The following news items and summary may explain why Bush and Putin are so friendly and so much alike:
February 28, 2005
From Russia With Love
While [Russian President] Putin travels with a contingent of reporters just as Bush does, the Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state . . .
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
February 25, 2005
The Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
USA Today
Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law
January 7, 2005
. . . and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
"It was very specifically said [that] we need to be fairer to the Bush Administration or to the Republicans than anybody else in the media would be. But that was always understood there as a sort of a code for “lay off.”
Former Fox News reporter
interviewed in the documentary Outfoxed
2004
Helpful questions are often planted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
Gannon: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like 'sickening,' 'disgusting' and 'reprehensible.' Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?
McClellan: I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often.
White House press conference
May 10, 2004
Unwelcome questions are not allowed.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During his trip to Germany on Wednesday, the main highlight of George W. Bush's trip was meant to be a "town hall"-style meeting with average Germans. But with the German government unwilling to permit a scripted event with questions approved in advance, the White House has quietly put the event on ice.
Der Speigel
With a Hush and a Whisper, Bush Drops
Town Hall Meeting with Germans
February 23, 2005
And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
During last year's election campaign Bush avoided interviews with leading newspapers, such as the Washington Post, but frequently invited reporters from smaller swing state publications to speak with him on Air Force One. Vice-president Dick Cheney took the strategy one step further and banned New York Times reporters from travelling with him.
The Observer
The mole, the US media and a White House coup
February 20, 2005
Television channels air newscasts with fancy graphics but follow scripts approved by the Kremlin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The [Education] Department already has paid Ketchum . . . to produce a video release on the law that was used by some television stations as if it were real news. Other government agencies -- including the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- also have distributed such prepackaged videos, a practice that congressional auditors have described as illegal in some cases.
Washington Post
Administration Paid Commentator
January 8, 2005
The general manager installed at NTV after the Kremlin takeover was later fired when his coverage of the Moscow theater siege in 2002 angered Putin.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
CNN's top news executive, Eason Jordan, resigned after a web-fed controversy over comments he made at a conference last month in Davos, Switzerland . . . Jordan drew the ire of mostly right-wing bloggers after he allegedly said that U.S. forces in Iraq targeted journalists on several occasions.
NewsHour
Bloggers and Journalists
February 14, 2005
NTV's most independent remaining hosts, Leonid Parfyonov and Savik Shuster, were taken off the air after the government bristled at their talk shows. Shuster's show was called "Freedom of Speech."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
ABC is canceling Bill Maher's late-night topical talk show, "Politically Incorrect," [which] has been on thin ice since just after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when host Maher was quoted as referring to past United States military actions as "cowardly."
CNN
Maher canceled
May 14, 2002
[MSNBC host Phil Donahue's show] was cancelled despite having the best ratings on the network; this occurred, according to published reports, after a study commissioned by NBC described Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."
Fair and Accuracy in Reporting
MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech
March 7, 2003
"People do get fired in American press. They don't get fired by government, however. They get fired by their editors or they get fired by their producers, or they get fired by the owners of a particular outlet or network."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Newspaper editors at the Texas City (Texas) Sun and the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Ore., apologized for opinion pieces critical of Bush's leadership in the aftermath of the [9/11] attacks, then fired the writers. "Criticism of our chief executive and those around him needs to be responsible and appropriate," wrote Daily Courier editor Dennis Roler in an editorial.
USA Today
The post-Sept. 11 world is potentially confusing
October 8, 2001
If Bush does not trust the Russian press to get the story of yesterday's news conference right, he can at least go to the Kremlin's own Web site. On it was posted a transcript of the joint news conference. Only all of Bush's statements and answers were deleted.
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
The list of names of countries supporting the U.S.-led military action in Iraq has been removed from the White House Web site. [Also] gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush's statement that "I'm not that concerned" about Osama bin Laden . . .
Washington Post
Those White House Links to Nothing
October 25, 2004
The Kremlin press pool is like so many institutions in Russia that have the trappings of a Western-style pluralistic society but operate under a different set of understandings, part of what analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center calls "the illusion of democracy."
Washington Post
In Russian Media, Free Speech for a Select Few
When conservatives talk of George W. Bush’s “transformational” role in American politics, they are referring to a fundamental change they seek in the U.S. system of government in which the Republican Party will dominate for years to come and power will not really be up for grabs in general elections . . .
This concept also might be called the “Putin-izing” of American politics, where one side’s dominance of media, financial resources and the ability to intimidate opponents is overwhelming – as now exists in Russia under President Vladimir Putin
Robert Parry
Bush & the Rise of 'Managed Democracy'
February 12, 2005
__________________________________
"I've just had a very important and constructive dialogue with my friend . . . We have had, over the past four years, very constructive relations, and that's the way I'm going to keep it for the next four years, as well."
George W. Bush
Joint Press Conference with President Putin
February 24, 2005
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Monday, February 28, 2005
'I've gotta get my elephant tusks back'
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005
In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.
Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.
"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'
"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"
His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.
That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.
Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".
He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.
I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."
His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"
Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.
"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)
Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.
"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.
As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.
I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.
