From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Kiev is burning tonight.

Flaming tires, fireworks.

The stench of tear gas.

Before an agreement was brokered Friday,

the standoff between President Viktor Yanukovych's government and the loose coalition of anti-government forces was bloody and telegenic.

Riot police shooting from rooftops at protesters on Kiev's Independent Square,

protesters hurling Molotov cocktails and paving stones. As the death toll mounted, the cameras recorded a conflagration.

Look at it now. A plume of black smoke coming off the big burning tires that form the barricades,

which are now the front line between the riot police and the protesters still holding the stage.

But while insurrection makes for great TV, complexity does not.

American news mostly defaulted to Cold War mode,

characterizing the upheaval as a confrontation of East and West,

with Yanukovych cast as a client of Russia's Vladimir Putin

in a country whose citizens prefer to look toward the European Union.

Ukraine is really the latest and the most dramatic illustration of the tensions, growing tensions,

between Vladimir Putin and the U.S. It seems to be a replay of the Cold War in many ways

because of what many experts see as Putin's Soviet-era world outlook.

Indeed, some protesters were warriors for Western integration,

but some, including the most organized and violent elements,

...