The Most Corrupt Profession in the World

To ensure that its stream of superficial, badly researched articles is as strong as ever, the NYTimes published a gushy piece on Mikhail Prokhorov, a “Russian billionaire who now leads a political party.” What the article forgets to mention is that Prokhorov is not really a billionaire and his “party” does not really exist.

Prokhorov is one of the figureheads used by the Kremlin to pretend that there is a free market in Russia and to fake the existence of a democracy. It won’t look good to put only Putin’s name on the ballot. But allowing real candidates to appear alongside Putin is too dangerous. So these completely fake “parties” are created to make an impression that there are alternatives to Putin and his party and that people vote for Putin after choosing him among other candidates. The system is very transparent but it obviously works. Americans look at this travesty and go, “Ah! Elections, parties, candidates! Good! There is real democracy in Russia.” This practice has been in place since the early 1990s, yet the trick works every single time there is a need to convince the West that real elections are really taking place in Russia.

The strategy also serves an important internal purpose. Fake politicians like Prokhorov are so inept and useless that they make Putin look good by their side. In the last presidential campaign, for instance, Prokhorov released a commercial that made him look completely ridiculous. He stood in front of the cameras and babbled incoherently for five minutes. The entire country laughed at the video for weeks. I hate Putin but I have to confess that after watching Prokhorov’s inarticulate braying in his own commercial I started feeling that Putin was not that bad of a candidate. At least, he could string along a few sentences that kind of made some sense.

Now, what I find really disturbing is that the NYTimes is incapable of uncovering all this and is discussing Prokhorov as if he were a real politician with a real electoral platform. Believe me, this stuff is not top secret. I don’t have a direct line to Putin or anything. A person with a very basic knowledge of Russian politics could find all of this very easily by accessing newspapers, radio shows, blogs, even Facebook pages of political commentators within the country. Anybody who sees Prokhorov famous video has to ask how come somebody who has access to billions of dollars failed to hire a campaign manager to prevent him from making a laughing stock out of himself. Why are the journalists who write for our most popular newspaper failing to conduct even this very superficial and basic research? If they can’t even do arm-chair journalism in a responsible way, how come we trust them to report on anything that might require them to get out of the arm-chair?

Gosh, if I did my job half as bad as these people do, I’d be out on my ass – and deservedly so – a long time ago. Journalism has become the most corrupt profession in the world if this kind of half-assed garbage is being published.