The Nobel Peace Prize

 I first read about Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa in a book ("This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality") by a Russian dissident named Peter Pomerantsev.

I read this book to figure out more about disinformation fighters in the rest of the world - but I quickly realized, at that time, that what Pomerantsev and Ressa faced was different from what I viewed as disinformation.

By that time, in 2019, I had already worked on identifying disinformation in a few projects - The United States of South India article in Newsminute being one of them.

My views have hardened in the past two years - the West (and therefore, the Nobel Peace committee) see Putin as some kind of monster spinning his web of deceit to get Trump elected or to get Brexit done.

Their view of mis/disinformation is a very selfish one. This was revealed in the COVID era - the mainstream western press repeatedly upheld their own vaccines; and highlighted failures and attributed motives to the Russian and Chinese vaccine efforts. It is likely that it was this effort that caused the high vaccine hesitancy in Russia.

Faced with Trump's election, American liberals have conjured an implausible global war against authoritarianism, to which they have added countries and leaders not based on reality, but on the very disinformation that they are supposedly against.

The very idea that a failure against COVID implies a leader's incompetence is wrong, I believe. This flat view ignores the many stages of development countries face, historical context and local administrative differences. However, this very flawed idea was pushed on the world by the American press, and eagerly exploited by partisans throughout the world, including from India.

How is this not disinformation?

I am now skeptical of the occasional villains conveniently thrown up the West - now Putin, then Duterte, then Bolsanoro; earlier Viktor Orban. May be these are bad people, but the Western press's coverage of India has convinced me not to trust what they choose to focus on.

They are now saying that Dmitry Muratov, who also won the Peace prize today supported the Russian proxy war on Ukraine.

I am sure these two peace prize winners are brave, but we should not give our trust over to the Nobel committee at all (remember their award to Obama when he had just become President?).