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Andrey Babitsky was the quintessential Russian democratic journalist.

A correspondent for the US government funded Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RFERL) since 1989, his star began to shine at the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999, when he was embedded amongst the rebel fighters in Grozny. He took a harshly anti-Russian line...

His troubles with the editors began with an article on his Russian language blog from March 2014. Just its first sentence, really. It has since been deleted, but the Internet remembers:

This is not about Crimea – on this question, I’m fully agreed with Vladimir Putin’s main thesis, that Russia has the absolute right to take the peninsula’s population under its protection. I am aware that a significant number of my colleagues don’t share this viewpoint. After the President’s speech, I am now a supposedly correct, officially approved citizen, while those who are disagree with Russia’s actions in Ukraine have become national traitors.

That’s it.

A week later, Babitsky was removed from his position as chief editor of Echo of the Caucasus, and suspended from work for one month without reimbursement. The decision was condemned by Mario Corti, a former director of RFERL who had also ran into terminal disagreements with the senior American management and resigned in disgust. Although he stressed that he disagreed with Babitsky’s position on Crimea, he notes that the overall article was “harshly critical of Vladimir Putin,” and affirmed that opinion in a commentary is “legitimate journalism” and that his demotion goes counter to RFERL’s standing as a “paragon of free speech.”

Babitsky was reinstated as a journalist following his one month suspension, but was quietly dismissed in September 2014 after a stint as a war correspondent in the Donbass. He left without much fanfare, unlike, say, Liz Wahl, whose theatric resignation from and denunciation of RT live on air was carefully choreographed in advance with neocon waterboy and professional troll James Kirchick. Possibly Babitsky didn’t want to risk his Czech residency permit – RFERL is headquartered in Prague – until his daughter finished school. In any case, it was only a few days ago that we finally got access to the juicy details of his departure when he gave an interview to the Czech daily Lidové noviny

But interesting as this all is, the Crimea sentence wasn’t what he was fired from RFERL for.

He was fired by a US government funded media outlet for exposing possible Neo-Nazi atrocities.

dissident wrote:NATO is a disgusting collection of self-righteous imperialists posing as do-gooders spreading democracy and human rights. Napoleon was also a self-annointed do-gooder spreading the noble values of the French revolution across Europe. The western crusaders were also spreading righteous values to the Middle East and to Byzantium (their fellow Christians). I see a pattern.

The French Campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801) was Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in the Orient, ostensibly to protect French trade interests, undermine Britain's access to India, and to establish scientific enterprise in the region.
...
In France, Egyptian fashion was in full swing – intellectuals believed that Egypt was the cradle of western civilization and wished to export the Enlightenment to the Egyptians, ...

Reuters cried it had evidence that anti-Kiev rebels downed MH17. It's not the investigation they cite or some country's intelligence service. It's a Lugansk region resident Petr Fedotov. On camera he said he saw a missile coming from the Ukrainian army's side, and this missile downed the plane. Then off camera, says the agency, the man took his words back and said the missile was in fact launched from a rebel city. The reason he lied in first place is that he was afraid of the rebels. RT caught up with the man who says he never commented the downed Boeing off camera and journalists simply made it up. In the Now are Ronald Suny, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago and US journalist Robert Parry who says that CIA intelligence could have shed light on what happened to MH17, but this information is being concealed for a reason.

Newfie wrote:Geeze, that guys talks faster than I can listen. Maybe I'm impaired cause I don't have TV. All joking aside, I have no idea what side he was on, or what his point was.

I guess my point is that NONE of the media is worth paying attention to.

We, as a culture, have lost the ability to think critically. Not every individual, but in aggregate.

Keith_McClary wrote:I'm not seeing any outrage and moral indignation in the Western free press about US-armed and assisted Saudi forces "massing on the border" and bombing poor little Yemen. Unlike their reporting on Ukraine.

onlooker wrote:just was wondering what you guys think of the "independent news bloggers". I am sure we can criticize any of them in so much as they are pretty much expressing their own viewpoint. But I find them refreshing in serving up a different view then main stream media whether Western or otherwise.