How would you like it if you opened the Instablogs home page and found there a post written by a contributor which accused you, totally falsely, of being a child molester with numerous convictions for that offense who just did it again last week. Would you say: “Oh well, that writer’s just expressing his opinion, he’s got that right”? Would you still say that as the lynch mob was closing in around your home?

All of us who are associated with Instablogs need to be careful to look out for libelous statements being made by our contributors, particularly false accusations involving criminal conduct. If we’re not, we could end up getting sued and the whole blog shut down. You simply can’t accuse someone of being a criminal or committing acts of fraud without having source material to back you up. By all means, call someone an idiot, say they are evil, challenge their views and actions. But there are rules civilized people must follow as to making specific allegations of criminal activity, and courts enforce those laws routinely in lawsuits.

That’s why I was disturbed to see a post by Eugene Ivanov (I’ve previously pointed out other very serious flaws in Mr. Ivanov’s contributions to Instablogs in my post “The Ivanov Report Volume I“) accuse Russian political leader Oleg Kozlovsky of being a “petty criminal.” Outrageously, Mr. Ivanov did not name a single “petty crime” of which Mr. Kozlovsky had been convicted other than civil disobedience of the same kind Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King went to prison for. It’s libelous to accuse someone of being a “petty criminal” without evidence. We could be sued for that if it’s not true. I’ve demanded that Mr. Ivanov produce evidence to back up his claim, and Mr. Ivanov has admitted the the only evidence he has is Kozlovsky’s own statements about being arrested for acts of civil disobedience he wasn’t even guilty of and then being railroaded into prison on trumped-up evidence.

Mr. Ivanov needs to substantiate his claim with clear documentary evidence or retract it and apologize. If he won’t do so, he’s unworthy of publication on our forum.

Mr. Kozlovsky is, for Mr. Ivanov’s information (he didn’t tell our readers when he wrote about him), a candidate for a PhD in political science at a prestigious Russian university (the Higher School of Economics), having just obtained his master’s degree in that subject after writing a thesis in democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Ivanov then goes on to state that a column authored by Kozlovsky in the Washington Post was not written by Kozlovsky at all, but by unidentified ghost writers working for the Post. He offers not one single shred of evidence of any kind to back up this claim, and it’s a lie. I’ve personally contacted both Mr. Kozlovsky and the editors at the Post and obtained the Russian original and the English translation Kozlovsky submitted to the Post. Again, accusing a world-renown newspaper like the Post of professional fraud without evidence is libelous, and we could be sued by the Post and shut down because of this lie. Again, Mr. Ivanov needs to substantiate his claim with clear documentary evidence or retract it and apologize.

Mr. Ivanov’s post is full of other wild falsehoods. He states in response to a story about a car accident told by a Post columnist named Julia Latynina:

Everyone who has visited Moscow at least once over the past few years knows that the city is a brutal traffic nightmare. And Ms. Latynina wants us to believe that during evening commute hours, a car travels through downtown Moscow at 90 miles an hour?

But this is what Ms. Latynina actually wrote:

On a rainy September evening a week after Natalia Trufanova fell under the wheel of justice, I witnessed an accident on Moscow’s government thoroughfare — the famous Kutuzovsky Prospect. A silver Lexus, traveling at what looked to be about 90 miles an hour, flew out of the far left lane and crossed four lanes of oncoming traffic, crashing into several cars. As I drove past the scene of the accident, the wind blew bits of crushed metal, pieces of cloth and broken glass along the asphalt; bodies still sat in some of the cars. Within the hour, I learned that the driver of the Lexus was a 27-year-old woman with no known occupation; with her in the car was a deputy minister of economic development.

There is nothing in Latynina’s account about “evening commute.” It looks like Mr. Ivanov simply made up this fact for his own convenience. For all Mr. Ivanov knows, the accident occurred at midnight. Mr. Ivanov does not link to or even mention any other account of the accident to establish what time it actually did occur, yet he dares to accuse the editors of one of the world’s most respected newspapers of incompetence in printing this account.

