Site Notes

Untimely Thoughts is a site dedicated to Russian goings-on maintained by Peter Lavelle, UPI’s correspondent in Moscow. Sure enough, I have plenty of reservations about UPI, considering the guy who owns it, but there is no denying Lavelle has more common sense and forthrightness than most NYT, WaPo and Moscow Times reporters. He does not seem to be bound by the frameworks and paradigms that force mainstream reporters into petty Procrustes, arranging and selecting facts to fit their college/school-of-journalism theories.

Alas, their paradigms are not universal–most have a rather limited applicability scope–but as they refuse to openly acknowledge it, all we hear is democracy, tolerance/intolerance, xenophobia, gender as if the whole world were a testing field for a tenure-hungry professor of political/women’s/cross-cultural studies.

[One of my worst posts ever. Lavelle would later morph into a full-throated Putinist. The MSM have made themselves an easy target for criticism – anyone can come up with some – but Lavelle has been attacking the mainstream press on behalf of enemies of free speech.]

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