"Правда." Pity the Poor Pravda Press -- Nobody Believes Them Anymore.

"What do you think about what happened last week, Comrade?"

"I don't know. I haven't read my Pravda this morning."

-- Popular joke of the Soviet Union.

Comrade Lenin read Pravda.

The Great Leader Stalin read Pravda.

Worker Comrades Distributed Pravda.

Even Peasant Comrades Read Pravda.

But NOBODY believed Pravda.

Pravda (Russian: Правда, "Truth") was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991. The Pravda newspaper was started in 1912 in St. Petersburg. It was converted from a weekly Zvezda. It did not arrive in Moscow until 1918. During the Cold War, Pravda was well known in the West for its pronouncements as the official voice of Soviet Communism. (Similarly Izvestia was the official voice of the Soviet government.) As the names of the main Communist newspaper and the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda and Izvestia, meant "the truth" and "the news" respectively, a popular Russian saying was "v Pravde net izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh net pravdy" (In the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth). -- Wikipedia.

I thought about Pravda when I read this at Politico.com today. It reminded me of another joke from the Stalin era:

Every morning a man would come up to the newspaper stand, and buy a copy of Pravda, look at the front page and then toss it angrily into the near-by bin. The newspaper-seller was intrigued. 'Excuse me,' he said to the man, 'Every morning you buy a copy of Pravda from me and chuck it in the bin without even opening it. What do you buy it for?' 'I'm only interested in the front page,' replied the man. 'I'm looking out for a death notice.' 'But you don't get death notices on the front page,' said the newspaper-seller, taken aback. 'I assure you, the death notice I'm looking for will be on the front page.'

The death notice I'm looking for is that of the state-run media. Go to the Politico link and read the story, I'm not going to waste the time reprinting it here. The editors of the New York Times and the networks are as sensitive to serving Comrade Barack's every propaganda need as their Pravda intellectual brothers of the past were about Stalin.

But the people are not fooled.

The state-run media is mystified why their sales and ratings are tanking.

They shouldn't be.

Another joke from the late Soviet period, during "the confusing time when the western newspapers were claiming thousands of Chernobyl casualties while the Russians were insisting there had only been two deaths, the East Europeans were no more convinced by Pravda than were the people of the west:"

The day after the Chernobyl accident a great crowd suddenly appeared asking Saint Peter for admission to heaven. "Where did you all come from?" he asked. "From Chernobyl," they answered. Saint Peter pulled out his copy of Pravda and said, "I'm sorry, I see I am only authorized to admit two of you."

FOX ratings are soaring, the listenership of talk radio is spiking and the Internet is humming precisely because our side doesn't believe the state-run media anymore. This will continue, and their sales and ratings will continue to plummet, until the collectivists get the nerve to directly attack these avenues of access to the truth.

When that happens, they will only infuriate us more and the proto-tyrants will risk an armed people's wrath.

I can't wait to see them try.

Until then they will continue to get our derision, disrespect and disbelief.

Did I tell you the one about the New York Times, Walter Duranty and Stalin's moustache?

Mike
III