afransen
Senior Member
Interesting bit of media manipulation by the Harper regime. I'm annoyed that they decided it was worth making Canada look foolish...
from Dan Gardner's blog:
from Dan Gardner's blog:
Peter McKay's 'farce'
The indispensable Dave Pugliese has the real story behind those aggressive Russian bombers.
The military officers I was talking to yesterday were full of kudos for Defence Minister Peter MacKay for a move that one described as “playing the media like a finely-tuned fiddle.â€
...
What’s the big deal?, was the response from the Russians. Canada had been notified of the flight and the Russian aircraft never entered Canadian airspace, they pointed out.
"The countries adjacent to the flight path had been notified and the planes did not violate the airspace of other countries. In this light the statements by the Canadian Defense Ministry provoke astonishment and can only be called a farce," Russia’s Ria Novosti quoted a government official.
The essential thing to learn from this wretched little exercise in agitprop -- aside from the fact that Peter McKay is an empty suit who will say anything he's told -- is that many powerful interests find it useful to portray Russia as a big, scary, enemy. We saw this in the conflict with Georgia, with NATO expansion, with missile defence, and with many other issues.
But here it's been laid out more clearly than ever because there actually was no story. Nothing at all. It was fabricated by a government which found it momentarily expedient to huff and puff about the evil Russian bear.
And no, I'm not excusing the many abuses of the Putin regime. But yesterday, the censored and harried Russian media got the story right while the free Canadian media acted like the compliant propaganda arm of a manipulative, chauvinistic government.
Let's remember this next time, shall we?