President Batman

A friend of mine IM’d me an arti­cle osten­si­bly about how Russia is trag­i­cally under the (now-former) KGB’s thumb again. Yes, yes, we all know Putin is a dirty bas­tard who should never be in charge of any­thing more involved than [insert menial civil-service gig here]. And the more media-savvy (ahem) will fig­ure out that the BBC is mak­ing a big deal about this because Putin is hold­ing up some deal a British big­wig cares about. This works because the big­wig in ques­tion (or one of his min­ions) will drop tid­bits of infor­ma­tion about Putin and Russia to reporters at cock­tail par­ties, reporters fill in a few blanks in the mad-lib sto­ries, and wham! Propaganda in action, baby!

But that’s all old-hat, really. What I want to con­cen­trate on is the fact that the “new Russian mil­i­tary intel­li­gence HQ” has a giant old­skool Batman logo on it’s floor:

Now that’s just awesome.

7 Responses

  1. Joe Buck says:
    2006-12-13 at 6:00 pm

    Um, a spec­tac­u­lar mur­der by means of Po-210 might also have some­thing to do with all the atten­tion paid to Russian secret police (even if it turns out that it’s Putin’s rivals that are responsible).

  2. James Cape says:
    2006-12-13 at 6:51 pm

    And one of Putin’s rivals just hap­pens to be an exiled bil­lion­aire liv­ing in London, who bankrolls both the poi­soned man and the “friend” who claims the dead guy blamed Putin. Certainly he wouldn’t be plant­ing sto­ries in the British press about how crazy Russia is, or talk­ing up the death into some­thing “spec­tac­u­lar” or any­thing… :-)

  3. Chris Cunningham says:
    2006-12-13 at 7:16 pm

    Yes, because clearly the rea­son the BBC is intrigued by KGB assas­si­na­tions in the cap­i­tal is because of all those cosy cor­po­rate ties the dead man has. The BBC might not be the shin­ing paragon of jour­nal­is­tic integrity I wish it were, but it isn’t CNN.

    The Batman thing though. Rock hard. And after the whole Polonium thing, hey, no DC lawsuits!

     — Chris

  4. James Cape says:
    2006-12-13 at 8:13 pm

    Yeah, amaz­ing how global pub­lic rela­tions machin­ery grinds to a halt when the BBC shows up, isn’t it. Lucky for you the “First Draft of History” virus hasn’t crossed the Atlantic. ;-)

    On a seri­ous note, the dead man was writ­ing hack pro­pa­ganda while on the pay­roll one of Russia’s bil­lion­aires who got rich by rob­bing the coun­try blind dur­ing the 90s. From what I’ve heard, the books are full of the sort of wild accu­sa­tions that couldn’t pass a libel case over there, and keep spe­cial pros­e­cu­tors busy inves­ti­gat­ing Democratic Presidents over here. Believing the bil­lion­aire in ques­tion is work­ing the media over is not sim­ply my cyn­i­cism towards American media run amok over­seas: there is still the fact that the deceased was being paid by the bil­lion­aire to work the media over when he was murdered.

    Is that the sole rea­son the BBC is cov­er­ing the case? Of course not. Is that why it’s being extra­or­di­nar­ily shrill and throw­ing out the wild sort of fear­mon­ger­ing and mock­ery that the arti­cle I linked to was? I think so, yes.

  6. Chris Cunningham says:
    2006-12-13 at 9:00 pm

    Hardly. The BBC gets shrill and sen­sa­tion­al­ist about most any­thing these days, and it’s often pulling in dif­fer­ent direc­tions; site arti­cles have a strong ten­dency to be pro-free soft­ware, for instance, while the embar­rass­ing “tech news” sec­tions they have on News 24 are prac­ti­cally Microsoft adverts half the time.

    The fact is that it’s really quite dif­fi­cult not to get sen­sa­tion­al­ist when spies are going around slip­ping deadly iso­topes into people’s Martinis, and in a post-9/11 world where every com­mer­cial news chan­nel has lost any sense of integrity what­so­ever there’s lit­tle hold­ing the BBC to a higher stan­dard other than viewer com­plaints. That said, if they wheel out any more estranged fathers of dead pros­ti­tutes tomor­row they’re get­ting mailed from work about it.

     — Chris

  7. martin says:
    2006-12-13 at 9:09 pm

    BBC is actu­ally rel­a­tively free. They might focus more on a case because some­one in Britain is intressted, but they don’t nor­maly care much about the views of their politicians.

    BBC World is one of the best news chan­nels there is. But every­one is flawed so we should use several.

    BBC have had a rel­a­tively bal­anced cov­er­age of the Iraq con­flict for one. They inter­view the ene­mies of the British armed forces and talk with them seri­ously on TV.

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