They’re all back in town again—all hyped up for the Big Dance. Throngs of knob-polishing co-ed cheerleaders in two-tone skirts, ready-made trophies, standing doe-legged and glassy-eyed at the end of the players’ bench. Each one watches the score and wonders: who will call her number tonight? A starter, or a reserve? The sleek, crotch-grabbing two-guard with dreds, or the white seven-footer with the highway of pimples down his back? Will the call come from a winner or a loser—and will it make a difference? If the game goes the wrong way, will she end up a fourth-paragraph mention in some complicated police report involving a loaded Walther and a Super 8 suite?

Who knows? She doesn’t know. All she can do is watch the score. Shake the pom-poms, do a midair split, land with a thud in a gay gymnast’s arms, and turn around to face the scoreboard again.

Keep an eye on the score. That’s all any of us can do. None of us knows our fate—until the last buzzer sounds.

It’s March Madness time again, and we at the eXile are feeling cheerleader-level anticipation. We can’t dance or do splits; we’re more like the guys who sit ten rows back behind the basket, holding up posters that read, “Brick!” But just like those guys, we’re on the edge of our seats to find out who’ll win it all-who’ll be named Moscow’s Worst Foreign Journalist for the year 2001.

Last year’s tournament was a nail-biter up through the Final Four, only to end in a blowout victory by The Washington Post’s David Hoffman over John “Dumb and Dumber” Thornhill of The Financial Times. This year is shaping up to be a different affair entirely. With Hoffman hobbled by injuries all year, and Thornhill leaving early to enter the NBA draft, the field looks to be wide-open. This has been already been a bad year for journalism, and the newsrooms of Moscow are teeming with contenders. Almost everyone in this field is Bad Enough to win it all.

Sportswriters call a situation where anyone can win “parity.” In big-time sports, parity comes mainly as a result of the salary-cap agreement, a kind of conspiracy between team owners guaranteeing that no owner can spend more money on players than any other. Other high-level decisions also play a role in securing parity—TV-revenue-sharing agreements, for instance, which allow small-market teams to make as much money as those from New York, Chicago, and LA. An equal level of competition is desirable for business. One-sided games don’t put meat in the seats.

Journalism is the same way. Decisions made by star-chamber money-men sitting in glass-paneled offices 10 stories above Ben Bradlee, men whose names only the Delaware corporate registry knows by heart, insure the business against the accident of talent. One paper is pretty much like the next. Every article reads pretty much like every other one.

Just as it is in sports, the product is the business, not its parts. In sports, most of the teams lose, but the business wins every time. And it’s the same way with journalism. One paper may do better than another, and only one reporter might win the Pulitzer Prize, but the correct consensus is almost always reached by season’s end.

Since last year’s tournament ended, the Moscow press corps has been doing double-sessions in its push for consensus. What should we think about Vladimir Putin? Is there a bright side to fascism? Are we being hysterical about this free-press thing? Don’t we all need a Strong State? These are tough questions, and the good editor, like the good basketball coach, knows you don’t solve them with one big play. No, you’ve got to play all 40 minutes to get that one right, which in this case means getting back to the fundamentals: clamp down on defense, set lots of picks, and throw it over and over again down to the wire service guys in the post—Ron Popeski, David McHugh, Jon Boyle.

That’s the battle under the basket, the place where the game is decided. And if things start opening up a little, give it to your stars on he wings, and let them create. Michael Wines. Rob Cottrell. David Hoffman. A 360 jam with time running out by any one of those guys can change momentum and put the game out of reach. You can light your cigar and go home; you can take off your pom-poms and head back to the hotel to wash and take your lumps. That’s sports. That’s March Madness, baby.

The eXile’s Worst Journalist Tournament follows a very simple format. We took 32 of Moscow’s leading foreign correspondents and bracketed them into pairs. The reporter who writes the worse article advances. There’s no objective criteria involved: we just decide. We don’t even need a good reason. A headline alone can send a reporter into the next round. That’s not to say that we’ve decided in advance who’s going to win. This is as much a process of discovery for us as it is for U, the fan. We ourselves are curious to find out who’s really the worst of the worst. The New York Times’s Michael Wines is our number one seed, and it wouldn’t surprise us if he won, but even we don’t know if he has the right stuff—the stamina, the will, the “intangibles.” Lots of first-round picks end up on the CBA waiver wire. Hell, Wines could even write one decent article and be gone by the first round. Even the greatest athletes have down days.

This is the second year of this annual competition, and it coincides with the eXile’s fourth anniversary. The beginning of this tournament finds almost all of us here at the paper at the end of our ropes. While this is psychologically painful for us, it should make for good entertainment for U, the reader, because simple commentary, even on a scale as excessive as this tournament, will no longer be sufficient to satisfy our aggressive urges. There will be a surprise somewhere in this tournament, a big, messy one, and we can pretty much guarantee that not everyone will find it all that funny.

