The problem with Guardian and Independent journalists writing on Russia – or the post-Soviet space is that 90% of what you get is produced by their lens and 10% by what is actually happening. In the lens is encoded a simple script: liberal capitalist ‘democracies’ good / planned economies bad / moral conservatism bad / Putin bad / Kremlin lies / Navalny is the Messiah. Something like that.
Take this nasty piece from the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker – who seems to have managed to hop on a plane to Minsk so he can write real-time reports from the heart of the uprising. The problem is he took his lens with him. Continue reading “Phantasy journalism (Shaun Walker on Belarus)”
