If there were a guide for corporate media treatment of Official Enemies, the first rule might be that you can hardly ever go too far. So Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Crimean region of Ukraine meant that he was either “taking a page out of the Hitler playbook,” as Fox News host Bill O’Reilly (3/3/14) put it, or was, as Washington Post columnist George Will (3/17/14) said, “Stalin’s spawn.”

Those are the extreme examples, but corporate media coverage of the crisis in Ukraine demonstrated a Cold War eagerness for increasing the conflict, a panic over the US failure to control events and a failure to properly examine relevant history.

The negative feelings about Putin were intense. ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz (3/4/14) called him “the bully Vladimir Putin. ... He is hammer-handed. This is how he operates.” In the Washington Post (3/23/14), he was “animated by nationalist impulses and historic grievances that have proved immune to the modern tools of diplomacy,” while in the New York Times (3/23/14), he was deemed a “wiry martial arts master” with a “deep sense of grievance.” New York Times columnist David Brooks (Meet the Press, 3/23/14) called him “this radioactive individual who wants to create history: large ego, large Russian nationalism.”

Some dug deeper. On ABC World News (3/7/14), Jonathan Karl described a “Pentagon study on trying to read Putin’s body language,” which apparently suggested “that his walking style may provide insight into how he operates.” The report, Karl told viewers, found “‘Putin’s movement style shows a man struggling to move forward’...a weakness he compensates for ‘by a dramatic need for internal control, which he seeks through external display of power.’”

While the conflict over Crimea would seem to be primarily about Ukrainians and Russians, many in the media saw the conflict as really about the United States and its Cold War rival. “Game on between the two superpowers,” ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer announced (3/17/14). “President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin locked in a kind of duel.”