The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, when arguing with Sophists, the PR managers of his time, tried to persuade them that BEING is more important than SEEMING. Why? Because, Socrates believe, the fallacious nature of “seeming wise while not being wise” will sooner or later reveal itself. His opponents the sophists retorted by saying that words were always subject to interpretation, so someone controlling interpretation will sooner or later control reality.

In our times, Sophists would probably find their golden age. Words and images are twisted in unimaginable ways. But two stories do stand out. One is the story with the Western media’s interpretation of Putin’s comments on the situation of gays in Russia. The second one is the same media’s interpretation of the events in Kiev (instead of a neo-Nazi pogrom we get “the government’s crackdown on peaceful demonstrators”).

Here is The Moscow Times’ former editor-in-chief Lynn Berry charging on Putin’s answer to the question on the law against gay propaganda among minors. As one may see from this recording of Putin’s speech, the Russian president has been going out of his way to show the friendliest possible attitude: “We have no prohibition of non-traditional forms of sexual interaction between individuals, we only have a prohibition of propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia, I would stress it, among minors. These are two absolutely different things. Absolutely different things – prohibition of certain relationships and prohibition of propaganda of these relationships. We don’t prohibit anything, we don’t arrest anyone, you can’t be made responsible for these relationships. This makes us different from many countries in the world, including the US where in some states non-traditional sexual orientation is still formally a crime. We don’t have anything like that, that’s why everyone can feel himself or herself free and unrestrained, just leave the children in peace, please.”

So, what does Lynn Berry write for the Associated Press and lots of newspapers which consider this agency’s information objective? Right, she makes the headline “Russian President Putin Links Gays to Pedophiles.”

Then, just two lines down the text, Lynn Berry heaps one more lie on top of the initial one: “He defended Russia’s anti-gay law by equating gays with pedophiles and said Russia needs to “cleanse” itself of homosexuality if it wants to increase its birth rate.” This is a classical case of the sophistic manipulation, even if a very crude one. The two verbs “to link” and “to equate” – are they synonyms? No. If you link one thing to another one, that does not mean you equate these two things. If some twisted mind could still see a “linkage” between pedophilia and homosexuality in what Putin said, then the same twisted mind should not see the “equation” here, unless that mind is completely dishonest – even with itself. And, of course, seeing an “anti-gay law” in a law that speaks about a fine for “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors” – this is a manipulation, a dishonest and arbitrary interpretation of a text. But this manipulation is already so “mainstream,” so ingrained in a reader’s conscience, that Lynn Berry does not even bother to provide any proof for it, besides citing some “international outcry”, obviously provoked by articles with an equally liberal attitude to their subject matter.

Of course, Putin never suggested “cleansing” the country of homosexuality – but hey, this is Russia, you can say whatever you want about this country with complete impunity. And Lynn Berry seizes the opportunity. She writes that Putin suggested that gays were more likely to abuse children (there are no quotation marks – for a simple reason that Putin never made such a suggestion).

This is not the first case when Putin’s (or Milosevic’s, or Vladimir Meciar’s, etc.) words are misinterpreted by the Western media, which ascribes itself the right to be the “translator” of things the leaders of other countries have to say. These “translators” follow the principle: if reality does not correspond to Western stereotypes (which we, the media, have formed) – then so much worse for the reality.

From dishonest media there is just one step to crude political mistakes. Everyone must have forgotten how Lynn Berry-like columnists from The Washington Post or the New York Times were discussing the amounts of weapons of mass destruction at Saddam Hussein’s disposal before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Similarly respected publications had been counting the months (if not days) which were left to Assad’s power just before the civil war in Syria started in 2011. Now, the war has been going on for almost three years, and none of these so called “experts” resigned or was fired for these miscalculations.

A reader can look at the video of Ukrainian policemen being burnt alive by the people whom the Western media had called “peaceful protesters” and which happened to have a strange peaceful taste for Molotov cocktails.

But in the mainstream Western media you will only read about the “draconian laws” of the Ukrainian government which do not allow these arsonists and other “protesters” to wear masks at their rallies. Worse, The Washington Post calls these pogrom-makers “opposition militants who were bolstered by government-sponsored provocateurs” and bemoans the fact that these overemotional youngsters “tarnished the previously peaceful character of the protest movement” (for those interested in the “previously peaceful” beatings of policemen and destruction of statues, it is enough to watch the video of the Ukrainian Maidan’s activities in December 2013 – especially the shots of the storming of the presidential administration).

Hence the State Department’s grotesque reaction to events in Kiev, blaming the violence on the government’s failure to “acknowledge legitimate grievances of the people” and praising the opposition.

And of course, the Washington Post knows everything about other countries, liberally describing Belarus as “an autocratic Kremlin colony” (the problem with Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko is that he seems to be no one’s viceroy, including the common sense). And the WP is never too shy to draw conclusions from its omniscience, calling for sanctions against Yanukovich if he “uses violence against the protesters” (I wonder what bouquets of flowers would the people burning policemen get in Washington D.C.) A long time ago, the founding fathers called on America to lead other countries by example. It is a pity that this example is getting more and more “lost in translation” – translation that we get from the likes of Lynn Berry. This translation of reality looks more and more like manipulation.