MOSCOW — The greatest media event of the Cold War occurred on July 12, 2013. By all accounts, the scene at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport on Friday afternoon was like nothing those present had ever seen — and most were no strangers to media madness. One witness said she had feared she might be torn apart by the journalists. Her concerns were not baseless: Though there apparently were no human casualties, the mob of reporters did break an escalator.
Factual accuracy was another casualty of the media frenzy. All the reports I saw, in both Russian and English, stated that the fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden had met with human rights activists and a Russian M.P. In fact, representatives of bona fide human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch were far outnumbered by representatives of Kremlin-affiliated agencies that exist to wage propaganda attacks — including attacks on actual human rights groups.