American Journalism and Russia's Tragedy (Page 2)

Yeltsin and his team were, it seemed, the only worthy political figures in all the vastness of Russia. Most Russians saw his economic shock therapy, which had cost tens of millions of ordinary citizens their life savings and plunged them into poverty, and related political measures as extremist, but for the US press Yeltsin was the sole bulwark against "extremists of both left and right."[6] There was little if any room for non-Yeltsin reformers. When one, Grigory Yavlinsky, ran against Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential campaign, he was pilloried in US dispatches and editorials: "History will remember who was the spoiler if things go bad for democracy." On the other hand, whomever Yeltsin appointed, however unsavory his political biography, invariably turned out to have "clean hands" and to be "one of the democrats" and a "reformer," including Yeltsin's eventual designated successor, Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer.[7]

More generally, affirming that all Yeltsin backers were invariably "reformers" resulted in odd reasoning on the part of US journalists. Thus, Moscow's mayor could be "a democrat" while being "an autocratic ruler." A Washington Post correspondent even included rapacious insider-oligarchs because "they bankrolled Yeltsin's presidential campaign against his Communist rival...and they generally favor the country's rocky transition to a free-market democracy, which has made them fabulously wealthy." His Newsweek counterpart knew who could not be a "reformer"--anyone "generally antipathetic to US interests in Russia."[8]

Sustaining such a manichean narrative in the face of so many conflicting realities turned American journalists into boosters for US policy and cheerleaders for Yeltsin's Kremlin. As early as 1993, even a pro-American Russian thought the US coverage of his country was "media propaganda." An independent New York press critic made a similar point in 1996, complaining that newspaper reporting was a "mirror of State Department double-think." For a senior US scholar, the media's pro-Yeltsinism even "recalls the pro-Communist fellow-travelling of the 1930s," though the "ideological positions are reversed."[9]

American journalists created, for example, cults of those Russian politicians whom the US government had chosen to embody its policy. The extraordinary Yeltsin cult of the early 1990s--"as Yeltsin goes, so goes the nation," in Time's formulation--was eventually eroded by his policy failures and personal behavior. But as late as 1999 he remained, according to the New York Times, the "key defender of Russia's hard-won democratic reforms" and "an enormous asset for the U.S."[10]

As for Yeltsin's "young reformers," no matter how failed their policies or dubious their conduct, their reputations hardly suffered at all, at least not for long. Consider Chubais, whom US officials regarded as a "demigod" and head of an "economic dream team."[11] Even after he was widely suspected of having ordered a cover-up of a Kremlin financial crime by his aides (an allegation later confirmed), a New York Times correspondent informed readers that "Chubais is plotting how to carry out the next stage of Russia's democratic revolution." And long after he was known to have personally profited from the privatization programs he administered, in part by rigging market transactions, he remained, according to another Times correspondent, a "free-market crusader," indeed the "Eliot Ness of free-market reform."[12] Nor was the Times alone in such reporting. A 1999 study by two American journalists published in The Nation concluded that the Wall Street Journal's Moscow bureau had been "little more than a PR conduit for a corrupt regime."[13]

* * *

There were even worse malpractices at the expense of professed American values. In 1993 US columnists and editorialists followed the Clinton Administration almost in unison in loudly encouraging Yeltsin's unconstitutional shutdown of Russia's Parliament and then in cheering his armed assault on that popularly elected body. The reasons given were uninformed and ethically specious. Insisting that "it would be not just expedient but right to support undemocratic measures," journalists even rehabilitated the ends-justify-the-means apologia long associated with and thoroughly discredited by Soviet Communists themselves: "One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."[14 ]Even the next Parliament, the Duma, elected under Yeltsin's own superpresidential constitution, became a target of US media abuse, as though Russia would be more democratic without a legislature, ruled only by the president and his appointees.[15]

Another example highlights the irrelevance, even cold indifference, of much US reporting on post-Communist Russia, where (even according to a semiofficial Moscow newspaper) most people were "being exploited" and impoverished in unprecedented ways. Discussing the brutal impact of economic shock therapy on ordinary citizens, another pro-Western Russian complained that US correspondents had "no desire to look Russia's tragic reality straight in the eye." A Reuters journalist later made the same observation: "The pain is edited out."[16]

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