主题：西方，西方媒体，中国，俄国，智者。 -- CaoMeng

We of the West are inordinately proud of our civil liberties, our periodic bouts of voting, our law-abiding, rule-based governments, and of course, our free and fair press. We are less likely to dwell upon the Patriot Act, the lack of real lternative political choices, nor of course on the complicity of that press in the egregious campaign of disinformation that opened the door to the illegal occupation of Iraq. Indeed, since the advent of mass media in the late 19th century, every war in every country – from the Opium Wars to the Spanish-American, from Vietnam to Kosovo, Iraq and So. Ossetia – has been characterized by the systematic manipulation and misinformation of public opinion by a press largely subservient to whatever government is in place. This is unlikely to change.

Indeed, there was something refreshingly straightforward about press manipulation in the USSR. The newspapers were told what to write – and they wrote it; everyone over the age of 14 realized this, reading Pravda with a jaundiced eye. The situation in the West is rather more complex. Much of the mass media is owned by financial conglomerates with their own political and economic agendas. Publishers sit down to dinner with senior politicians,and are briefly made to feel important – part of the inner circle. There is a thick network of think tanks – some strongly ideological, others available to the highest bidder – feeding journalists pre-packaged spin. There is huge peer pressure to conform – imagine the fate of a junior reporter who failed to remind the reader that (like George Bush Sr.) Putin had once headed the security services, or noted that he remained overwhelmingly popular with the denizens of Russia’s provinces. Their readership remains absurdly credulous – given how often they have been spun, misinformed or simply lied to.