{"id":20666,"date":"2016-05-16T11:44:56","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T16:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20666"},"modified":"2016-05-16T11:44:56","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T16:44:56","slug":"russias-diversity-of-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20666","title":{"rendered":"Russia\u2019s Diversity of Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Russia\u2019s Diversity of Opinion<\/a><\/h3>\n
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I remember with a shudder an exchange I had with Elmar Brok on March 5, 2015, on\u00a0The Network<\/em>, a debate program of Euronews. Brok, a German and chairman of the European Parliament\u2019s Committee on Foreign Affairs, comes from Angela Merkel\u2019s CDU party and within the Parliament is in the European People\u2019s Party bloc, on the center right, the bloc which really calls the shots in the Parliament.<\/p>\n

Brok is big, brash and doesn\u2019t hesitate to throw his weight around, especially when talking with someone outside the Establishment whom he has no reason to fear. We were discussing the shooting of Boris Nemtsov, which occurred just days before. Brok insisted the murder was the responsibility of Vladimir Putin, not that Putin had pulled the trigger but he had created the atmosphere where such things could happen, etc., etc.<\/p>\n

\"Russian<\/a><\/p>\n

Russian President Vladimir Putin answering questions from Russian citizens at his annual Q&A event on April 14, 2016. (Russian government photo)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

One way or another the talk shifted to the allegedly autocratic nature of the Putin \u201cregime,\u201d with its crackdown on freedoms and, in particular, its ever tightening control of media. At that point, I objected that the Russia media were very diverse editorially, with many different points of view expressed freely.<\/p>\n

Brok shot back that this was patently untrue, and he did not hesitate to cross all red lines and indulge in libel on air by asking how much the Kremlin paid me to say that.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russia\u2019s Diversity of Opinion The usual U.S. depiction of Russian media is that all you get is\u00a0Kremlin propaganda, but prime-time talk shows actually offer wider diversity of opinion and more substantive debates than what appears on American TV, says Gilbert Doctorow. I remember with a shudder an exchange I had with Elmar Brok on March […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[13858,281,283,12827,660,694,827],"class_list":["post-20666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-diversity-of-opinion","tag-europe","tag-european-parliament","tag-gilbert-doctorow","tag-putin","tag-russia","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20667,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20666\/revisions\/20667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}