RFE is based in Prague and its daily publishing time is midnight, Central European Time. The Putin "gunslinger" story was thus published by RFE in the early hours of Tuesday, December 15.
Over the next two days, the British media ran with the same story using virtually the same wording and highlighted the same points of Putin walking as if he is holding a gun on his right side, and that this habit is as a result of KGB training.
What is remarkable is that two newspapers, The Guardian and Daily Mail, both even credited the RFE as the source of their articles, without, of course, mentioning to their readers the CIA connections of RFE.
Interestingly, too, the first British papers to publish the article were Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph -- both early Tuesday -- only hours after RFE. The Daily Telegraph is a well known media outlet for British intelligence propaganda.
In recent years, Western news media have shown a sporadic tendency to engage in negative stories about Putin. And the telling thing is that this negative Western media coverage shows a concerted response.
Newspapers and other news outlets tend to publish the same pejorative stories about Putin at the same time. That indicates a centrally manipulating source.
Some of the news coverage can be put down to "lazy journalism" or herd mentality, where some outlets just regurgitate what they deem to be "in the news" carried by others.
But what is revealing from the latest Putin "gunslinger" smear story is that the triggering media source was evidently and specifically the CIA-affiliated RFE outlet.
In previous bouts of Western media slandering against Putin, such as his alleged millionaire daughter, or his alleged ordering of the shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in 2014 by Russian-backed rebels, it is plausible to speculate that there was covert media manipulation going on.
However, in this week's media smear job carried out by British publications, it is clearly traceable that the disinformation came from the CIA operation RFE.
It is easy to dismiss the KGB shooter story as a lot of rubbish with no substance.
Nevertheless, what should be alarming to anyone upholding independent, critical journalism is the odious way that supposedly independent news media are played as political tools to sell a propaganda message.
If in this instance it is clear that British media are so pliable to serve as propaganda outlets to demonize Vladimir Putin what does that say about the credibility of all their other news and information?
What of their coverage on events in Ukraine, Syria, or any other major international development?
As already noted, the CIA-British media smear job about "gun-toting Putin" came out just as the Russian leader was holding a major international press conference. In recent months and especially over the conflict in Syria, Putin has shown himself to be probably the best world leader there is.
His principled military intervention in Syria to defeat terrorists trying to topple the government there is not only succeeding in that purpose, it is also exposing the international state-sponsored links to the terrorism, links that include Washington and its NATO allies, as well as its regional cronies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
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