Latynina is a highly respected journalist in Russia who hosts a program on the well-known Echo of Moscow radio station, writes a column in the well regarded Moscow Times newspaper, and is viewed by many as the successor to murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She has many enemies in the halls of power in Moscow because she routinely attacks them in her work. Mr. Ivanov, you will note, tells you none of that.

Mr. Ivanov’s point is apparently that he doesn’t believe the accident occurred, or if it did it wasn’t serious, or if it was it didn’t involve Kremlin-connected bigwigs who got off with no punishment because of pulled strings. All of that is totally bogus. The accident happened, it was very serious, and no punishment was handed out to the obviously reckless driver because a Kremlin-connected bigshot was in the car. But you’d never know that from reading Mr. Ivanov’s “analysis.”

The falsehoods from Mr. Ivanov’s shameful smear job against Latynina are relentless, just like Soviet propaganda always used to be. He claims that the accident Latynina describes could not have involved a deputy economics minister as Latynina reported. But in fact, she did not say it did. All Latynina wrote was that she had been told that it did by someone who was on the scene. She did not say she confirmed it. The Kremlin-friendly Russia Blog, certainly not one to invent smears against the Kremlin, confirms that it did involve someone with high-level Kremlin connections:

Another notable incident recently took place in Moscow involving a driver who was high on drugs. On the rainy night of September 14, 2007, a female driving with the headlights off lost control of her Lexus, destroying five cars, injuring four people and killing three more. The driver happened to be a friend of the assistant to the former Russian Economics and Trade Minister German Gref, who was not asked to join back the ministry earlier this week after he had been laid off with the rest of the government by President Putin two weeks ago. A relative of another recently fired minister, Zurabov, struck a pregnant woman with his car. Later driver was found not guilty due to her “mental condition”.

This confirms the accident occurred just as Latynina says it did. The point Latynina was making was that the driver was not charged with any crime despite the mayhem because of the involvement of Kremlin-friendly forces, and Mr. Ivanov doesn’t even try to dispute that, nor is there the slightest hint of his doing any research to flesh out the details before launching his outrageous accusations. Latynina was attempting to describe the nature of corruption in Russia, and nothing Mr. Ivanov says changes usefulness of her example in that regard.

Apparently, Mr. Ivanov thinks that if he finds any type of mistake, maybe even a typo, then the entire account is to be dismissed as a total fraud. Do we hold ourselves to that standard here on Instablogs? Could anyone publish under those standards? Do we lose all credibility if we report that an eyewitness told us someone was a “deputy minister” when in fact he was a friend of a deputy minister? If so, we’ve just been destroyed by Ivanov’s misstatement about the time when the accident occurred!

It’s a classic propaganda ploy of the old USSR, where Mr. Ivanov was educated, to attack minor points in a text at the level of minute detail and then combine that smear the author personally when the main thesis is too rock-solid to question, and hope the mud will stick. Latynina never said she knew who was in the car, she only said it was powerful person whose presence got the reckless driver off without charges, and that she was told by a source it was as deputy minister. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what she wrote, though to be absolutely punctilious (a standard Mr. Ivanvov himself certainly doesn’t follow) she might have researched what her friend said to confirm exactly who was in the car. But Mr. Ivanov hasn’t done that either, he’s only guessing.

When I read Mr. Ivanov’s words, I hear the Kremlin talking. I hear it trying to stamp out the very last voices of independent journalism in Russia so that it can proceed with dictatorship unfettered. I hear the echoes of the Cold War. Mr. Ivanov did not write a balanced criticism of the Latynina and Kozlovsky articles, pointing out both strengths and weaknesses. Instead, he launched a vicious personal attack, even accusing Kozlovsky of being a “petty criminal” without even naming his crime — just what they tried in the old Soviet days.

We bloggers lose credibility when we make false charges against the world’s leading media. They’re just waiting for gross errors like this on our part in order to dismiss us. We must call on Mr. Ivanov to prove his allegations with clear evidence or retract them and apologize. Otherwise, we can’t expect to be taken seriously by the world community we seek to serve.