Fareed Zakaria Was Unpleasantly Reminded of the West's Loss of Media Monopoly (Video)

Don’t you hate that? You’re a prominent figure amongst those entrusted with disseminating the official narrative from on high, but then when you go and rather sensibly suggest to your wayward charge that he should stop misbehaving and dutifully conform to the authorized narrative, he proceeds to go off-message, and at length.

This is what happened to Fareed Zakaria, a mainstream media grandee, at the recently concluded St. Petersburg International Economic Forum when he posed a loaded question to Putin. “Given that Russia is responsible for bringing us to to this pretty pass, where we’re on the verge of a new cold war, what can be done?” he essentially asked.

Ah, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? The official, authorized narrative only works when the powers that be enjoy a monopoly over the transmission of information, able to cut off, give coverage to, or consign to oblivion whomever they wish, as the case may be.

But here was isolated Putin (flanked by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to his left and Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev to his right, and having earlier shared a panel with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker) in a setting where he was able to give his side of the story, his narrative, uninterrupted.

Putin proceeded to relate to Zakaria and the audience the litany of NATO and the West’s perfidy, mendacity and duplicity in relation to Russia since the fall of the USSR, showing indubitably how it is the West that is responsible for bringing things in international relations to this juncture and not Russia as Zakaria’s narrative sought to maintain.