War and Patriotic Propaganda in the Media

This is a letter that I was compelled to write to The Australian newspaper after reading countless articles which endlessly push pro-Western thinking onto the readers. 


          Hello. Reading into the events in Ukraine and Crimea have again highlighted the subtle and insidious nature of bias in the media.

Obviously most media organisations will report events in a manner that favours the country or culture that the organisation is from, so a degree of bias is to be expected by the reader. 

But having said that, I wish to compel the Editors of The Australian to hold a higher bar of unbiased reporting. I am quite disappointed when even this publication seems
to fall into the same trap of 'patriotic propaganda' that the Australian tabloids willingly dive into. 

All of the articles in The Australian dealing with the Ukrainian crises (as well as the Syrian crises come to think of it) smack of subtle- and probably subconscious -propaganda; all of Russia's crimes are enthusiastically expounded ad nauseam, but the plethora of crimes perpetrated by the US and it's allied lackeys are palliated or ignored; Putin is portrayed as a ruthless and opportunistic tyrant who can only do evil, but Obama is glorified as a saviour of the free world who at worst may make a few foreign policy boo boos from time to time. 

The truth is that they are both rabid autocrats who both have an arm-length list of crimes to their names. The only difference is that Obama is a much slicker and skilled criminal than Putin. 

But, the more that I think about things it seems that maybe there just isn't a market for a media organisation who is truly unbiased; because when it comes to issues of war, people actually do want to be spoon fed soothing sips of propaganda reassuring them that their 'team' are the good guys who can do no wrong. 

I guess I am just disappointed that even my favourite paper tries to sell me a crapload of biased reports in support of Western government's global hegemony :/

Tim