Thanks for the tip, Chris. Now I finally know how to pronounce the name of the esteemed and hard working author of this blog: Шон Гиллори.

I do it all the time!

Perhaps I am idealizing the journalist’s role too much. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies about heroic journalists taking on the corrupt corporations.

Probably. Particularly in the States there is a romantic view of journalism that does not sit well with reality past or present. Read David Edwards & David Cornwell Guardians of power: The Myth of the Liberal Media ISBN 0745324827. You don’t have to agree with everything but the undisputed fact is bad enough.

Are you suggesting that writing about political intrigue and corruption in Moscow is now as dangerous as being a war correspondent?

Actually I pointed out more or less the opposite that the number of journalists being killed in Russia had fallen under Putin to none or one, not risen as is often implied in the Western press. That should be acknowledged even if you then say it is because the journalists have learnt to keep their mouths shut or whatever but it should not be ignored as if it never happened. This is particularly the case as the all time world record for murdering journalists is in Western occupied Iraq.

I find it distasteful that journalists in dangerous countries are constantly egged on to take serious risks whilst in the West the great majority of journalists do not want to take the relatively minor risk of spoiling their careers. The western media is largely self censoring. There is no great plot; it is simply that if you do not hold views that are reasonably acceptable to the political and business establishment you don’t get into prominent media jobs. It is no coincidence that Chomsky who has analysed this problem so well is a distinguished philologist. Take the Kosovo affair. Hardly anywhere will a journalist spell it out that in giving Kosovo independence the Western powers involved are breaking their word given in resolution 1244 of the UN security council that ended the war, that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia. They just slide past it and say that the Serbs are sentimental about Kosovo because it was the cradle of their civilisation etc which is not a lie, but it is far from the whole truth.
I am not saying what journalists should do or governments should do. Total secrecy is the friend of tyranny and oppression. Absolute press freedom is impossible and in an unstable or a divided society a contributor to chaos. There will always be a struggle between media and power but it seems to me wrong constantly to harp on the failures of one and apparently ignore the very obvious limitations of the other. Criticism should at least be balanced and accurate. AFP are still writing that the Iranian President said that ‘Isreal should be wiped from the face fo the earth’ when it is quite clear that whatever he said it was not that. A further complicating factor is the now well established fact that, particularly in poor developing countries, powerful outsiders urge democracy and press freedom and then use those very freedoms to undermine the government of the country in question to dispose of leaders who do not do what they are told. Read Stephen Kinzer ‘Otherthrow: America’s century of regime change from Hawaii to Iraq’ Times Books New York 2006. An important reason, but not the sole one, Cuba became a dictatorship was because Castro saw what happened to democratic Guatemala a few years before and was determined to remain independant. One thing I think is essential is a more humble and constructive attitude from critics in the West. Thank goodness for the internet, otherwise I doubt if I would know what the exact terms of UNSCR 1244 are.

They’re not shut down…

I think the elites view outlets like New Times as a tool used by other members of the elite in the power struggle, which I think is largely true. They are not standing up for the proverbial little guy (if anybody is doing that, it’s Sovetskaya Rossiya and Zavtra). Thus I am kind of jaded about action taken against them. I think you are using
“the government” in a far too unitary sense — as MAB (God bless her) used to point out, it is a bardak in there. If somebody in the FSB or whatever organization takes action against something, that does not mean it was “the government.”

I have no opinion about the Morar case specifically, since I know nothing about it.

Now, if somebody started engaging in a campaign against SR or Zavtra, I would be upset (although I do not have much in common ideologically with either publication). (However I am willing to bet money that were such a thing to happen you would see little outcry liberal and/or foreign outcry about it. My experience is that “liberals” only cry “oppression!” when they are the ones being oppressed.

CM: You know, this is so different from my own experience that if I did not know you (sort of) I would think you were making it up. God knows my fiancee at the time wouldn’t have agreed with you. (She was from Sakhalin by the way. Her father’s a miner.)

I think there are two reasons you find it incredible that I recalled Russians in the 1990’s by-and-large rationalizing the criminalization of their government and society. In brief: 1) different ideas about what it means to rationalize something; 2) you talked to one Russia, and I talked to a different (though not an Other ) Russia.

Please note (once again) that I am not saying that people defended or supported the situation, just that they rationalized it one way or another, which in my mind encompasses a wide range of attitudes (perhaps this definition is overbroad, but it’s what I’m working with): optimism (“this sucks, but it is a transition”), dislike of the past (“this sucks, but I don’t want the Soviet Union back”), and – probably most common – resignation (“vezde voruiut,” “u nas vsegda tak bylo”), in some cases combined with one of the first two, and becoming apolitical.

