In a week full of tough competition, the editor of Italy’s La Stampa might have won the “chutzpah-of-the-week” award. La Stampa featured a photo of the carnage in Donetsk, from a Ukrainian missile strike (a Tochka-U ballistic missile) on March 14, that killed 21 civilians and injured dozens more. However, they evidently had no intention to cover any of the story of the Ukrainian army attack. Next, the front-page photo was employed as a ‘teaser,’ an encapsulation of the horrors of the headline items — “traumatized children in Lvov” and “Kiev preparing for the final assault.” So, following allegation after allegation that Russians have been indiscriminately targeting civilians, finally a photo, of a city street littered with dead bodies, appears to show such. What else could readers take away from the photo?
So far, it is just crass “snow is black"-type of propaganda, the new normal of Western ‘news.’ However, when criticized for their war propaganda, editor-in-chief Massimo Giannini opened his mouth. He is hurt, claiming that they were merely showing the generic horrors of war, and not taking sides: “The thing that bothers me most and pains me a lot is that there are also some people here in Italy, some disgraced people of the web, who amplify this and call it a case of disinformation. Where is the disinformation?” he demanded.
