Recycling NYT's shoddy journalism cheaper than producing your own

News-hungry hicks in these parts rush to the newsstands bright and early every Sunday to get their hands on The New York Times International Weekly, which comes as a supplement with the Sunday Star. This week we were rewarded with a front-pager titled "Deception Fuels Tilt To Nativism In Sweden," which is a recycled version of this story which ran in the mother ship a week earlier.

The gist of the story is that anti-immigrant sentiments in Sweden are due not to reckless immigration policies that brought in migrants in substantially greater quantities than could be readily assimilated. Nope, it's not that... it's Putin!

That's right! Kremlin troll farms are doing their devious best to "...weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate," thereby opening the eyes of the docile Swedes to the fact that some neighbourhoods in their country have become ghettos of dark-skinned people.

I'm no expert on Sweden, but I have a hunch the Swedes would have noticed that without prodding from Kremlin trolls. What we have here is not a news story per se, but just another exercise in Russia bashing.

Writer Jo Becker quotes an expert from the "Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit that tracks extremism," to lend the story a sense of gravitas.

Here's what you should know about the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that Becker neglects to mention. Its "partners and funders" include:

•  Brookings Institution
• Chatham House
• Google
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Yale University
• British Council
• Open Societies Foundation (Soros)
• International Republican Institute
• US State Department
• UK Foreign Office
• Governments of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Canada

There's more, but you probably get the drift. The partners and funders of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue are a veritable roll-call of institutions and vassal states committed to American Exceptionalism, which we are constantly reminded has ushered in the era of peace we have seen since WWII, not to mention enforcing the "rule of law" and lifting billions out of poverty, etc.etc...

And of course, they all agree, the biggest threat to continued world peace and prosperity and the "rule of law" is... Putin!

I have no problem when our "free press" labels Sputnik a Russian propaganda outfit. They are, after all, funded by the government of Russia to put a pro-Russian spin on their reportage. However, it's disingenuous to pretend that the NYT or the Institute for Strategic Dialogue are any different. They are American propaganda outlets every bit as much as RT or Sputnik are Russian propaganda outlets.

As for the Toronto Star, they have numerous anti-Russian propagandists on their own staff, so why do they need to import it from the US?