Human beings in general are good at rationalizing bad situations as a survival mechanism. Russians are especially good at coping and tolerating bad situations, which is a very admirable trait in many contexts (but may work against getting a responsive government). People raised in the Soviet Union also possess an amazing “umenie vykruchivat’sia,” to make the best of a situation and find ingenious workarounds and coping strategies. This is what people – including the current ruling elite – did during the 1990s, with varying degrees of success.

For all sorts of reasons, people may remember things differently now (if they were optimistic, they realize they were being naïve; if they were resigned, they realize they should have been more active, if they actively profited, well, naturally they’d want to downplay that).

Maybe I’m not remembering the whole story, either, it’s been a few years, but most likely the divergence in what you’ve heard and my recollections of what I heard at the time has to do with my interlocutors (to be clear, I’m talking about the period from 1996 to early 2001 when I was visiting Russia a couple times a year on average, not later on when we lived there). They were young people I met in bars (who obviously had enough money to go out or were bartenders and thus employed), people I met professionally (who obviously had jobs), Russians visiting America, or family friends from when we lived in SPB in the ’80s (mostly members of the creative intelligentsia).

All of these people I met in Moscow, SPB, or the US (well, I met a few people when I visited Novosibirsk, but most of that visit was spent ringing in 1999 in an extended fashion and trying to recover my lost passport). Practically none of them worked in the state sector or depended on the state for their income (even my grade school teacher had become financially independent thanks to her success with AmWay or some other MLM program), other than officials who weren’t dealing with payment arrears the way other state sector employees or pensioners were. Some of these people were casual acquaintances and not close friends, so perhaps they concealed the depths of their despair or rage or told an American what they thought he’d want to hear. I don’t mean to prattle on about this, I just want to dissect why our impressions might be so different.

I know that the 1990s were bleak, and they were much bleaker for some than for others, but at the time they did not necessarily seem like the universally dark, hopeless, Hobbesian time they are portrayed as in retrospect.

Chris, I missed this earlier, but it’s an interesting comment. I wonder how much you thought about it before you posted it. To break it down:

They are writers of tabloid sensationalism.

You are simply using the pejorative “tabloid” without defining what you mean. If it’s a question of format, the New York Post (not the most, but hardly the least, serious paper one might read) is a tabloid; if its a question of sensationalism and questionable credibility, even the National Enquirer has broken political stories once in awhile (that is not to suggest a comparison between the New Times in its current incarnation and these other newspapers).

Anyway, should those newspapers be shut down or their journalists persecuted if they write something the government doesn’t like? Why should government action against a “tabloid” or its journalists be any more legitimate than action against a mainstream newspaper? I guess I missed the part of Russia’s Press Law that talks about how it’s ok to shut down anti-government “tabloids” or go after their journalists.

They write for money.

Is this really surprising or supposed to be some kind of indictment? Like many professionals, journalists of all political stripes and levels of sensationalism generally get paid for their work.

They are told what to write, they write it, and they are paid.

This is also not very surprising. I think it’s standard practice in the print media to have editors assign stories to journalists, who then research and report them. And then, yes, the journalists get paid, and so – horrors! – do the editors.

Furthermore, often, journalists work for publications with editorial views that coincide with their own political views; and media outlets prefer to hire people whose worldview coincides with the editorial slant, to the extent an outlet has one.

Unless you’re suggesting they are being “told what to write” by someone other than the magazine’s editors, or you’re suggesting that someone just emails them texts to which to attach their names (which I know has been suggested by others, though without any proof that I’m aware of), I’m not sure what’s wrong with a reporter covering stories based on editorial assignments and getting paid for it.

Actually, the funniest thing about the arrangement you describe (“They are told what to write, they write it, and they are paid.“) is that it is exactly the relationship that, for example, RIA Novosti and Russia Today have with their employees.

Chris – You’re 100% right about this and about it happening both ways. It’s as if we’re all locked into some bizarre lazy-brained ritual, Russian “westernizers” and western Russophobes collaborating to depict everything Russian as crap, and Russian patriots and western Russophiles forever making excuses and offering up exaggerated counter-factual comparisons. We do it ourselves. Or, well, sorry, I do it anyway. And BOTH things – both feeding the stereotype AND propagandizing against it.

Once one thinks about this a little, it’s suddenly obvious why the news coverage, in both directions, is so screwed up, with correspondents reaching for home-readership “resonance”.

By the way, in the paper yesterday I read about the plight of a married couple from Saudi Arabia that were divorced against their wills. They found out about it only after the fact. A truly sad story that is amazing by its ridiculousness–hey, it’s the XXI century! Yes, it is embarrassing that such things happen in a country with which the US has such a mutually dependent relationship.

Link to the story:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hTGnwH3eea7RnUbhSEnBwRvV5d-AD8U9OTA00