The Tabloidization of American Media
by John Lawrence
Tabloids such as the National Enquirer have been around a long time. It is all about celebrity gossip, in other words "fake news", who cheated on whom, who slept with who, whether or not it is true. This is nothing new. So the whole idea of spreading gossip and innuendo spread to the political realm with trolls and bots funded by right wing think tanks churning out damning gossip about Hillary Clinton and others in emails and on Twitter and Facebook.. Now the American media is all excited because evidently some Russians, whether or not at the behest of Vladimir Putin, have also spread gossip (fake news) about Hillary Clinton and thus might have influenced the 2016 election.
Give me a break. Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, Fox News and other right wing trolls were perfectly capable of spreading gossip and fake news about the Clintons without any help from Vladimir Putin. They've been doing it for years. Sure maybe the Russians chimed in but so what? Their contributions were probably minuscule compared to the pounding Hillary has taken over the years from the likes of right wing American media.
Does Vladimir Putin like Hillary Clinton? Probably not. He observed Hillary's emphasis on regime change in Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Libya. He probably thought he was next. Trump and his team had ties and business interests of one sort or another with Russia whether it was the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant or oil or Trump Towers in Moscow. Hillary was the emissary of regime change. By the way, in my opinion, the regime change policy championed not only by Hillary but by Obama and Bush has been a total failure spreading chaos in the Middle East.
Putin also resented the fact that the West as embodied by NATO has been encroaching on Russia when Reagan promised Gorbachev that would never happen if he let the Berlin wall come down. For this and a host of other reasons Putin feels that he and Russia have been humiliated and rightly so. They have been humiliated by the US, no question about it.
Bloomberg reports on Putin's recent speech:
In the 1990s, the storyline goes, Russia opened itself up trustingly to the West, which immediately took advantage of it. As Putin put it this year, "The biggest mistake our country made was that we put too much trust in you; and your mistake was that you saw this trust as weakness and abused it."
The examples Putin usually gives are the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's expansion despite a promise that it would stay away from Russia's borders; the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and particularly the recognition of Kosovo's independence; and the invasion of Iraq and the Arab Spring. The revolutions in post-Soviet countries are given as examples of threatening Western "democracy export" to traditional Russian allies and clients.
Putin has made entreaties to the US about becoming partners in fighting terrorism. He has been turned down. So he is going a different route. His quest, similar to Trump's, is to make Russia great again. Another axis is forming that will be both political, economic and military. It will consist of Russia, China (Xi Jinping is already convinced China is great again) and Iran. Others will be added to the fold, particularly in Africa and the Middle East where the US has acquired many enemies with its careless bombing of civilians including wedding parties. The US' self-assumed role of world's policeman has only resulted in creating enemies in the countries which it has policed. The backlash might be called #ArabicLivesMatter.
