Oh, New York Times. As stupid and dishonest as ever.
OK, here goes. Ksenia is the daughter of the St Petersburg mayor who first gave Putin a government position. We would all be “Putin who?” without this fellow.
Ksenia has spent the last 20 years spreading a rumor that she’s Putin’s goddaughter, which Putin never denied. Or confirmed but who cares when she’s been able to self-promote massively on the basis of this rumor.
She’s been known as an influencer and TV hostess, as well as one of those oligarch mistresses that pass from one rich dude to another. It’s clearly not her beauty that attracts oligarchs in droves. But she has a proximity to Putin, so who cares that she looks like a horse?
Ksenia has helped the Putin regime in every possible way, including working to create an illusion of elections in Russia at some point.
You’ve got to be either completely unprofessional (and banned from Google) or a shameless stooge to lionize this distasteful “vagina for hire” and present her as some sort of an anti-Putin fighter. And letting her amplify the lies about the invincibility of the regime she so faithfully serves is simply immoral.
And before you say, OK, who cares about some stupid Ksenia Sobchak, ask yourself why you assume that the rest of the stories the paper publishes are any less rotten.
Clarissa's Blog 
You know the saying, you’re always reactionary about the things you know best. I read NY Times coverage of India and it’s so much lies, so much propaganda, that I wonder what else they’re lying about. Just disgraceful.
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And then I read an article on India, and since I don’t know the real situation, I might be duped into accepting the NY Times version. It’s impossible to know everything, so people keep getting duped.
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NYT publishes trash about India and can stuff its opinion where it belongs.
P.S. I don’t remember reading such an all-encompassing excoriation of a person on your blog before. You really don’t like her, to put it mildly!
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If anybody can write or link to what they are getting wrong about India, I’d be grateful. One lives in ignorance because it’s very hard to find serious sources.
As for Ksenia Sobchak, I detest all of these oligarch girlfriends. They are very disgusting.
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The issue is that Indian populace has been consistently electing a right-conservative, openly nationalist, and absolutely par-excellence administrator as the PM.
So, according to rags like NYY, of course Indians are a bunch of bigoted hoodlums who have receded to dark ages since the British imperialists abandoned them! Most of the English media in India is ultra-communist in its outlook, “wannabe woke” and cites NYT op-eds like gospel.
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OK, yes, the bigoted hoodlums message is the one I’ve been receiving. I did wonder whether it was true. See? People do get duped. At least, I wondered. Others don’t because they think they can trust leading news sources.
If Arestovych gets elected President of Ukraine, Ukrainians will become “bigoted hoodlums” to the NY times immediately.
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This piece articulates the biases in western media coverage on India:
https://sundayguardianlive.com/opinion/western-media-must-truthful
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Great link, thank you. I’m truly grateful. It’s very easy to get snagged by these malicious lies and manipulations.
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Just use Indian sources? Quite a lot of them publish in English. You might get just a different propaganda, but I find that if I can track down the same story in sources that are slanted different ways, I can often reach something comfortably like the factual core of the issue.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india
https://www.thehindu.com/news/
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This is a known and well established phenomenon.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
— Michael Crichton
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That’s a spot-on quote. The problem is that nobody can be an expert on everything. I started doubting precisely when stories began to appear about the events I knew a lot about. Then I started doubting everything but it’s impossible to find the time to get informed on every issue. This is the privatization of the news competence that we are observing, and it sucks.
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Example of good journalism one can share with English speakers:
// ‘A matter of weeks’: Zelensky’s ex-adviser says Ukraine will reach Crimea by October
INTERVIEW
Oleksiy Arestovych was the second most popular man in Ukraine after the president. But he has never been afraid to swim against the tide
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/matter-weeks-zelensky-ex-adviser-ethical-warfare-reclaiming-crimea-2554266
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I’m glad Arestovych is being covered in English. He has already confirmed that he will be running for president but he won’t run against Zelensky. He’s a deeply conservative, religious man, and he detests wokeness. I hope he does become president because he’d be great. Also – young. We urgently need more Gen-X world leaders.
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