Apr 12, 2015

VIDEO: Patrick L. Smith: Alternative Media Tells It Right on Ukraine

From Russia Insider

Patrick L. Smith is the foreign affairs columnist at Salon and author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (2013). He was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992 and a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly and other publications.

The key points of Smith’s interesting speech:

American media have had an unhealthy relationship with political power from 1898 and the first advance into imperial adventures
You can have democracy or you can have empire, but you cannot have both at the same time
You can have a healthy press or you can have imperial ambitions, but you cannot have both
The American media had a really bad Cold War and never got over it
In 2001 the media didn’t rise to the occasion and bent to power
Quantitative in media had become qualitative
Informally American media function as state supervised institution
America is in the late imperial phase
The Ukrainian economy is a humanitarian tragedy
The so-called ‘alternative media’ are not an alternative to anything; alternative media tell the truth, but they just don’t have the means of production and infrastructure like mainstream media have to push it out there.