First, your media cheat sheet:
The New York Times is the P.R. rep. for the DOJ and FBI.
The Washington Post disseminates for the Intelligence Community (IC) and the Central Intelligence Agency.
CNN used to cater to the needs of the State Department, I don't know if they still do after the management change.
From the Washington Post December 2:
Robert Wright, whose books include “The Moral Animal” and “Nonzero,” publishes the Nonzero Newsletter and hosts the Nonzero podcast.
The Biden administration would like to make one thing clear: It won’t throw Ukraine under the bus. If President Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t want to pursue a peace deal that could leave Russia with some Ukrainian territory, America won’t use its leverage as Ukraine’s main arms supplier to push him into negotiations.
“The United States is not pressuring Ukraine,” said national security adviser Jake Sullivan in early November, the day after NBC reported that he had broached the subject of negotiations with Zelensky. President Biden said, that same week, “We’re not going to tell them what they have to do.” And a week later, national security spokesman John Kirby asserted that “nobody from the United States is pushing or prodding or nudging [Zelensky] to the table.”
Well, maybe somebody from the United States should be. If an enduring peace can be had through negotiation — and we won’t know if it can until we explore that prospect — then negotiations would be in America’s interest. That alone might be enough reason for Biden to steer Ukraine toward the table. But as it happens, such a peace would be in Ukraine’s interests — and most of the world’s — as well.
To start with some of the more mundane virtues of near-term peace: The war is costing America lots of money. And this spending is inflationary at a time when inflation is a big global problem. The war also fuels inflation in other ways, notably by constricting the supply of energy to European allies. And, as those allies buy American natural gas as a substitute, some European officials are accusing the United States of profiteering, revealing tensions within the West that could grow as the winter proceeds.
Meanwhile, every day the war continues, more Ukrainians die, and more of Ukraine gets wrecked. And every day there is some risk of a fluke turning this into a wider war, featuring direct NATO involvement. Even if such a war didn’t go nuclear, the devastation could be vast. “World War III” might be an overstatement — but it might not (especially in light of a recent report that China and Russia have a secret mutual defense agreement)....
....MUCH MORE
And:
Germany’s Scholz phones Putin after diplomatic overture by Biden and Macron
