The US media continues to be unsettled by a journalism course organized by the RT Academy in Africa, one month after its completion, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan posted on Telegram on Wednesday.

Her remarks came in response to a feature in the National Interest, a US-based bimonthly, titled ‘Combating Russia’s Global Disinformation Campaign’. The lengthy article, published earlier this week, warns Western media of the presumed dangers posed by Russian journalism, which is rapidly evolving and becoming influential in the countries of the Global South.

According to the article, while Russia’s main tactic to compete with Western news media was previously to create alternative outlets such as RT and Sputnik, Moscow has recently changed course by introducing journalism training and fact-checking.

“Russia – with its eye particularly trained on the Global South – seems intent on advancing its own mirror image of Western journalism training, one in which Russian media practices are portrayed as the gold standard,” the article states. It names RT Academy, launched in February, as an example of such practices, recalling that it welcomed journalists from all over the world to train and had a course specifically for African participants in October.

The article also claims Russia’s tactics “follow decades of effort by Moscow to ingratiate itself with journalists, especially in the Global South,” so as to challenge the Western narrative. The piece then offers Western news organizations advice on how to counter Russia’s growing influence, chiding them for overlooking the Global South and failing to provide enough of their own coverage there.

Simonyan found the attention of Western press on RT Academy amusing.

“American media just can’t calm down. They are discussing our RT Academy course for journalists from Africa a month after its completion,” she stated in a Telegram post on Wednesday, adding a tongue-in-cheek: “You’re falling behind, comrades. We already have a course for journalists in Chinese in full swing.”

Russian media, and RT in particular, has been repeatedly smeared and targeted in the West. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow last month claimed that US President-elect Donald Trump will try to turn the American media into an “American-accented version of RT,” suggesting that it would be the end of free press in the country. BBC chief Tim Davie said in October that Russian media outlets were spreading “unchallenged propaganda” across the Global South. The US State Department has sanctioned a host of Russian news outlets over the past two years, including RT and its parent company, accusing the latter of acting as an extension of Russian intelligence.

However, many experts, including some in the West, have criticized the incessant targeting of Russian media, noting that the states that sanction Russian news outlets are violating their own principles of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

https://www.rt.com/russia/609181-us-media-russian-influence/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

The house always wins: The EU’s sham ‘democracy’ is on show against Romania’s Georgescu
The presidential frontrunner has been banned from elections under a laughable pretense. Is this the future fate of the entire bloc?

One way you can recognize a rotten Ancien Regime desperately running out of road is by how boorish and transparent its methods of repression get.

By that standard, Romania and with it the EU must be on the verge of revolution. Because it is really hard to imagine a cruder set of dirty tricks than what has been deployed there to suppress the most likely winner of the next presidential election, Calin Georgescu.

By now, the hounding of Georgescu by the Romanian establishment (and that of the EU) is quite a saga. A short recap will do: Last December, Georgescu, an insurgent nationalist-sovereignist surprise candidate, won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. Instead of holding the second round, as foreseen by law, the Romanian establishment resorted to crass lawfare: Bucharest’s constitutional court cancelled the run-off, which Georgescu had very good chances of winning. Or rather, because Georgescu had very good chances of winning.

The pretext the court used was ludicrous then – guess what? “Russian interference,” again – and by now even Western mainstream media have had to acknowledge that the so-called “evidence,” a file cobbled together by the Romanian security services, is a bad joke. Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, stately stalwart of German Russophobia, has long admitted that the claim of Russian meddling was a “myth” (read: lie): “The governing class in Bucharest has made a show of the Russian bogeyman to distract from the failure of its little power games – and to have a pretext for annulling elections that did not suit it.”

Worse (yes, they can do even worse in EU-Romania), Georgescu’s successful social media campaign, which was used as evidence against Georgescu was, in reality, financed by his political opponents. Their plan was to promote him into the second round where they would then be able to beat him. When he proved unpredictably popular and upset that scheme, they cancelled the election.

Unsurprisingly, many Romanians saw through this charade and rallied even more behind the suppressed candidate. Hence, Georgescu was, if anything, even more likely to win the replacement elections scheduled for May, as polls clearly indicated: leading with over 41% over his closest opponent, who had less than 19%.

That was too much to bear, of course, for Romania’s long-suffering and deeply corrupt establishment. With those poll figures just out, as it happened, the main election authority has now banned Georgescu, again. The underlying principle is simple: You look like you are going to win fair and square. But rule number one of EU democracy club is: we always win. Out you go.

Georgescu, it is true, can still appeal. But guess where: to that same constitutional court that was used to kneecap him when he was winning the first time. Fat chance he’ll have a fair hearing.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Georgescu has been widely characterized as far-right. He certainly is a nationalist and definitely does not belong to my club, the Left. But all of the above is irrelevant. Strictly irrelevant. He has a right to stand for elections. If his opponents dislike his politics, they have to beat him at the ballot box, not through lawfare and by clearly instrumentalized charges.

These charges include dubious associations, playing fast and loose with recent Romanian history, and being less than transparent about money. And so what? Big deal: Even if every single accusation should turn out to be true, the fact is that if the same standards were applied everywhere and to everyone in Romania and the EU or its favorite sham “democracy”, Zelensky’s Ukraine, then broad swathes of the incumbent “elites” would fall.

Italy, literally, has a government led by a neo-fascist; Ukraine is shot through with not even neo-fascism but the good old sturdy World War Two variant. And don’t get me started on the AfD in Germany and the National Rally in France, neither of which – in spite all the already deeply undemocratic “firewalling” they face – anyone would dare to simply kick out of elections. We could enumerate more examples, but the gist should be clear: even if Georgescu can be characterized as “far right,” the EU, to which Romania belongs, has long accommodated this type of ideology.

The real reason why Georgescu has been eliminated, for now, is, of course, something else, or rather two things: First, he is a populist (that’s praise in my lexicon, by the way) challenger to the elite in both his own country and the EU. Secondly, he has dared question the wisdom of turning Romania into a massive NATO base and thus a giant target. Everything else is pretext. Don’t fall for it.

Georgescu’s supporters are demonstrating and resisting. They are right. Those currently running the US have also come out on his side repeatedly. J.D. Vance warned the Europeans not to overdo it in Romania, or elsewhere. Elon Musk has called the new Romanian attack on the elections “crazy.” About this one, he, too, is right, even if Politico is hysterical about it.

Yet, in a way, the fact that the Romanian authorities, certainly with EU backing, have gone so far is a bad sign: it seems that with the US-Europe relationship on the rocks anyhow, the Europeans are now willing to thumb their noses at what their old overlords in Washington tell them, at least, when it’s about cancelling elections, suppressing democracy or, of course, continuing the moronic and bloody Western proxy war via Ukraine against Russia. Way to go, Europe: You are discovering your ability to rebel against the US, at very long last, only to be even worse.

Georgescu is right: This is not “merely” a Romanian affair, but yet another trend-setting event for all of EU-Europe. After the massive manipulations used in France to build bizarre governments to shut out both the populist right and left and not reflect the vote, the brazen “firewalling” (against the AfD) and probably outright falsifications (against the BSW of Sarah Wagenknecht) in Germany, now we have reached the stage of direct, open election suppression.

Romania is likely to be a harbinger of the future of the EU. No offense, but what an irony. The only hope is that Europe’s future is, actually, not the same as that of the EU. Indeed, Europe may only have a future if the EU will not.

https://rurtnews.com/news/613982-romania-georgescu-eu-democracy/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.