Kiev Post’s Promising Padawan

Pocket Vader? On the photo above: Arseniy Pavlov a.k.a. Motorola, a DNR commander, “self-confessed” murderer of exactly 15 Ukrainian POWs.

When Luke Harding hyperlinked an outrageously stupid claim about the Lugansk aerial attack of June 2 to an irrelevant Kiev Post story many of us suffered a fit of righteous anger and accused poor old Luke in all mortal sins.

The Guardian’s latest use of this virtual paper makes us deeply reconsider our callousness. Now it is quite obvious Luke Harding was only intussuscepting up to the great master of Jedi Journalism, the Kiev Post. The aspiring padawan was trying its modest best to get that enlightening sabre apprenticeship.

Why would dream factories exist if dreams didn’t come true at times? Guardian’s recent repost from the Kiev, well, Post, should really be celebrated as the latest, much enhanced exploit of the promising padawan in the process of completely reducing itself to a faceless, meaningless, abjectly substandard propaganda sheet.

The Kiev Post’s story about a Donetsk separatist commander admitting to killing 15 (no more, no less) Ukrainian POWs, is rather poorly equipped to convince in its authenticity. If one gives it the benefit of the doubt, the obvious question comes up: why didn’t The Guardian do its own minimal reporting effort to dispel the very serious doubts that remain? Motorola could have just burst out a nasty joke, for all we know.

The answer is an easy one. The Guardian’s acclaimed journalists have already passed the point of no return between journalism and propaganda, between cognitive and descriptive effort, and intellectual laziness. The really bad news is The Guardian has convinced itself it is already in the trenches of its self-defined, self-waged and self-serving war with the Evil One, so it has nothing to prove to anyone anymore.

We are the first to admit to just reblogging, reposting, retransmitting and relaying what we see fit to print. But if uncritical copying and pasting of superficial, almost schoolyard exchanges between parties that live to troll each other, is Pulitzer-rate journalism, can we have a couple of these blingy awards too?

Guardian used to make sense; it currently steeps in destroying it. It used to have a sharp eye for injustice; it now practices selective blindness (Odessa, Konstantinovka). It used to be a newspaper; it has been downsized to a bad-looking blog. The force was strong with it. But one should never underestimate the power of the gray side.

More on this topic: Motorola denies killing prisoners

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