Not that we're surprised.
What’s the Real Story in Ukraine?
I am writing this article to help interested persons make head or tail of the ongoing shambles that is the situation in Ukraine and to give some (hopefully accurate) information about the main players in the situation. One of the things that has driven me to contacting the team to offer to write this article has been the disgraceful, shallow, ill-informed coverage in much of the UK Press. The coverage on the two main TV News providers, BBC and ITN has been pathetic and has been propagandising an EU version of events (I will give some examples of this in the article).
Most of the print media has been nearly as bad. In fairness, during the past few weeks, since mid-February, the Daily Mail has started to take the situation seriously and provided much more accurate coverage, particularly in some of the op-eds. The best TV news coverage has been from Al-Jazeera (AJ). I suppose AJ is giving unbiased coverage for the simple reason that as an Islamic-funded broadcaster they have no particular brief for any of the parties in the region. There is also a channel for non-EU-tainted coverage on Russia Today (RT). RT is as you would expect: pro-Russian, putting the official ‘Moscow spin’ on all its reporting. It is also on occasions hilariously technically incompetent and some of its presenters speak very strongly accented English (some of the other staff are, however, Western European).
The first thing to get straight about the situation is the claim that the document that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign was a ‘EU Trade Pact’ (or similar names). This was in fact an innocuous and misleading wrapper put around a preliminary agreement for Ukraine to begin accession procedures with the EU, a process that can take decades (for example, Turkey!). Why was this misleading name used?
In the discussion that follows please note the difference between ‘Europe’ and the ‘EU’. Some reporters use the two names interchangeably. They are not the same. Europe is a geographical entity, a continent, consisting of over 40 countries. The EU is a group of 28 countries within Europe that have decided democratically (!) to form a supranational bloc. Reasons for the use of the misleading name for the rejected treaty are numerous and include:
More @ Gates of Vienna
They must be onto the truth, when I go to that page, I just get a white screen.
ReplyDeleteTry it again as it just worked for me. Thanks.
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