RT reporter hard-line questioning: an indictment on passivity of U.S mainstream media.

Drama erupted at the U.S media briefing when RT (formerly Russia Today) reporter, Gayane Chickakyan posed a straightforward question to US State department spokesperson, John Kirby. The question borders on the US backing of illegal Turkish troop’s deployment on Iraq’s territory. Rather than answer the question, Kirby completely lost his composure, throwing all diplomatic ethos into the wind by taking personal issue with the reporter, the media organisation she works for and ultimately her country, Russia. 

Gayane Chickakyan had asked U.S State Department spokesperson if United States supports deployment of Turkish troop to Iraq’s Kurdistan region without the consent of Iraq’s central government. The US spokesperson parried the question. The reporter pressed further to ask if U.S was aware of Iraq’s parliament decision to review its security agreement with United States based on the tacit support it gives to the illegal Turkish incursion. John Kirby stressed he was not aware of such decision. At that moment in the briefing, Kirby started getting uncomfortable with the hard-hitting question and sought to ridicule the questioning style of the reporter saying she spent about 10 minutes framing a question and expect her to get a grasp of what she was asking about. That indeed was very low coming from a spokesperson that is expected to deal with journalists from different media organisation and with different linguistic styles. 

What Kirby attempted to do was insinuating the reporter was not coherent in putting her thought together and asking a clear question. Kirby went further to say the questions asked were crazy and ridiculous without pointing out what is ridiculous about the questions when confronted by the reporter to identify which of her questions was ridiculous.

Having failed to ridicule the personality of the reporter, Kirby then unloaded on her by dragging Russia into his own self-made predicament. He opined Russia was not committed to fighting ISIL but only the United States “within the coalition of 65 countries” is actively fighting ISIL- nothing could be farther from the truth than that statement.  He therefore went on to make a ridiculous claim that Russia media do not question their leadership on their activities in Syria. At this point, one could clearly see John Kirby was living in another planet. I doubt if he ever watched Russia media throws hard questions at President Putin or the Foreign Ministry media briefings and the calmness with which such hard-hitting questions are answered.

The shameful drama that ensued on that fateful Thursday media briefing simply highlights the deplorable level which the U.S mainstream media has sunk into. The mainstream media have virtually become robots programmed to ask certain scripted questions. The media briefing is more or less, a roll call of media personnel in United States. They simply regurgitate government positions mostly on every issue, particularly when it borders on Russia. One needs to read few Mainstream media news to spot this glaring journalistic impotence.

The U.S spokesperson further indicted his government and its lazy press when he said such open and challenging questions could only be asked in the US media briefing settings. If such setting could provide a platform to ask hard-hitting questions, one could only wonder why same platform could not provide honest and straightforward answers to such questions.