How Cold War-Hungry Neocons Stage Managed RT Anchor Liz Wahl’s Resignation

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How Cold War-Hungry Neocons Stage Managed RT Anchor Liz Wahl’s Resignation
Truthdig
Posted on Mar 19, 2014

By Max Blumenthal and Rania Khalek

Behind the coverage of Wahl’s dramatic protest, a cadre of neoconservatives was celebrating a public relations coup. Desperate to revive the Cold War, head off further cuts to the defense budget and restore the legitimacy they lost in the ruins of Iraq, the tightknit group of neoconservative writers and stewards had opened up a new PR front through Wahl’s resignation. And they succeeded with no shortage of help from an ossified media establishment struggling to maintain credibility in an increasingly anarchic online news environment. With isolated skeptics branded as useful idiots for Putin, the scene has been kept clean of neoconservative fingerprints, obscuring their interest in Wahl’s resignation and the broader push to deepen tensions with Russia.

PR From PNAC 2.0

It was a full 19 minutes before Wahl resigned. Inside the offices of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a neoconservative think tank in Washington D.C., a staffer logged on to the group’s Twitter account to announce the following:
“#WordOnTheStreet says that something big might happen on RT in about 20-25 minutes.”
Then, at 5:16, exactly 10 minutes before Wahl would quit on air, FPI tweeted:
“#WordOnTheStreet says you’re really going to want to tune in to RT: http://rt.com/on-air/rt-america-air/ #SomethinBigMayBeGoingDown”

From left: Jamie Kirchick, Eli Lake, Rosie Gray, Liz Wahl. Photo from Twitter.

The tweets from FPI suggested a direct level of coordination between Wahl and the neoconservative think tank. Several calls to FPI for this story were not answered.
Just over an hour later, an exclusive interview with Wahl appeared at The Daily Beast. It was authored by James Kirchick, a 31-year-old writer whose work has appeared in publications from the neoconservative Commentary to the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz.

More: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_cold_war-hungry_neocons_stage_managed_liz_wahls_resignation_20140319