-The resignation of RT anchor Liz Wahl in early March made some waves in the media, but is there more to the story? First, we start with a small section of The Daily Beast's article by James Kirchick from The Daily Beast for some background.
Liz Wahl wasn’t just disgusted by
the Kremlin-funded TV network’s handling of Ukraine, she says in an
exclusive interview. RT’s coverage of the entire world “made me feel
sick.”
American journalist Liz Wahl just made Vladimir Putin’s enemies list.
Wahl,
an American anchor for RT-America, a cable news network funded by the
Russian government, stunned viewers Wednesday, when, at the end of her 5
PM broadcast, she announced her resignation from the channel.
- The author of the article admits prior contact and discussions with the former RT anchor Liz Wahl and you can
read the rest here
March 19th, a website called Truth Dig publishes an article with a different take on the resignation and calls it a
NeoConSPIRACY. This story won't go unnoticed by RT.
Liz Wahls On Air resignation and RT's follow-up story citing the 'neocon' involvement.
By Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek
For her public act of protest against Russia Today’s coverage of the
Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory and supposedly advancing the
agenda of Vladimir Putin in Washington, D.C., previously unknown news
anchor Liz Wahl has suddenly become one of the most famous unemployed
people in America. After her on-air resignation from the cable news
channel, Wahl appeared on the three major American cable news
outlets—CNN, Fox News, MSNBC—to denounce the heavy-handed editorial line
she claims her bosses imposed on her and other staffers.
“What’s clear is what’s happening right now amid this crisis is that
RT is not about the truth,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “It’s about
promoting a Putinist agenda. And I can tell you firsthand, it’s also
about bashing America.”
Wahl’s act of defiance eventually earned her invitations from “The
View” and “The Colbert Report,” offering her the opportunity to
introduce millions of Americans to a Russian government-funded network
whose Nielsen ratings have been too low to measure, but which commands a
massive following on YouTube. Wahl was the toast of Washington, winning
plaudits from a variety of prime-time pundits, from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes (“remarkably badass”) to the conservative Amanda Carpenter (“Liz Wahl is proud to be an American and in the last five minutes I think she made everyone else proud to be one, too.”)
The celebration of Wahl fed directly into a BuzzFeed expose
on “How The Truth Is Made at Russia Today,” with writer Rosie Gray
painting a portrait of an “atmosphere of censorship and pressure” on
American staffers toiling in RT’s D.C. offices. RT had long been the
subject of criticism and ridicule for its promotion of Zeitgeist-style
trutherism and libertarian paranoia, but Wahl now placed RT under
unprecedented scrutiny, with mainstream U.S. media sounding the alarm
about a bulwark of soft Russian power situated just blocks from the
White House.
Behind the coverage of Wahl’s dramatic protest, a cadre of
neoconservatives was celebrating a public relations coup. Desperate to
revive the Cold War, head off further cuts to the defense budget and
restore the legitimacy they lost in the ruins of Iraq, the tightknit
group of neoconservative writers and stewards had opened up a new PR
front through Wahl’s resignation. And they succeeded with no shortage of
help from an ossified media establishment struggling to maintain
credibility in an increasingly anarchic online news environment.
With
isolated skeptics branded as useful idiots for Putin, the scene has been
kept clean of neoconservative fingerprints, obscuring their interest in
Wahl’s resignation and the broader push to deepen tensions with Russia.
Through interviews with six current RT employees—all Americans with
no particular affection for Russian President Vladimir Putin or his
policies—and an investigation into the political forces managing the
spectacle, a story has emerged that stands in stark contrast to the one
advanced by Wahl, her supporters and the mainstream American press.
It is the story, according to former colleagues, of an apolitical,
deeply disgruntled employee seeking an exit strategy from a job where,
sources say, she was disciplined for unprofessional behavior and had
been demoted. Wahl did not return several voice and text messages sent
to her cellphone.
At the center of the intrigue is a young neoconservative writer and
activist who helped craft Wahl’s strategy and exploit her resignation to
propel the agenda of a powerful pro-war lobby in Washington.
The story began at 5:07 p.m. Eastern time on March 5.
PR From PNAC 2.0
It was a full 19 minutes before Wahl resigned. Inside the offices of
the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative think tank in
Washington D.C., a staffer logged on to the group’s Twitter account to announce the following:
“#WordOnTheStreet says that something big might happen on RT in about 20-25 minutes.”
Then, at 5:16, exactly 10 minutes before Wahl would quit on air, FPI tweeted:
“#WordOnTheStreet says you’re really going to want to tune in to RT:
http://rt.com/on-air/rt-america-air/ #SomethinBigMayBeGoingDown”
Up until two minutes before Wahl’s resignation, FPI took to Twitter again to urge its followers to tune in to RT.
And finally, at 5:26 p.m.,
at the very moment Wahl quit, FPI’s Twitter account broke the news: “RT
Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that
whitewashes the actions of Putin.’ ”
The tweets from FPI suggested a direct level of coordination between
Wahl and the neoconservative think tank. Several calls to FPI for this
story were not answered.
Just over an hour later, an exclusive
interview with Wahl appeared at The Daily Beast. It was authored by
James Kirchick, a 31-year-old writer whose work has appeared in
publications from the neoconservative Commentary to the liberal Israeli
paper Haaretz.
Kirchick acknowledged having been in contact with Wahl since August,
but cast himself as a passive bystander to the spectacle, claiming that
they merely “stayed in touch periodically over the past 6 months, and I
always encouraged her to follow her conscience in making a decision
about her professional future.”
Kirchick wrote that by quitting, Wahl paid “the price real
reporters—not Russian-government funded propagandists—have to pay if
they are concerned with quaint notions like objectivity and the truth.”
Later that evening, Kirchick tweeted a photo of himself with Wahl, calling it a “Freedom selfie.” The two had apparently gathered to celebrate.
On March 7, Kirchick and a camera person stationed themselves
outside the office building on D.C.’s G Street housing RT America’s
headquarters. On a self-proclaimed mission “to find out more about RT,”
he badgered dozens of random passers-by with questions like the
following: “What is a more appropriate punishment for the women of Pussy
Riot: two years in a Siberian labor camp or public whipping by
Cossacks?”
Kirchick says RT staffers called the D.C. police department to remove
him from the premises. However, several RT staffers told us that a
security guard notified the police because Kirchick had mistaken
employees at two adjacent law firms for employees of RT—“the wannabe
thugs at 1325 G St,” he called them—and began harassing them. (An update
inserted at the bottom of The Daily Beast summary of the incident noted
that it was building security and not RT staffers who called the D.C.
police.)
So who was Kirchick, and what sort of commitment did he maintain to “objectivity and the truth?”
Read more: How Cold War-Hungry Neocons Stage Managed RT Anchor Liz Wahl’s Resignation
-While our attention to the Cold War only went into hibernation, it appears that spring is here and the proxies and their battlefields are right before our eyes and just a double click away.
The German automaker announced Friday it will create another line at the plant, producing the X7, a larger SUV with three rows of seats similar to a Cadillac Escalade. The company will also make the X4, a sportier version of the X3 coupe and plans to build a plug-in hybrid version of its smaller X5 SUV.
