Suspended for Providing Balanced News on Ukraine, by Tony Kevin

These days, nothing will get you in trouble quicker than telling the truth. From Tony Kevin at consortiumnews.com:

Violent Maidan coup in Ukraine, 2014. (Wikipedia)

On Friday The Guardian Australia website carried a news report, with a follow-up piece on Monday, whose implications for free speech are profoundly disturbing.

They concern a Radio New Zealand, or RNZ, broadcasting employee — unnamed, but everyone in the small New Zealand broadcasting world will soon know who it is — who has been placed on leave while their professional conduct is investigated.  Obviously, a career hangs in the balance. 

The malign ghosts of Orwell’s 1984 stalk this story.

‘Russian Garbage’

This unnamed person in RNZ committed the cardinal sin of “inappropriate editing” of incoming Reuters news feeds on the war in Ukraine to insert “Russian garbage” in the contemptuous words of Paul Thompson, chief executive of RNZ. That is to say, they drew on Russian news sources to insert balancing pro-Russian material to the incoming Western news agency feeds.  

The Guardian tells us that in fact accurate information about Ukraine was added to the Reuters copy:

“The articles in question made a range of amendments: adding the word ‘coup’ to describe the Maidan revolution; changing a description of Ukraine’s former ‘pro-Russian president’ to read ‘pro-Russian elected government’; adding references to a ‘pro-western government’ that had ‘suppressed ethnic Russians’; and on several occasions adding references to Russian concerns about ‘neo-Nazi elements’ in Ukraine.”

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One response to “Suspended for Providing Balanced News on Ukraine, by Tony Kevin

  1. Foxtrot Juliet Bravo's avatar Foxtrot Juliet Bravo

    The Monsters Who Own Ukraine has some great backstory on the coup and riots with false flag snipers and opposition channeled into a kill zone by police.
    It is not for the weak as it shows the Donbas people blown to bits.
    Certainly not for those who can’t handle truth and reality.

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