#21 - JRL 8073
From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004
Subject: Dealing with the Realities of Media Hostility to Putin and to Russia

The reality is that the American media have been primarily against Putin, and against the Russia that he heads. I will not undertake to prove this; it seems obvious. The problem is that people are looking in the wrong direction. I will simply note here Peter Rutland's solid collection of evidence on JRL, in response to Masha Gessen, aiming to show that the New York Times was indeed sufficiently anti-Putin. It succeeds in showing that quite well -- so well that, if it were not answering the wrong question, it would lead to the real question, namely: Isn't it distorting for the media to be so anti-Putin? And isn't it strange that only the opposite question is being asked? Are people really unaware of any possibility of danger or harm in the direction of being too anti-Putin, or for that matter, too anti-Russia? Isn't such unawareness -- unawareness that the risk of distortion runs in both directions -- itself a huge danger, leaving the journalistic train at risk of running off the deep end?

The anti-Putin bias is the reality that media critics need to deal with. For the American media have been spreading not just valid arguments and facts in support of a view similar to Gessen's, but more often than not have supported it by spreading prejudices, exaggerated interpretations, endlessly repeated misinformation, and logical absurdities. And have worked in a strange environment in which no one bothers to correct these mistakes.

And the media have not restricted themselves to Putin-bashing in this manner. They have generally indulged in Russia-bashing at one and the same time. And with the same disproporationate combination of fact with non-fact and absurdity.

In recent months the problem has gotten worse. It is as if the major media have gone on a binge of Russia-bashing. They have generally neglected to report countervailing information or corrective arguments. And there has been a tendency to surround any countervailing information and arguments, when they do get through, with "corrective" attacks, often ad hominem in nature, dismissing the countervailing arguments as lackey service to the interests of Russia or Putin.

All this might as well be an anti-Russia propaganda campaign, it's so similar to the anti-American propaganda campaigns that Communist agencies used to conduct in Cold War days. In those days, the Communist ideological warfare built up a constituency in the West for responding in kind, with anti-Soviet campaigns. Perhaps it was then that our media developed a habit of such campaigns. Campaigns that were always grossly distorting, but that nevertheless were on balance justified in the days when the Soviet Union was around to fight against. The Soviet Union really did operate as a closed, often-conspiratorial center of power with substantial evil in its intentions. Yes, an "evil empire"; a phrase that Russians, interestingly, often translated and then re-translated into a theologically sectarian form, "the empire of evil".

There was always a danger of sectarianism in this campaign mentality, but at least there was substantial reason for it in Cold War days. The weird thing is how the milieu and instinct for these anti-Soviet campaigns has outlived the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. (Thereby realizing one of the worst dangers of sectarianism -- the risk of refusing to give up enemies after they've stopped being enemies, failing to see who one's real enemies are, shooting at moderates instead or at one's own side for not being pure enough or approved by one's own in-group. Getting things upside-down and ending up harming one's cause and group. Something that this mentality has in fact done on a number of occasions since 1991. It played a major part in the series of mistakes that focused much of American policy on removing Russian influence from the Caucasus and Central Asia, let the Taliban come to power, wasted half a dozen years of opportunities for working with Russia and the Northern Alliance to remove them, and left America lying open for September 11.)

Alas, this stuff serves major interests in domestic American politics. It has been used for Clinton-bashing, and now for Bush-bashing.

In 1998-9 there was a veritable orgy of Russia-bashing, exploiting the ruble collapse in order to write off Russia as "lost" or ruined. The main practical point of all this was to attack Clinton for being friendly to Yeltsin's Russia. The attacks on Yeltsin and on Russia in the American media were vicious. Our poor Russian democrats could be forgiven for having confused these attacks with a massive American hostility to the democratic forces in Russia, but that was the lesser part of it. The underlying butt of most of the attacks was less Yeltsin or Russia than Clinton. And Gore, whom these attacks helped defeat. They wanted to get at Clinton by hitting Yeltsin. Partly as a matter of partisan politics, partly as a media sport against the presidency. To be sure, they did a lot of damage to Yeltsin as well along the way. And for that matter, they did a lot of damage to Russia. And to Russian-American relations, which cannot be micromanaged to fit the needs of sectarian polemics.

