Remember Pravda?

Good lord, the Russian media has really climbed down into the muck.  I was surprised to read this headline on Tass: "Foreign observers laud parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan."  Wow! I thought, every other media report I'd read was wrong.  The Tass story relates its interpretation of the elections in Uzbekistan:

The opinion of representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is very important for Uzbekistan, [head of the Uzbek Foreign Ministry  press service Ilkhom] Zakirov said. The OSCE observers noted “an improvement since the previous parliamentary elections in 1999,” he said. They also officially confirmed that they were able “to concentrate on election laws, elections administering, the election campaign and the role of the mass media.”

and of course

CIS election observers also recognized the Uzbek elections legitimate, free and transparent.

Being the conscientious blogger that I am, I buzzed over to the OSCE website only to find, to my shock and dismay, that

Although minor improvements since the 1999 elections were identified, the Mission concludes that the elections did fall significantly short of OSCE commitments and other international standards for democratic elections.

"Regrettably, the implementation of the election legislation by the authorities failed to ensure a pluralistic, competitive and transparent election," said Ambassador Lubomir Kopaj, Head of the OSCE/ODIHR Limited Election Observation Mission.

They decide, they report.