OP-ED: Back-Scratching in America (Moscow Times, RUSSIA)

By Alexei Pankin

A few weeks ago, a British friend of mine said: "I have a personal banker in Switzerland whom I had consulted about possible foreign investments, but as soon as I realized that he was basing his advice on information taken from the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, I immediately closed my account in that bank. As a result, I saved myself from serious losses during the crisis."

In recent days, a number of respected Western media outlets, including the BBC and The New York Times, have concluded that their initial reports about the outbreak of the Russia-Georgia war in August were erroneous. In the first weeks of the conflict, readers and viewers were given the same message: "Authoritarian Russia unleashed an unprovoked war against the young Georgian democracy." It took three months for the media to realize that Georgia launched the first attack against both the peaceful citizens of Tskhinvali and Russian peacekeepers, thereby compelling Russia to send its forces into Georgian territory.

If most of the Western media misled the public for so long over the simple question of who attacked whom in the Georgian conflict, then what guarantee do we have that the rest of the information they are reporting is reliable?

And as people search for the cause of the financial crisis, experts increasingly point to the lack of objective analysis in the United States. On a government level, for example, U.S. bureaucrats are becoming increasingly less professional and more politicized as they cater to the demands of their elected leaders.

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