Mark MacKinnon, the "senior international reporter" for Canada's newspaper of record, has a feature in yesterday's paper that runs an astonishing four full pages. "Vladimir Putin's War of Fog" purports to examine how Putin used "deceit, propaganda and violence to reshape world politics."
In a helpful "backstory," MacKinnon reveals that "this project started out as an attempt to look at how Russia won back its role as one of the world's main powers." So far so good. That would certainly be a worthwhile journalistic exercise, and our senior international reporter "conducted interviews in nearly a dozen countries" to get to the bottom of Putin's perfidy.
I'm sorry to report that MacKinnon's deep dive into the rise of Putin seems to have been a colossal waste of Globe and Mail resources. In four full pages, his story does not include a single fact, half-fact, factoid, non-fact, fiction, rumour, or innuendo that hasn't been freely available on the internet for years.
Yet putting his story together took MacKinnon months, and required him to travel to "almost a dozen countries?"
Methinks someone be bullshittin' us... and maybe their bosses at 351 King Street as well.
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