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A Fox News video clip in very heavy circulation in Russia these days, on local television and on video sharing websites, is of an interview done by Fox News' Shepard Smith of a young Ossetian girl and her aunt. The girl, Amanda Kokoeva, had been visiting family in South Ossetia when the fighting began, but managed to escape and make it all the way back to Walnut Creek, California, where she lives. The graphic shown during the segment reads "12-YR-OLD BAY AREA GIRL CAUGHT IN CONFLICT" so it seems clear that the segment was booked as a kind of 'hometown hero' feature. And surely it starts off that way, with Amanda telling Smith where she was when the attacks started and what she did. But seconds later, it all goes off the rails.
Amanda, at some point in her narrative, stops to make the explicit point that it was the Georgians that were doing the bombing and adds: "I want to say thank you to the Russian troops that were helping us out." Then Kokoeva's aunt joins in, blaming Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili directly for starting the violence. Smith awkwardly interrupts her, saying that a commercial break will come in 4 seconds "whether we want to or not" to which the aunt replies "I know that you don't want to hear that." Smith does come back to the pair after the commercial at which point the aunt resumes her description of the situation, but Smith then cuts it short again, claiming the show is ending and saying something about "grey areas" in times of war.
From looking around on the Internet, the video seems to have made the rounds on the usual media watchdog and conspiracy theorist sites in the US but not much more. But here in Russia, it has been widely seen and commented on. It's being held up as clear evidence of the bias of the US media, which Russians appear to almost uniformly believe is staunchly pro US administration (which will come as a surprise to many Americans, who constantly complain the exact opposite is true of the 'MSM', although perhaps not Fox itself). On Russia Today, an English language 24-hour news service, an anchor uses the example of the Fox interview to depict what she calls "deliberate attempts to suppress the range of opinions" by the major international news channels. Russia Today and the Russian language 24–hour news channel Vesti both rushed to California to interview Kokoeva themselves, and the stories they produced include not only her story of survival, but her treatment on Fox.
Now, I know how live, daily news works. I've done it at CNN. Getting through an hour is often a rollercoaster experience. I still have a Pavlovian response of jangled nerves whenever I hear my former show's theme music. And I've seen countless guests, even very high profile ones, ruthlessly cut off by an anchor using a looming commercial break as a cudgel. But I will admit that this segment, and the flustered-seeming reaction of Smith, do little to disabuse suspicious viewers (be they Russian, American or any other) of the notion of media bias.
In the past something like this would have passed away into the ether, leading only to some isolated grumbles by those who happened to catch the last few minutes of Smith's show. But in today's information landscape these things no longer go away. So Amanda's interview stays out there for all to watch over and over again. But here, even the democratic nature of the Internet is being called into question. On the Wikipedia page that has been quickly assembled about Kokoeva, there is an accusation of YouTube censorship, claiming some comments have been deleted and the viewer counter reset, supposedly to hide how many have watched. And so the war over the 'information war' rages on.
View the video clip on Fox News.