“As you would be aware, early this year, I was invited to oversee as a foreign observer of the Russian presidential election, and when I reported back honestly and truthfully on what I saw here and in Russia, it went very much against the mainstream media narrative in Australia,” McRae told Sputnik.
McRae participated in the ballot counting and publicly congratulated Putin “on his transparent and his comprehensive win”, a move that contradicted the official party line in Australia.
“When I was here, actually, I was voted into local government office and for an Australian elected official to publicly be going against what the foreign minister had called a disgrace to democracy,” he recalled. “And actually to contradict that with my own firsthand experience, really sort of shook the foundation, I think, of the of the narrative in Australia, and that certainly set a chain of events off that the media sort of came after me pretty hard and still to this day they may use a smear of a ‘pro-Putin councilor’ merely for reporting the facts that I oversaw a very transparent and very comprehensive electoral victory by Mr. Putin.”
According to McRae, Australians’ trust in mainstream media has a long history, though that trust has now started to erode.
“We certainly see a cracks in the dam wall happening. But I think it was the German philosopher Karl Schmidt that said, ‘You have to have an enemy figure to create a cohesive society.’ And of course, the enemy figure at the moment in the Australian media, in the Australian narrative is Russia,” he said.
At the same time, he noted, the Australian government is nervous about this tendency and is “creating these new laws to make anyone that talks against the government narrative as a disinformation or misinformation agent.”
“We're seeing more and more suppression of the media, more and more suppression of the dissident voices. But, as a sort of a whack-a-mole game, as one gets knocked down, another one pops up and it's we're there's still plenty of people, still, doing their best to spread the truth,” McRae said.
Commenting on Sputnik being effectively banned in the US, the UK and in Europe, McRae remarked that the powers that be in those countries “clearly need to not allow the other side of a narrative to be disseminated through the public,” seeing how “having alternative voices heard is not conducive” to pushing the “government narrative of the day.”
“Now, of course, the Ukraine thing is a prime example of that. But I think probably even more so than the Ukraine thing is Sputnik and particularly some of these Russian channels are giving an alternate voice, particularly to the people of Palestine and in particular Gaza, that we just don't get to hear in the mainstream narrative in the West,” McRae suggested.