It would in theory be easy for a Russian to be anti-Russian then, or anti-Putin now, without being anti-Russian, or anti-Russian-American friendship. But it is more complicated for an American. And very few American journalists or politicians made the effort. They didn't care if what they said was anti-Russian, and sometimes they explicitly directed it against Russian-American closeness. They told their gross lies and distortions, under the amazing guise of speaking a nearly-suppressed truth (do these people always have a persecution complex?), and when they said "let the chips fall where they may", the meaning was something like this: let the damage fall wherever it may, no matter what damage we do, as long as we score a hit at our domestic politicians and excite some public interest that way.

Today there is another wave of Russia-bashing. Its main point is to attack Bush, getting at him by way of Putin and Russia. It too serves big-time partisan interests, and media-sport interests of attacking the President. And meanwhile it latches onto all the entrenched constituencies that are good at Russia-bashing. Constituencies, many of which intend it when they do damage to Russia.

The bashing binge latches onto a deeply ingrained instinct, one developed over four decades of Cold War: the instinct of distrusting those Americans who might slip into a posture of serving Soviet interests. Being close to the enemy is easily attacked as serving the interests of the enemy; that was how any closeness was attacked throughout the Cold War decades, and the suspicion was sometimes well-founded. Bush, like Clinton, is condemned implicitly for this -- being close to the enemy and serving its interests -- never mind that the Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia is not our enemy.

Evidently the old two-camp mentality and habits persist in many circles. There are, to be sure, many Americans who have given up the Cold War habits of knee-jerk anti-Russian discourse. But, in a sad form of compensation for this gain, the old knee-jerk defenders of Soviet Russia have also left the scene, leaving Russia far more naked than in Soviet times before its remaining and new attackers.

And so we are told that we must "stand up to Russia", the same way we used to be told that we must "stand up to the Soviet Union". An attitude that makes sense only if Russia is our enemy. "Standing up to Putin" seems to be a particular obsession for some writers at the Washington Post; it gets treated almost as a way of measuring Bush's manhood. It is not a mature measure; it that tells us more about those writers than about either Bush or Putin.

Today, what would make some sense would be to talk about standing up to the Saudi royal family. Or to Pakistan. Or to Libya, or Iran, or (until a few months ago) Saddam. Or to criticize Americans for serving Saudi interests. Or to raise questions about an American president's ability to stand up to these regimes, whose funds and agencies and personnel have served as big-time breeders for anti-American terrorism and nuclear proliferation. And then there would be countervailing arguments about the complexities of these regimes and of U.S. interests. And some judgment would be formed.

We do get some of this in our media. But surprisingly little. Instead we are endlessly treated to talk about how the President isn't "standing up" enough to ... Russia. Or to Putin. And we get very little of the normal countervailing argumentation, of which there had been at least a decent share in Cold War times, when the anti-anti-Communist wing of American politics could always be counted on for that purpose.

The phrase "stand up" to someone is a phrase whose normal usage is vis-a-vis adversaries, not friends or neutrals. The calls for "standing up to Russia" assumes an adversarial relationship. The repeated insistence on it indicates logically -- whatever the case may be psychologically -- a pressure for reverting to such an adversarial relationship. It also creates obstacles to America's ability to see who are its actual enemies in the world, and to focus and deal with them.

The anti-Putin and for that matter anti-Russia slant of recent reporting and commentary would, I think, be obvious to any reader/watcher of the media. Or for that matter, any reader of JRL, which gives a decent sampling of the press.

