https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
I don't disagree with your characterization, but I'd also characterize cable news, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that way. These big "news and entertainment" companies do not offer any meaningful political dissent whatsoever.
You're the one who demanded specific examples, but then failed to provide any yourself, after being asked repeatedly.
What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow is an actress and not a journalist? What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow has zero journalistic acumen?
Specific examples!
By the way, have you looked up the definition of whataboutism yet, to which you have openly confessed of being guilty? It's not a "buzzword". It's not "juvenile". And it definitely doesn't mean "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason" as you falsely claim. It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda, comrade.
You also seem to be willfully misunderstanding why I brought up the Flint Water Crisis, which was simply to point out an example of the kind of embarrassing story that RT seems to focus on when reporting on US domestic issues. I brought up the Flint Water Crisis simply because it's one that most people are familiar with and the importance of journalistic coverage of the situation is obviously important to the democratic process.
I don't think Rachel Maddow is relevant at all to this discussion. If her coverage of the Flint issue was exemplary, that's great. It is not germane to my use of the Flint example at all. The fact that you and most people are aware of the Flint Water Crisis is because it happens to be one of the rare stories like this that did get significant big media coverage. Thankfully, Maddow determined that covering the story would not alienate her advertisers!
As for your dogged effort to keep this discussion about whataboutism and the minutia surrounding its definition, I have reviewed the definition and it seems to be relevant only to debates where there are two sides and one side uses the technique as a logical fallacy in an attempt to persuade or in order to distract from the truth of his opponent's argument.
The remarks I made that led to my being accused of whataboutism were some questions I asked about scenarios that seem to me to warrant a similar approach to determining the harms/benefits of journalism. Please re-read that last sentence again several times as it is critically important to my point.
I am not asking those parallel questions to distract attention from the claim you make that RT's reporting has caused destabilization, simply asking you to clarify (by applying your analytical approach to some similar scenarios) a more general rule for categorizing journalism as being harmful or helpful through the lens of political "stability" (a term which is highly loaded and rarely used without significant bias).
I understand how the technique you describe as whataboutism is sometimes used in a persuasive argumentation scenario argued by two partisans. But in this case you are the only partisan. I consider the Russian government and the US government fairly morally similar, and I'm not interested in arguing the minutia of how the US is slightly better, because I don't disagree. My concern is whether RT helps or hurts the marketplace of ideas and the search for truth in the American political discourse, and my argument is that it helps in many obvious ways, while the specific harms that you and others claim exist cannot be supported by links to specific articles, etc. The many articles about embarrassing aspects of the US are very easy to find on RT, and I view those as helpful to American democracy rather than "destabilizing".
Since you seem to be one who views "stability" as a good thing no matter what, I was hoping that you would clarify when journalism that can be perceive to create destabilization is good vs when it is bad. Your simplistic view seems to be that regardless of all other factors, if the journalism was done by a journalist whose salary is paid by a foreign government, the journalism is bad and unhelpful, no matter any other factors. But by this definition the VOA is also all bad and unhelpful, so I think it's a pretty useless definition.
Again, since I think you might be trolling, I don't want to spend too much time trying to be thoughtful in my reply. In my view, propaganda is everywhere, and the reader must understand how to filter it from the truth. That is a core responsibility of citizenship. I'll often cross-reference NYT stories with a similar story in the Globe and Mail, since omissions are much more likely to stand out than when comparing the version found in the WSJ, which may cater to a different American political constituency.
Isn't it enough that the weaknesses of our own media needs work that we don't help to undermine with those who actively chip away at the basic tenets of an open society?