The Western media's campaign against RT has now descended to the point where an article in the London Times lumps it together with the Islamic State as an "enemy of the West" in an "information war" supposedly being waged against the West.

Even by the tawdry standards of previous attacks, the latest attack on RT by Roger Boyes, Eastern Europe editor at the London Times, which we attach below, plumbs new depths.

The trigger that seems to have caused Boyes to write his article is two conversations he says he has had with a Latin American friend and an Egyptian acquaintance.

The Latin American friend supposedly asked Boyes “why the British are so closed to the Russian point of view?” The Egyptian acquaintance supposedly asked Boyes “why don’t you (ie. the West) give Putin a fair chance?”

These comments from people Boyes admits are “intelligent” seem to have pushed him over the edge. That is the only explanation for the bizarre comments that follow.

Before we come to those, it should be said that much of the article is the standard fare of cliches that have become the staple of western attacks on RT . The crude personal attacks on RT’s guests and presenters (“a pallid Julian Assange, a puffed-up George Galloway, the hobgoblin Larry King, a crazed former stockbroker, a wad of blogging conspiracy theorists”) are a case in point.

The article does, however, include an unusually ugly attempt to misrepresent RT’s reporting of the MH17 tragedy. It does this by making an entirely false comparison between the supposedly “objective” reporting by the Western media of the recent A320 disaster and the way the RT is supposed to have reported the MH17 disaster.

Many of the things Boyes says about RT’s reporting of MH17 are actually untrue.

RT did not claim MH17 was shot down “as a result of a failed attempt to assassinate Putin by Ukraine’s western backers.” Nor did RT engage in a plot “to cover the tracks of the Russian military intelligence agency the GRU.” Boyes has no evidence to back that claim. There is no evidence the GRU was involved in the tragedy despite Boyes’s attempt to insinuate that it was. Certainly it is not “now widely understood” that the GRU “masterminded the rebel fighting in eastern Ukraine.”

There is no comparison between the A320 tragedy and MH17. They have nothing in common with each other save that they both involve air crashes.

A better comparison would be with the fatal air crash in April, 2010, in Smolensk that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski.

Boyes does not make that comparison. Possibly that is because much of the speculation in the Polish and Western media that followed the accident has turned out to be wrong, whilst recent evidence suggests that reports at the time of the tragedy in the Russian media suggesting interference with the cabin crew by members of Kaczynski’s entourage were right.

An example where the Russian media has been shown to have been right and the Western media has been shown to have been wrong does not support Boyes' case. Not surprisingly, therefore, he does not mention it.

Far and away the most outrageous part of Boyes’ article is, however, his attempt to lump RT with the Islamic State as enemies of “western values” engaged in some sort of “information war” supposedly being waged against the West.

That is grotesque. RT is a news organisation and a broadcaster, not a terrorist organization. There is no comparison between RT and the Islamic State. There is no similarity between RT’s news broadcasts and discussion programmes and the propaganda videos the Islamic State produces. It is paranoid to say there is.

That paranoia is, however, present in every line of Boyes’ article - from the headline (“West must dismantle the enemy lie machines”) to the sub title (“Isis and the Kremlin have proved to be master propagandists so why don’t we put up a fight”) to line after line of text, including the peculiarly outrageous comment: “we have to persuade young people across the globe that invading countries, breaching frontiers and decapitating prisoners is not part of some ‘success’story”.

“Invading countries” and “breaching frontiers” more accurately describes western behaviour than Russian.

As for the Islamic State’s barbaric practice of decapitating prisoners, Russia does not apply the death penalty and Putin publicly opposes it. To lump together Russia’s conduct - real or imagined - with the Islamic State’s horrible use of this barbaric practice, calls into question Boyes' understanding of the values he claims to be upholding.

Though Boyes’ article is not specifically about RT’s coverage of the Ukrainian conflict, it is obvious that that is what the article is actually about.

As I have said many times before, the reason RT’s and the Russian media’s narrative of the Ukrainian conflict is prevailing over the Western narrative is not because of the effectiveness of “the Kremlin’s propaganda machine,” but because it is true.

The conflict in Ukraine is a civil war triggered by a violent unconstitutional coup. Crimea’s secession from Ukraine was not a conquest but was a valid - and highly popular - exercise of the right of self-determination provoked by the coup. The present government in Kiev includes right wing extremist elements. It is pathologically Russophobic and intolerant and resorts to violence whenever it is challenged. It is opposed by a large proportion of Ukraine’s population, who reject its intolerant ideology and its violent and lawless methods.

RT’s and the Russian media’s narrative of the Ukrainian conflict is convincing because it is based on these facts. The Western narrative of the Ukrainian conflict - that it is entirely the result of Russian aggression against a “democratic” and otherwise “peaceful” Ukraine - is not convincing because it denies these facts.

It is simply impossible to persuade (in Boyes' words) "intelligent people” like Boyes’s Latin American and Egyptian acquaintances, or “the billions of non-aligned people who make up the BRIC countries” or “the internet community” that the West “hasn’t persuaded” about Crimea, that the West’s narrative of the conflict is true, when the facts so clearly show it is false.

Blaming RT for this problem is a classic case of shooting the messenger to suppress the message.

That this is so is shown by the inadequacy of what Boyes proposes by way of response. He admits that beefing up organizations like Radio Free Europe and the BBC World Service is an inadequate response “too anchored in Cold War thinking.” However, what he proposes is actually little different.

He calls for “…..a fast, authoritative response” that would involve “closer cooperation between the West and local activists (in Russia) who are, for example, monitoring the number of Russian soldiers brought home from Ukraine in body-bags” and “publicising financial links between the Russian and disgraced Ukrainian elites” and “the ties between the arms industries of the two countries.”

As Eastern Europe editor of The TImes, it beggars belief Boyes doesn’t know the West is doing all this already. Given that this is so, it is scarcely credible that he really thinks that what he proposes (basically more of the same) is going to change anything or convince anyone. In view of this, his descent into abuse and paranoia comes as no surprise.

The article does, however, show what much of the Western media has now become and why a genuine independent news organization about Russia - like Russia Insider, which has no agenda other than to report news and no axe to grind - is so desperately needed.

Instead of objectively reporting the Ukrainian conflict and explaining it to the Western public, much of the Western media, as Boyes’ shows, now sees itself as some sort of army engaged in an “information war” against Russia, in which journalists are the foot soldiers, facts are expendable and “propaganda” is simply a word used to describe what the other side is doing.

I have already discussed Boyes’ casual way with facts in his opinion of RT’s coverage of MH17. Given that he thinks of himself as a soldier in an “information war,” he actually has no alternative but to behave in this way. As a soldier, his duty is not to tell the truth; it is to “win.” Facts are expendable and necessary casualties on the road to “victory.”

As Boyes' article makes all too clear, what actually annoys him is not that RT is not telling the truth or is some sort of "propaganda channel." It is that in the "information war" he sees himself as fighting, RT is "winning" and his side is "losing". He complains that RT's logo is “Question More” “but we receive mainly mendacious answers”. “Mendacious,” however, is the word that best describes his own article.

The collapse of journalistic standards and of ethics is all too obvious.

From The Times: