Editors Note: Interest in recent articles analysing the press coverage of Nalvany who it appears is a white supremacist with significant Western government backing and is in jail convicted for embezzlement. Also raises concern for Julian Assange who is self funded and is in jail on remand for exposing war crimes that have yet to be investigated. It would be interesting to see a motion in the European Parliament to sanction the UK over Julian’s maltreatment.
On the 20th April 2021 Thomas Scripps wrote ‘Navalny vs Assange, or the geopolitics of selective outrage‘
Since January this year, the Guardian, Britain’s leading nominally liberal paper, has published 78 articles and videos on Navalny. It published 16 on Assange, with just one since February. It only belatedly adopted a for-the-record opposition to Assange’s extradition in a November 2019 editorial, after waging a decade-long smear campaign against him. It wrote another in December 2020 and then again in January this year. It has written three on Navalny this year alone.
On the 27th April 2021 Glenn Diesen, Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal wrote ‘Russia needs liberals in politics, but failure of Navalny movement shows futility of street protests & reliance on foreign backers‘
Since January this year, Britain’s Guardian has published 78 articles and videos about Alexey Navalny and 16 on Julian Assange. A strange distribution of coverage for a British newspaper given that Assange is jailed in Britain for conducting journalism, and Navalny is a foreign activist in a far-away state.