Барабешје

I’m genuinely fascinated by the “investigative methods” of @BrianJBerletic. We invited Brian onto my show to debate whether Serbia’s Student List movement is a legitimate grassroots uprising or a US-backed color revolution. A perfectly reasonable subject for debate, particularly since Brian has been arguing so confidently that the movement is a US intelligence operation. There are serious people on both sides of this argument, and the best way to find the truth is to put them in a room and let the audience hear both cases. That’s what a debate is for. I wasn’t trying to score a win for the students. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Our producer emailed him the invitation, including the NAME and POSITION of his proposed opponent: Marko Maletić, international secretary for Serbia’s Party of the Radical Left. Brian never replied to the email. Brian also apparently couldn’t be bothered to read it carefully. Instead, he found a DIFFERENT Serbian man with a SIMILAR name, Marko Miletić, founder of Mašina, and produced an approximately 25-MINUTE video attacking the wrong man, and ME for inviting this wrong man. My favorite moment is two minutes in, when he tells his audience, “I’m NOT going to show you the email.” Shame, because anyone who read it would have spotted his mistake in about four seconds. He then promised a “mountain of evidence” he would drop on his opponent’s head. But it was the wrong head. And, of course, he closed the video by attacking ME for supposedly failing to do my journalistic due diligence. He told me that anyone with a large platform has a “responsibility to make sure that information is correct.” He also spelled my name wrong. But at this point, that’s the least of his diligence problems. This man devoted an entire video to educating me on the importance of research while failing to establish WHICH HUMAN BEING HE WAS RESEARCHING. When I publicly pointed out his mistake, Brian made ANOTHER video. This is where it gets even better. He actually admits, in his own words, “I did fail to do basic due diligence.” Then he re-creates his “research” on camera to show us how it happened. He searched for a Serbian man, in Serbia, involved in Serbian politics, in ENGLISH. Brian, the man is Serbian. Try Марко Малетић. Try “Partija radikalne levice.” And then he admits he couldn’t be bothered to type the full name of the party into Google. His words: he “should have just copied and pasted” it. The man who claims to have traced an elaborate American intelligence operation through Serbia’s political and media institutions was apparently defeated by the radical investigative technique of COPYING AND PASTING. Later in the same video, he finally types in the full party name, and it pops up instantly. The information was there all along. He just didn’t look until he got caught. Brian has now decided that the CORRECT Marko isn’t important enough to debate anyway. Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that the relevance of an argument depends on how many followers its author has. He actually compared the party’s 1,970 followers on X to his own 313,000 YouTube subscribers. By that standard, Brian, I’d never heard of you until this week. Should I have skipped sending you the invitation? And in the very same video, he reminds us that he doesn’t do debates anyway. So... the right guest was irrelevant. The wrong guest was a US asset. And none of it mattered, because Brian was never coming. That’s over 40 minutes of video to say “no” to an email he NEVER ANSWERED. Brian, you’re welcome to decline a debate. You don’t owe me an appearance, and your health is your business. But if you’re going to publicly accuse me of failing to investigate a subject, perhaps the absolute bare minimum would be to investigate the identity of the person you’re accusing me of inviting. Your whole brand is “follow the money.” You couldn’t follow an email. Thankfully, the debate is still happening. We’ve found someone else to make the case that Student List is a US operation, someone who can do it without the meltdowns and without making elementary journalistic mistakes.