Mainstream US Media Is Lost in Ukraine

As reported by the UK Guardian...

"During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga -- who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor -- blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

"Paet said, 'What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.

"'So she also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can say it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened. ... So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition.'

"Ashton replied: 'I think we do want to investigate. I didn't pick that up, that's interesting. Gosh.'"

This important evidence regarding who was responsible for the crucial sniper fire, which sparked the violent coup, has been virtually blacked out of the mainstream U.S. news media, along with the sudden disinterest on the part of the coup regime to investigate who committed those murders. Yet, instead of repairing the rotting foundation of Official Washington's false narrative, the major news organizations just keep building upon it.

Whiting Out the Brown Shirts

The next step is to white-out the brown shirts of the neo-Nazi storm troopers who led the final violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Then, you clean up the unsavory coup regime by having its U.S.-chosen leader, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, receive a formal welcome at the White House. Next, you pretend that the concerns of the ethnic Russians in Ukraine's east and south are simply the result of Moscow's propaganda and intimidation.

That's what we're seeing now. The New York Times even dispatched correspondent C.J. Chivers, the same guy who falsely fingered the Syrian government with that "vector analysis" last September, to co-author a dispatch entitled "Pressure and Intimidation Grip Crimea," with the subtitle, "Russia Moves Swiftly to Stifle Dissent Ahead of Secession Vote."

Chivers and co-author Patrick Reevel wrote:

"With a mix of targeted intimidation, an expansive military occupation by unmistakably elite Russian units and many of the trappings of the election-season carnivals that have long accompanied rigged ballots across the old Soviet world, Crimea has been swept almost instantaneously into the Kremlin's fold.

"This has happened well ahead of the referendum set for Sunday, after which, barring an extraordinary surprise, the peninsula's interim authorities, led by a previously unsuccessful politician nicknamed the Goblin, will announce that its citizens have voted to leave Ukraine and seek a place in President Vladimir V. Putin's Russia."

You get the picture? While the New York Times accepted the rump parliament's actions in Kiev last month as "legitimate" -- voting in lock step under the watchful of eye of neo-Nazi militias to depose Yanukovych and strip away rights of ethnic Russians -- a different standard will apply to Crimea's referendum on bailing out of the failed Ukrainian state.

That vote, if it favors secession, must be seen as rigged and resulting only from Russian coercion, all the better to continue the false narrative that now dominates the U.S. political/media process.

Yet, the danger of false narratives -- as the American people saw in Iraq and almost revisited in Syria -- is that policies, including warfare, can be driven by myth, not by fact. The real story of Ukraine is far more complex than the black-and-white caricature that the New York Times, the Washington Post and others are presenting. It is in the truthful grays that responsible policies are shaped and bloody miscalculations are avoided.

[For more of Consortiumnews.com's exclusive coverage of the Ukraine crisis, see "Can Obama Speak Strongly for Peace?"; "Neocons Have Weathered the Storm"; "Crimea's Case for Leaving Ukraine"; "The 'We-Hate-Putin' Group Think"; "Putin or Kerry: Who's Delusional?"; "America's Staggering Hypocrisy"; "What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis"; "Ukraine: One 'Regime Change' Too Many?"; "A Shadow US Foreign Policy"; "Cheering a 'Democratic' Coup in Ukraine"; "Neocons and the Ukraine Coup."]