To be sure, to be anti-Putin is not in itself to be anti-Russian. However, when it has been a matter of the American media, anti-Putin articles have usually been anti-Russian as well. Probably because the practical import of these articles has been the oppose close American-Russian relations. And that in turn, because the purpose of these articles is as often as not to bash the U.S. President, who can be attacked in Cold War style for being too friendly to Russia (again all this makes sense only on the presumption of Russia somehow being the enemy), without much real concern for Russia one way or the other

The anti-Russia and anti-Putin materials predominate in the American media not just in quantity, but in visibility and quality. By quality, I mean intensity -- emotional and persuasive intensity. The anti-Russian articles are out to persuade, and do so with great rhetorical emphasis, oftentimes freely distorting facts and evidence along the way in order to make a stronger impressino. The pro-Russian articles -- such as there are to be found -- are generally, passionless, defensive, careful to try to correct the evidence rather than say any wildly distorted things in Russia's favor; they take a tone of "yes, in part, but on the other hand...". And the anti-Russian articles appear in the major media, while most of the relatively cautious ones appear in scholarly journals or other relatively obscure venues.

It comes as a matter of irony, after several months of this campaign, that we are now treated to a kind of "media criticism" that takes the media to task, not for its major sin -- putting on a crude anti-Russian campaign -- but for not having been thoroughgoing enough in this campaign.

A further absurdity: we are now treated to an attack on JRL and David Johnson to task for being supposedly prejudiced to the pro-Putin side. And -- carrying this "media criticism" one step further -- we are treated to complaints about alleged ad hominem attacks on these would-be media critics, who themselves have plainly descended far quicker and more crudely and unfairly into ad hominem attacks than those who have spoken back to them.

While I have not asked David Johnson his recent views, but it was no secret that he was anti-Yeltsin. After all, he wrote several times that JRL was formed in order to provide a wider variety of information and views than the pro-Yeltsin stuff that he considered to predominate in the American media. Similarly, it is no secret that Putin was the chosen successor to Yeltsin, and it seems to me that a fair reading of JRL would show that, if it has any special leaning in this period, it is to the anti-Putin side.

Why is the complaining all on the side that has least to complain about? It is a phenomenon that does not sit well with democratic culture, where people have developed a habit of seeking balance and moderation rather than pushing each other off the deep end. But it is not an unusual phenomenon in most cultures. Indeed, probably it's because it is so easy and traditional to do this kind of thing, that the enlightenment developed its theory of the virtue of balances among political forces, and why democratic culture always has to make an effort to avoid the temptations of backsliding and keep itself in a balanced mood.

When discourse is overwhelmingly unbalanced to one side, the easiest thing to do is jump on anyone who utters a dissenting view and scream that it is out of bounds. And to complain that the orthodox point of view isn't supported widely enough. And that the presence of some dissension against it, and some reticence on the part of officialdom to carrying through on it in a hard-core fashion, is the great obstacle to fighting back against the Great Evil and overcoming it. If only we can get 100% unanimity in shouting the same slogans, the Evil will be blown over by the strength of our faith...

When Hitler ruled, no one in Germany complained that the media or the police were too anti-Semitic. They complained instead that journalists and bureaucrats were still too much under Jewish influence and not anti-Semitic enough. It was a complaint that was cultivated by the regnant media culture. Once you get to 99%, it is always felt that 99% is not enough. That all the problems would be overcome if we could just make it to 100%.

When Stalin ruled in the 1930s, no one in the Soviet Union complained that the media and police were too hard on the Trotskyites or Bukharinites. They complained instead that people were still too soft on the Trotskyite wreckers, too much under their influence. The more hysterically the media complained about the Trotskyites, the more clear it was that the only complaint one could afford to make about journalists or officials was that they were not anti-Trotskyite enough. Yagoda did his duty for Stalin, purging and killing oppositionists, and then Yagoda himself was purged. Purged, in a sense, for not going far enough. Yezhov finally went far enough. So far that, if it had gone on much longer, the entire society would have been behind bars.

Of course we're nowhere near 100% in America, and this isn't a matter anyone is going to get killed for over here. Still, there is an element of this kind of bandwagoning and unanimity-obsession going on in the Russia-bashing in our media. And in what has been passing for media criticism at this time.