The website I have chosen to analyse is from Russia. I chose to use a site from Russia after reading the Wall Street Journal article we were given. I quickly realised that Russia's statistics seemed to indicate an overwhelmingly negative attitude towards America. For example, the survey suggests that just 10% of Russians believe that America's cultural influence in the world is positive, and a mere 27% of Russians thought that after Obama's election America's political influence will improve, compared to much higher percentages from other nations. The ideas and thoughts expressed in the article I have chosen seem to reflect the statistics in the Wall Street Journal article. This is immediately made apparent, with the title "America is still dead" opening the article. It can be suggested that this resonates with the statistic in the Wall Street Journal concerning Barrack Obama's unpopularity in Russia. The writer's choice of title opposes the common belief that Obama's election was a new beginning and a positive change from the nightmare years of Bush; instead claiming that the country is still dead, no positive change has taken place, and Obama is far from the Nobel Peace Prize winning President that America thinks he is.
This section in my opinion best encapsulates these views;
"The "Nobel Peace Prize Winning" Obama and his cronies have also done everything in their power to promote illegal detentions, torture and the extrajudicial executions of American citizens. Attorney General Eric Holder, a self-professed paradigm of "integrity" who demonstrates far too little of it, refused to prosecute corrupt CIA officials who, in defiance of a court order, destroyed videotapes that depicted the torture of detainees. And, in a revelation exposed by Wikileaks, it was discovered that Obama strong-armed foreign governments to prevent them from filing torture and/or war crimes charges against Bush and/or his minions".
The article uses America's ideas and policies to criticise the nation in an attempt to expose its hypocrisy. It explains how the Bill of Rights has "protected the fundamental freedoms of its citizens" for many years, but then explains how "all that ended with the recent extrajudicial execution of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen". He goes on to explain how on paper America is a very fair and just nation, but in reality, the way the government acts in and out of the country contradicts its laws.
By looking back to the first and second 'Red Scare' in America in the 1919 and then from 1947 to 1957, and well as, of course, the Cold War, it is easy to understand why such a negative view of America can come from a Russian article. The American treatment of the Russians, particularly during the second Red Scare, as well as the conflict during the Cold War will undoubtedly have an effect on the writing of a Russian article. On one hand, the overwhelmingly biased approach taken by David R Hoffman, and the formal style he uses suggests a frantic, opinion-based reaction to the United States, which would suggest that perhaps his views aren't entirely valid. However, a deeper analysis of the article reveals a more factual based argument, which uses quotations from a variety of sources and examples of America's negative political influence in a host of nations, rarely mentioning Russia; suggesting that his writing is in fact quite valid and not completely underlined by historical Russian-American rivalry.
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