Amid the guns, drugs and enormous expenses claims, Hunter S Thompson created a new style of writing - gonzo - and a generation of followers. Jon Ronson explains why he became one of them
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Wednesday February 23 2005
In this article, we mistakenly attributed to Richard Nixon the view that Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". On the contrary, it was what Thompson said of Nixon.
It is the morning after Hunter S Thompson's suicide, and I am reading loaded magazine's recent interview with Iggy Pop. It begins: "Iggy Pop! Shit man. I'm alone in a hotel room thinking I've overdosed on coke. Sweating. Thinking what the hell am I going to ask Iggy tomorrow afternoon. Two valium and 14 hours later I am sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont ..."
And so on.
A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way. Reading loaded's over-Thompson-inspired prose reminds me of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanours when Woody Allen confesses to Mia Farrow that his love letter to her was plagiarised from James Joyce. "You probably wondered why all the references to Dublin," he says.
Thompson's brilliant invention was not the drug-addled journalist, although he did play the role wonderfully, fictionalising himself (and it did begin as a fiction, or at least an exaggeration, although it doesn't seem to have ended quite that way) as a frothing madman in the midst of some gigantic President Nixon-inspired bad trip.
"Nixon's face filled the screen," he writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was 'sacrifice'. Over and over again: 'Sacrifice ... sacrifice ... sacrifice.'
"I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. 'Don't try to fight it or you'll start getting brain bubbles ...'"
His was such an enticing persona that thousands of budding young writers have subsequently taken it at face value, got stoned, and attempted to create mayhem at London Fashion Week, or a Conservative party conference, or a Brits award, or wherever. But unlike many of his copyists, Thompson had a very good, pragmatic reason to put his unhinged self in the midst of his story. The policemen at the Las Vegas drugs convention are just as crazed as he is, the only thing to do is take more and more ether, and the whole thing makes for a powerfully nightmarish metaphor for the anchor of sanity being lost in Nixon's America.
That's the great, breathless thing about the best of his writing. There is no everyman, no sane anchor to hold onto, just ever-burgeoning madness, bulging out of the prose and out of Ralph Steadman's superbly grotesque illustrations.
Nixon once famously said Thompson represented "that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character". When you think about it, this doesn't sound like an insult. Nixon wasn't claiming that Thompson had defamed the American character. It sounded more like Nixon admitting that when Thompson held up his surreal, hallucinatory mirror, the president recognised an aspect of himself in there.
Thompson's great legacy was not the drugs. It was his realisation, as he wrote in The Great Shark Hunt, that "the writer must be a participant in the scene ... like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character".
He was the first journalist to really spot that a story becomes truer when the reporter honestly chronicles his or her own idiosyncrasies, and admits that those foibles act as a prism between real life and the page. This realisation of his has changed the face of journalism, giving generations of writers licence to put themselves into their stories. Take - for instance - Lynn Barber's beautifully hassled, sardonic battiness. Ostensibly, it couldn't be less gonzo-like, but it was (she has written) greatly inspired by Thompson and the new journalism he helped create.
I always assumed that Thompson was far more in control of himself than people imagined. He never seemed hopelessly in love with the drugs.
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge," he once wrote. "You can turn your back on a person but never turn your back on a drug."
His method of writing, I have heard, was to get stoned, have some adventure, sober up, and then get out the typewriter. His best writing has, beneath the apparently frenzied stream-of-consciousness surface, a very precise construction. You can't write that well on drugs, and you can't be that funny either. People only think they're funny on drugs. But a few years ago I met PJ O'Rourke, and he told me a sad tale. He said he and Thompson were on Rolling Stone assignments in London at the same time. Thompson had been commissioned to write "Fear and Loathing at Buckingham Palace". O'Rourke phoned him at his hotel for a joke and said, "The royal family are onto you! They've got their people on the roof and they're going to break into your window and get you!"
Thompson apparently screamed, hung up the phone, locked himself in his hotel room, and didn't come out until it was time for him to fly back to America.
"He's in a terrible shape," said O'Rourke. He seemed surprised. (Apparently, though, Thompson was still coherent enough to put in a large expenses claim.)
Somewhere along the line, it seems, Thompson became tired. His work got repetitive, it sometimes descended into self-parody, and he admitted that he no longer enjoyed it.
"I suspect writing is a bit like fucking," he wrote, "which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
He ended up living ostensibly like one of his own nightmare creations, inside a heavily armed compound, waving guns at young journalists on hopeful homages to his corner of Aspen. He was recently roused to fly to Cannes to protest against some perceived injustice contained within Terry Gilliam's dramatisation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He cancelled his protest trip at the last minute when he was told that it was no longer possible to have a smoking seat on a long-haul flight.
As I write this, on the afternoon after his suicide, I have no idea what made him do it. But I have a guess. I bet he wasn't on some crazed drugs binge, nor was he out of his mind with paranoia. Beneath the mad surface, and the odd flights into nuttiness, Thompson was basically a conservative, sensible, working journalist. My guess is that his suicide was pragmatic: maybe he was terminally ill, with something unglamorous like lung cancer, and he just wanted to take control of things.
I need to stop writing now. Suddenly my office seems full of huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around my laptop. I haven't taken drugs. I think I've been staring at my screen for too long.