![\"\"](\"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Rachel-Maddow-Russia-MSNBC-1024-850x461.jpg\")
<\/a>Rachel Maddow on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC. (Screen shot via MSNBC \/ YouTube)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n
Norman Solomon
\nTruthdig.org<\/p>\n
The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.<\/p>\n
More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network\u2019s obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.<\/p>\n
FAIR\u2019s study, \u201cMSNBC Ignores Catastrophic U.S.-Backed War in Yemen<\/a>,\u201d documented a picture of extreme journalistic malfeasance at MSNBC:<\/p>\n \u25cf \u201cAn analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017. And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.\u201d<\/p>\n \u25cf \u201cMoreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation\u2019s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the\u00a0largest outbreak in recorded history<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u25cf \u201cAll of this is despite the fact that the U.S. government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated Yemen, selling\u00a0many billions of dollars of weapons<\/a>\u00a0to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing\u00a0intelligence and military assistance<\/a>\u00a0to the Saudi air force.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, MSNBC\u2019s incessant \u201cRussiagate\u201d coverage has put the network at the media forefront of overheated hyperbole about the Kremlin. And continually piling up the dry tinder of hostility toward Russia boosts the odds of a cataclysmic blowup between the world\u2019s two nuclear superpowers.<\/p>\n In effect, the programming on MSNBC follows a thin blue party line, breathlessly conforming to Democratic leaders\u2019 refrains about Russia as a mortal threat to American democracy and freedom across the globe. But hey\u2014MSNBC\u2019s ratings have climbed upward during its monochrome reporting, so why worry about whether coverage is neglecting dozens of other crucial stories? Or why worry if the anti-Russia drumbeat is worsening the risks of a global conflagration?<\/p>\n FAIR\u2019s report, written by journalist Ben Norton and published on Jan. 8, certainly merited a serious response from MSNBC and the anchors most identified by the study, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes. Yet no response has come from them or network executives. (Full disclosure: I\u2019m a longtime associate of FAIR.)<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the FAIR study, a petition gathered 22,784 signers and 4,474 individual comments\u2014asking MSNBC to remedy its extreme imbalance of news coverage. But the network and its prime-time luminaries Maddow and Hayes refused to respond despite repeated requests for a reply.<\/p>\n The petition was submitted in late January to Maddow and Hayes via their producers, as well as to MSNBC senior vice president Errol Cockfield and to the network\u2019s senior manager in charge of media relations for \u201cThe Rachel Maddow Show\u201d and \u201cAll In with Chris Hayes.\u201d<\/p>\n Signers responded to outreach from three organizations\u2014Just Foreign Policy, RootsAction.org (which I coordinate), and World Beyond War\u2014calling for concerned individuals to \u201curge Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, and MSNBC to correct their failure to report on the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the direct U.S. military role in causing the catastrophe by signing our petition.\u201d (The\u00a0petition<\/a>\u00a0is still gathering signers.)<\/p>\n As the cable news network most trusted by Democrats as a liberal beacon, MSNBC plays a special role in fueling rage among progressive-minded viewers toward Russia\u2019s \u201cattack on our democracy\u201d that is somehow deemed more sinister and newsworthy than corporate dominance of American politicians (including Democrats), racist voter suppression, gerrymandering and many other U.S. electoral defects all put together.<\/p>\n At the same time, the anti-Russia mania also services the engines of the current militaristic machinery.<\/p>\n It\u2019s what happens when nationalism and partisan zeal overcome something that could be called journalism.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. media\u2019s approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda,\u201d the independent journalist Robert Parry\u00a0wrote at the end of 2017<\/a>, in the last article published before his death. \u201cDoes any sentient human being read the New York Times\u2019 or the Washington Post\u2019s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts?\u201d<\/p>\n Parry added that \u201cto even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a \u2018Putin apologist\u2019 or \u2018Kremlin stooge.\u2019 Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many \u2018liberals\u2019 who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the U.S. intelligence community feeds us, even if we\u2019re told to accept the assertions on faith.\u201d<\/p>\n Across a U.S. media landscape where depicting Russia as a fully villainous enemy is now routine, MSNBC is a standout. The most profound dangers from what Rachel Maddow and company are doing is what they least want to talk about\u2014how the cumulative effects and momentum of their work are increasing the likelihood that tensions between Washington and Moscow will escalate into a horrendous military conflict.<\/p>\n Even at the height of the Cold War during the 1960s, when Soviet Communists ruled Russians with zero freedom of speech or press, most U.S. political and media elites recognized the vital need for d\u00e9tente. They applauded the \u201cSpirit of Glassboro<\/a>\u201d when the top leadership of the United States and Russia met at length. Now, across most of the U.S. media spectrum, no such overtures to the Kremlin are to be tolerated.<\/p>\n The U.S. government\u2019s recently released \u201cNuclear Posture Review<\/a>\u201d underscores just how unhinged the situation has become.<\/p>\n Consider the assessment from the head of a first-rate research organization in the nuclear weapons field, the Los Alamos Study Group. Its executive director,\u00a0Greg Mello, said<\/a>: \u201cWhat is most \u2018missing in action\u2019 in this document is civilian leadership. Trump is not supplying that. In part the fault for this comes from Democrats\u2014who, allied with the intelligence community and other military-industrial interests, insist that the U.S. must have an adversarial relationship with Russia. There is no organized senior-level opposition to the new Cold War, which is intensifying week by week. This document reflects, and is just one of many policies embodying, the new and very dangerous Cold War.\u201d<\/p>\n