What was meant to be a swift military operation to topple the Ukrainian government and take control of the country has now dragged on for four devastating years. Russian President Vladimir Putin's promise to protect the people of Donbas, who, according to him, had been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for the previous eight years, has meant that hundreds of settlements have been wiped off the face of the Earth and millions of lives have been broken, in both countries.
I watched the January 3 rd nightly coverage on CBS and NBC of the U.S. assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and what I witnessed was not journalism but the choreography of propaganda. CBS, in particular, offered thirty uninterrupted minutes of state-sanctioned fantasy, anchored by a fawning interview with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, a man implicated in the killing of more than one hundred people at sea without evidence, accountability, or due process.