Give Ted Galen Carpenter's book,
Unreliable Watchdog a try.
UNRELIABLE WATCHDOG
The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy
The book is over 400 pages in length and then there are nearly 100 more pages consisting of over 60 pages of notes and an index that is 27 pages long.
Excerpt:
To this date, the Kremlin has committed no acts of military aggression except in Ukraine, providing additional evidence that Ukraine is a special case in Russian foreign policy. Western warnings in 2014 about vast expansionist goals were both premature and excessive. Most interpretations of the Crimea annexation greatly oversimplified a complex historical and contemporary set of issues regarding that peninsula—and indeed the overall situation in Ukraine.4 Crimea had been part of Russia beginning in 1782, and it remained so until Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, transferred the territory to Ukraine in 1954. Since both Ukraine and Russia were constituent parts of the Soviet Union, the move didn’t seem to have much importance at the time. But when the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, Khrushchev’s decision mattered far more. Among other problems, Moscow’s crucial Black Sea naval base was now on the territory of a foreign country.
Russian leaders were nervous about that situation, even though the newly independent Ukraine gave Moscow a lease to the base. Russian uneasiness increased when a pro-Western Ukrainian government took power in 2005 following the Orange Revolution and sought membership in NATO. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, agitated the Kremlin even more when he indicated that Kyiv might not renew the lease when it expired in 2017. The election of a pro-Russian government in 2010 eased Moscow’s concerns. However, its worries returned with a vengeance when the United States and its European allies encouraged anti-government demonstrators in late 2013 and 2014 to oust that elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, before the end of his term and install a new, staunchly pro-Western regime in Kyiv. Putin promptly responded to the so-called Maidan Revolution by orchestrating a snap referendum in Crimea under the watchful eyes of Russian troops. He then had the Russian parliament give its rubber stamp approval to the regional government’s “request” to join the Russian Federation.
Unfortunately, all those nuances—especially the role of the Western powers in assisting Ukrainian demonstrators and provoking Moscow with promises that Ukraine would one day become a NATO member—were lost or deliberately omitted in the apocalyptic media coverage of the Crimea annexation.5 Not only did an array of journalists openly advocate economic sanctions against Moscow and other components of a hardline policy, but many of them, especially in the United States, vilified any person who dared advocate a more cautious policy.
The Kremlin’s apparent meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent investigations by the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller into alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Putin government greatly intensified the media’s hostility and vitriol. But attributing the emergence and growth of a new McCarthyism in the United States solely to that development would be a mistake. Many of the features of the unrelentingly negative media coverage of Russia and Putin had emerged more than two years earlier. So, too, had the demonization of the opponents of a hardline U.S.-NATO approach.
Indeed, some of the nastiest allegations were directed at individuals who not only had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s presidential bid but were outright critics. Princeton University professor Stephen F. Cohen, a longtime distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union and its successor states, was a prominent early target. Cohen’s motives were impugned and his reputation sullied long before the 2016 election because he advocated a less confrontational policy toward Russia. Such terms as “Putin’s American apologist” and “Putin’s pal” were among the labels routinely applied to Cohen.6
Analysts who argued that NATO’s expansion eastward to Russia’s border had needlessly provoked Moscow, or that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were more defensive than offensive, usually received the same treatment. Targets included Jeffrey Tayler, columnist for The Atlantic; University of Chicago professor (and dean of the realist school among U.S. international relations scholars) John J. Mearsheimer; The American Conservative columnists Pat Buchanan and Daniel Larison; National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn; and an assortment of journalists with a wide range of ideological orientations, such as The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, Medium blogger Caitlin Johnstone, and Boston Globe columnist Stephen Kinzer. Epithets such as “apologists,” “stooges,” “Russian trolls,” “patsies,” and “useful idiots” appeared frequently in mainstream media attacks on such maverick foreign policy critics. Those accusations began early, and they proliferated with the onset of the 2014 Ukraine crisis.7 But Donald Trump and his associates became the principal lightning rods. Even before Trump entered the White House, critics accused him of being intent on appeasing Moscow, because he indicated that he would seek better relations with Putin’s government.8
Carpenter, Ted Galen. Unreliable Watchdog (Kindle Locations 3819-3854). Cato Institute. Kindle Edition.
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