Last night's propaganda

We watched the Donetsk channel news last night. They reported massive fraud in Western Ukraine coupled with the poisoning of Yanukovych supporters to prevent them from voting. (They were offered tea by someone somewhere and that is alleged to have put them in the hospital. That would be a lot more service than anybody I know got when they went to vote.) None of this has been reported anywhere else and it won't be because it didn't happen. But that lack of reporting of this information, by operation of the Alice in Wonderland kind of logic which rules conspiracy theories, will serve to convince some people that it is true. ("You would hardly expect them to admit it would you?")

The interesting thing though was the guy reporting the poisonings. His report came in by phone and he had all the lurid details. But his voice didn't sound convincing to me. It had the sound of doing something perfunctory. There was hardly any emotion at all in it and he was reporting the poisoning of people in a political election. The information conveyed sounded bad but the voice of the reporter didn't convince me that it was. And he might have been reading it. At least at points he sounded as if he were. That means he had to put it together before phoning it in if so.

The use of poison is not irony either. It is meant to tie in with the Yuschenko poisoning, which he, well, obviously did himself. This is also Alice in Wonderland which would confirm that Yuschenko poisoned himself--he has poison to give to others which means he had some he could use himself and of course he most benefits from the poisoning -- and the Yanukovych supporter's poisoning--they had to have been poisoned by the poison Yuschenko had because he benefits from their not voting.

That has been the problem with the media in the east for some time. And it was a problem all over Ukraine until the revolt of the press in Kiev during the revolution. What is news is what is in the collective head of powerful interests, that is, what they want the public to know and to believe. And they can bring that about because they have a near monopoly on the sources of information. The real disheartening thing however is that some want to believe it.