I find myself with a growing concern about media censorship/filtering.
The news coverage of the Orange Revolution had broken previous method of operation by the Western media to covering breaking news in Ukraine. The press had covered the story fully and fairly accurately.
Prior to the Orange Revolution the news of events in Ukraine had been covered by journalists based in Moscow. The stories always had a Russian flavor/taint to them and thus tended to portray events in Ukraine in a negative light.
In the last year, the Western media has fallen into old habits. Major events in Ukraine either do not get covered or with that Moscovite flavor that leaves many people with a bad aftertaste.
Two major events have occurred this week that have received zero coverage in the Western Media.
The first was the November 28th 2006 enactment of a Law in the Ukrainian Parliament that declared that the 1932-1933 Holodomor (Famine-Genocide) was an Act of Genocide carried out against the Ukrainian people by the brutal Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin. This was based on extensive evidence declassified by the Ukrainian security services of Soviet OGPU & Government records of the era. This is an extremely important issue as 10 million Ukrainians had perished in such a short time.
This first act was heavily covered by the Ukrainian media in a positive light while it was covered with disdain by the Russian media. The Western Media just ignored it.
The second was the November 29th 2006 resulting bombing of the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow by a "youth group" protesting the enactment of the Ukrainian legislation. This is a serious act of terrorism carried out on Russian soil. The Ukrainian media has covered it. The Russian media has ignored it and the Western Media is nowhere to be found.
Is this media censorship by the Western Media or just plain incompetence?
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This is unfortunately no surprise. If it had concerned the Middle East it would have hit the headlines for days! The western media still doesn't seem to think of Ukraine as a real country - and it's high time for that ignorance to end!!! As for Russia - go figure - that's just typical. Pardon me my soap box here but the same thing goes on in the Churches - we're all still waiting for Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow and his cohorts including those in North America to admit that their Patriarchate leadership collaborated with an atheistic regeime in the persecution of other Christians - most notably the Greek Catholics the Autocephalous Orthodox in Ukraine during the Soviet era - unfortunately I don't think that will happen too soon either! Ignorance is definately NOT bliss and neither are sheer arrogance and stubborness!
I thought Slavko brought up some excellent points in this post, and Fr. Bruce has expanded on them to illustrate how insidiuos and destructive politics can be.
Not that we don't need politics ... underneath we are all political animals, but what sticks in my craw is the sheer hypocrisy of western media in representing itself as "objective."
Bottom line is that the media is an industry, not a profession ... although its practitioners would have the rest of us believe differently.
Excellent Point Pawlina! I quite agree!
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