American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy

With only a few exceptions, America's professional Russia-watchers--policy-makers, financial advisers, scholars and, not least, journalists--committed malpractice throughout the nineties. They claimed to know the cure for what ailed Russia after the Soviet breakup in 1991, gave regular assurances about the ongoing treatment and, while noting occasional relapses, predicted a full recovery.

Their prescriptions, reports and prognoses have turned out to be completely wrong. Nearly a decade later, Russia is afflicted by the worst economic depression in modern history, corruption so extensive that capital flight far exceeds all foreign loans and investment, and a demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. The result has been a massive human tragedy. Among other calamities, some 75 percent of Russians now live below or barely above the poverty line; 50-80 percent of school-age children are classified as having a physical or mental defect; and male life-expectancy has plunged to less than sixty years. And, ominously, a fully nuclearized country and its devices of mass destruction have, for the first time in history, been seriously destabilized, the Kursk submarine disaster in August being yet another example.

Underlying all the American misreporting and false analyses of the nineties was an enthusiastic embrace of the Clinton Administration's ill-conceived policy--a virtual crusade to transform post-Communist Russia under President Boris Yeltsin into a replica of America through US-sponsored "reforms," first and foremost economic "shock therapy." The crusade was (and remains) an official project, but it also captivated investors, academics and journalists, who in their respective professional (or unprofessional) ways became its missionaries.

Reporters, editorialists and columnists played an especially lamentable role. Accepting the Administration's premise that "Yeltsin represents the direction toward the kind of Russia we want,"[1] they made that nation's purported "transition to free-market capitalism and democracy," as the process of conversion was termed, the guiding concept, prism and basic narrative of their coverage, with little, if any, concern for its impact on the people or the country's stability. As the missionary chorus of the American crusade, they helped obscure Russia's unfolding tragedy and abetted the worst US foreign policy disaster since Vietnam. It was, and in significant ways continues to be, a bleak chapter in the history of American journalism.

Journalists had long been forewarned. At the birth of Communist Russia, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published an analysis of the US press coverage of the 1917 Revolution and the ensuing civil war between Reds and Whites that became a celebrated textbook case study of journalistic malpractice. Lippmann and Merz found that in terms of professional standards the reporting was "nothing short of a disaster" and that the "net effect was almost always misleading." The main reason, they concluded, was that US correspondents and editors believed fervently in their government's anti-Red crusade and had thus seen "not what was, but what men wished to see."[2]

Seven decades later, it happened again. Most journalists writing for influential US newspapers and newsmagazines believed in the Clinton Administration's crusade to remake post-Communist Russia. Like a Washington Post columnist, they quickly "converted to Yeltsin's side." Like Business Week's Moscow correspondent, they "hoped for the liberal alternative" and believed in the "job that Yeltsin and his liberal reformers had begun." Like the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, they were certain Russia needed the "same basic model" that America had. And with that newspaper's correspondent, they worried constantly that Russia might opt instead for a "path of its own confused devising." Some were even more embattled. For a longtime Washington Post correspondent still in Moscow today, the post-Communist crusade was another chapter in a "Cold War...not yet really won."[3]

Leaving aside a plethora of factual errors, the first casualty, as Lippmann and Merz had warned, was professional objectivity. Moscow correspondents, according to a 1996 survey, tended to look at events there "through the prism of their own expectations and beliefs." Three years later, a reviewer of a book by a former correspondent concluded that the author's "spectacularly wrong projections" arose out of her personal hopes for Russia, "which prompted her to accept appearances for reality and desire for fact."[4]

Such hopes and fears produced a US media narrative of post-Communist Russia that was manichean and based largely on accounts propounded by US officials. On the side of good were President Yeltsin and his succession of crusading "young reformers," sometimes called "democratic giants"--notably, Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Kiriyenko. On the side of darkness was the unfailingly antireform horde of Communist, nationalist and other political dragons ensconced in its malevolent parliamentary cave. Chapter by chapter, the story was reported over and again for nearly a decade, always from the perspective of the "reformers" and their Western supporters. It was, a leading Russian journalist thought, a "deception."[5]

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