of this phenomenon. Times Radio is interviewing an expert about Ukraine. The expert in this case is Matthew Savill who is ‘Director of Military Sciences’ at the Royal United Services Institute. The expert talks about the “Russian mindset which takes great pride in their ability to suffer pain”. He talks about how the Russians are taking “ridiculous casualties”. He really emphasises this point. He does admit though that Ukraine is “not in the place where they would like to be” and that Russia is slowly moving forwards. He needs to maintain an aura of objectivity otherwise the whole game breaks down.
This seemingly cool analysis is anything but. The speaker almost certainly is fully aware that Ukraine is losing and losing badly and that the cause is lost. But, as yet, the Western military-political establishment is not ready to admit this. So; the speaker won’t say it. His message is not an independent analysis. It is part of the political messaging which accompanies the West’s failed war effort. (For an actual objective analysis we can turn to scholar John Mearsheimer. In this clip Mearsheimer points out that given the disparity between Russian firepower and Ukrainian firepower it is inevitable that far more Ukrainians are dying than Russians. If a ‘ridiculous’ amount of Russians are dying – how many Ukrainians does that make? The speaker makes no mention of Ukrainian losses). The endlessly repeated meme about how many Russians are dying almost looks like their consolation prize; “well, Ukraine lost some territory but, gee, didn’t we kill a lot of Russians, so it wasn’t a total waste of time”.
The speaker is a consultant at RUSI. According to their own account (which may be reasonably reliable), RUSI’s main funders include; US State Department, EU, UK Foreign Office, The British Army, Google, BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin. The speakers I have seen from RUSI on Times Radio are not so much independent experts as propagandists and spokespeople for the war machine. This is a pattern which is repeated countless times.
Another “independent think tank” which regularly supplies “experts” to the Western media is the US Institute for the Study of War. (ISW). I looked on their website for information about who funds them. All I could find is: “In order to sustain and grow our research programs and achieve our mission, ISW is funded entirely through the support of foundations, corporations, and private individuals. ISW does not take any US or foreign government money.” [1] I could not find any information about the actual sources of money. The “foundations” could, for example include the National Endowment for Democracy which aims to spread “democracy” worldwide and is significantly funded by the US government. Corporations could, of course, be arms merchants. “Private individuals” could, of course, mean anything at all. If the CIA, for example, wants to fund the ISW they can channel money through a private individual. In other words; the ISW does not appear to want to tell us who funds them, and we can imagine why. If we look at the list of Board Members [2] we can get some idea of the overall orientation of this “independent” think-tank. The list includes 3 retired US army figures, a former US Ambassador, someone from a US Cybersecurity firm, someone from a global property company, someone from a US equity firm, two people from a massive US security technology firm who is a US government contractor, and a retired CEO of a large US Chemicals company. You do not need to be a genius to see that the ISW is not likely to be “independent”. Indeed they say themselves; “We are committed to improving the nation’s ability to execute military operations and respond to emerging threats in order to achieve U.S. strategic objectives”. This think-tank whose pronouncements are routinely cited by the “free media” lies at the heart of the US war machine.
The idea of using these “experts” on the media is to give viewer the impression that an independent-from-government view is being presented to them. In reality they are getting the government view. Indeed some of these “think-tanks” do not so much repeat the government narrative line as shape the policy. The media is not unaware of who their experts are and thus are, in effect, hoodwinking their viewers.
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