Fraudster Bill Browder still a "Putin expert" at CBC

Bill Browder was one of the hyenas who swooped in on Russia in the '90s to teach the locals the ins and outs of the capitalist system. He was the front man for a couple of Israeli billionaires of shady repute, whose "Heritage Capital" took the struggling Russian treasury for billions.

Once Putin came to power, Browder was originally a fan. That changed when Putin began reining in the oligarchs and the foreign carpet-baggers. 

Things got a little too warm for the likes of Browder, and he soon enough skedaddled out of the country under a cloud of scandal.

Wanting to fluff up his PR profile, Browder retained highly-regarded Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov to make a documentary about how he had been hounded out of Russia by corrupt officials because he had exposed their corruption. Nekrasov, a well-know Putin critic, agreed.

Somewhere along the line, the PR project went off the rails. The Putin critic gradually came to the conclusion that Bill Browder was full of shit.

The doc that resulted, The Magnitsky Act - behind the scenes, has caused Browder no end of grief. His reputation in Europe has more or less gone down the shitter. No reputable news outlet there would call on him as a Russia expert.

But there he was on the CBC this morning, still being passed off as Putin's number one enemy.

Brodie Fenlon's team at CBC needs to take a few dollars out of the DEI training budget and put it into fact checking.

Why billionaires invest in journalism

In Brodie Fenlon's "deep dive" he mentioned that hundreds of professional journos at CBC were so devastated by the residential school story they reached out for help from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the most prestigious J-school in America, Columbia (tuition approx $80K USD/year).

Ken Dart, benefactor of the Dart Center, was a partner in crime with Paul Singer in the multi-billion shakedown of Argentina's economy, and like Singer, has made billions from the suffering of some of the poorest people in the world. A man of deep convictions, although unfortunately not of the criminal variety, Dart renounced his US citizenship many years ago, because why should a billionaire pay taxes? Clearly an ethically challenged greedbag, he spreads a few crumbs around for reputation rehabilitation.

In a world wherein the vast majority live a precarious hand-to-mouth existence, the billionaire class should, in theory, be constantly on the alert for pitch-fork wielding mobs. Instead, they are venerated and celebrated, and their ownership of media and politics at least keeps the mob confused and disoriented. 

Billionaire David Thomson owns Reuters and The Globe and Mail. 

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. 

Here's a Columbia Journalism Review story about the hundreds of millions Bill Gates spreads around the mediasphere. 

The University of North Carolina slapped Walter Hussman's name on their J-school for a mere $25 millions.

In "Plutocrats," Chrystia Freeland, former top banana at Reuters, writes, "Many members of the global super-elite have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends." The next sentence is a list of 16 names, starting with George Soros and Eric Schmidt. 

You don't imagine twenty years of kissing billionaire butt may have influenced the world-view of our deputy PM, do you?

The Poynter Institute and its fact-checking arm are endowed by multiple billionaires including Soros, the Kochs, and Pierre Omidyar, who also launched The Intercept with spare change found under the couch cushions. 

When news organizations and fact-checkers are funded by billionaires, how much scrutiny will the billionaires get?

Meanwhile, journo jobs have disappeared by the tens of thousands over the past twenty years, and those that are left don't have much of a future. Their aren't enough six-figure jobs in Canadian journalism to keep a modest Porsche shop in business.

In short, journalism is poverty-stricken while billionaires have too much money. It's a marriage made in heaven!