In British reporter Chris Ayres’s memoir War Reporting for Cowards, he describes the arrival briefing he got from the woman he was replacing as New York correspondent of the London Times: “‘Lift and view, Chris, is what we do here … We lift from the New York Times.’ She held up the copy on her desk. ‘And we watch the news.’ She pointed to CNN. ‘We lift … and view. If you get the hang of that, you too can be a foreign correspondent’.”
As a description of how even prestigious media organizations work, it’s very revealing. Research indicates that the vast majority of English-language media stories are taken, almost word for word, from just two sources: a handful of press agencies (primarily AP), and government or corporate press releases. The existence of a large number of media outlets might lead us to believe that we are getting a wide variety of takes on world events. In reality, no matter what we read or watch, we mostly get the same few stories told in exactly the same way. This is especially true of foreign affairs, as the number of Westerners working as foreign correspondents is extremely small.
A glaring example of the practice of “lift and view” was the coverage this weekend of the murder of Daria Platonova (Dugina), the daughter of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Leading English-language media outlets ran almost identical, and identically wrong, headlines, and repeated almost identical, and identically wrong, claims within the stories which followed. The coverage revealed not just the widespread tendency to cut and paste (or “lift and view” as Ayres puts it), but also a disturbing lack of knowledge.
The BBC led with “Darya Dugina: Daughter of Putin ally killed in Moscow blast.” Author Leo Sands told readers that, “It is thought that her father, the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is known as “Putin’s brain,” may have been the intended target of the attack. Mr Dugin is a prominent ultra-nationalist who is believed to be close to the Russian president.”
His old party literally used the third reich's flag with a hammer and sickle instead of a swastika. He's the guy who invented the term nazbol, as a self descriptor, a textbook case of third positionist fascist ideology-wise.
He's also very definitely not "Putin's brain" or w/e, his old party got banned and neither the old nazbol party nor its descendant are particularly successful in elections, and they're also opposition parties. I've heard claims that some generals in the Russian army stan him, and you could definitely say that he's using a lot of nationalist narratives that are fully compatible with or show up in the kind of nationalism putin promotes, but i'm not aware of any particular direct connection from dugin to putin. he's just this bizarre edgelord guy that you can point at when you want to distract from Azov fascists in Ukraine by saying "look, Russia has fascists, too." Yeah, no shit, fascists are all over Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, wonder what made them all crawl out of the woodwork so suddenly.
Honestly, i think the main reason they tried to go after him was doing a "no, u!" on the whole "denazification" thing. Saying "we're the actual nazi killers here." I'm not buying one bit of it. I'm also not gonna cry ab the nazi daughter of some nazi shithead who thinks i'm part of a westoid op to destroy the white race and would gas me if given the chance. I'm glad they got his daughter and it's a pity they didn't blow him up, too. I 100% stand behind that. Every dead fascist is a small step towards a better world, towards a safer and more liveable world for me, and that absolutely 100% includes Alexander Dugin. But that obviously also includes the rats they flushed out of the Azovstal basement and all the other nazis in Ukraine, and even though i'm used to and fine with letting the crabs dance when a reactionary croaks, there is something disturbing about V*ushite blellow liberals showing that kind of blood thirst after the attack. Not because i morally object to it, but because libs enjoying political murders makes my Rosa sense tingle.