Some of you will, however. So without further ado, here’s the opening round of March Madness 2001.

Michael Wines (1), New York Times, def. Marc Franchetti, Sunday Times (UK)

When Franchetti talked to our surgically-altered black sideline reporter Dwayne Steele before this matchup, he was not confident. “I don’t really feel I can compete in this tournament against the American press,” he said. “We’re an English broadsheet. We don’t really have what it takes. I mean, they’re The New York Times , for God’s sake.”

Indeed, if Franchetti hoped to depose number one seed Michael Wines, he was going to have to do better than his January 28 effort, “Gorbachev’s in-law left to rot in asylum.” I mean, just look at the lead:

Above: will the glass-slipper fit Knign-Ridder's Dave Montgomery? Below: Szcerbiak made his name with a first-round splash.

“The brother in-law of Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has spent the past 13 years in a bleak psychiatric hospital in southern Russia, abandoned by his family.”

You can’t get away with play like that at the Big Dance; studs like Wines will jump in the passing lanes every time, snatch the ball away, and race down court for a breakaway dunk in three steps. To get through in this tournament, you have to at least throw in a superfluous adjective somewhere. Franchetti just didn’t make the plays, and suffered the consequences. He was pummeled in the opener by Wines’s January 21 effort, “Russia’s Latest Dictator Goes By the Name of Law.”

This effort by The Times is yet another in a long series of “There are two sides to every coin” pieces that have run in the mainstream press about Putin. Wines, who last year wrote an atrocious 4,700-word blowjob profile of Putin, takes here the position that Putin’s “Dictatorship of Law” is just that—a dictatorship in which Putin makes “pitiless” use of the law to impose order. In other words, this is an authoritarian regime that exercises its authority legally, if brutally. He address the brutality aspect later, but early on in the piece, he makes it clear that there is an upside to whatever the heck it is that Putin is doing:

“Through deft and sometimes pitiless use of Russia’s convoluted legal system, Mr. Putin’s Kremlin has managed to produce a measure of order and even modest prosperity that his embattled successor, Boris N. Yeltsin, could only dream of.”

First of all, this is bullshit-by no rational standard could today’s Russia be considered “modestly prosperous.” If oil prices were even a shade lower, even the macroeconomic indicators in this country would be among the worst in the world. That’s not even taking into consideration what life is really like out there for most Russians, which is to say, not changed significantly from the eat-your-own-feces Yeltsin years.

Secondly, Wines doesn’t even address the idea that Putin’s style of government might be illegal. He doesn’t mention allegations surrounding the apartment bombings of two summers ago, for instance, or bring up the numerous beatings of journalists which seem very clearly to be the work of Putin’s people. Wines adds insult to injury farther down in the piece when he brazenly rewrites history by saying that Yeltsin “rewrote an entire constitution after putting down a communist putsch in 1993.” The communist putsch was in 1991, Michael. The ’93 uprising was led by what even the most conservative observers usually called a red-brown coalition. And the real putsch came when Yeltsin dissolved the parliament, not when the parliament refused to be dissolved. Whatever. When you’re The New York Times, you can be flexible about details. As Alice B. Toklas said, “A putsch is a putsch is a putsch.”

Actually, if you read Wines’s piece closely, it appears as a massive and shameless apology for dictatorial government. After listing all of the various “prosecutions” now being undertaken, Wines writes: “The Kremlin insists no one is being prosecuted unfairly, and in a sense, it may be right…. Everyone in Russia is guilty; the only issue is who gets caught.”

Well, hell, if everyone’s guilty…. The next thing you know, The Times will be calling for all Russians to turn themselves in to their local police stations. For over a year now, Wines has been the chief apologist for the new dictatorship, and that’s why he was seeded first in this tournament. He’s living up to his billing. Wines through to round two; Marc Franchetti, better luck next year.

Jon Boyle, Reuters, def. Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor

No amount of physical abuse cold prevent this puppy (above) from eating Fred Weir's copy of Boris Yeltsin’s landmark memoir "Against the Grain"

About two months ago, I borrowed a book from Weir—a copy of Boris Yeltsin’s first book, Against the Grain. I kept promising to return it, but never did. Then about a week ago, I came home and found the book torn to shreds all over the floor. I have this dog, a six-month old Dalmatian bitch, who’d eaten the fucking thing. I don’t walk her enough, so she eats everything in the house. In any case, she tore the cover off of Weir’s book, then ate the top paper layer on the hardcover, then took a big bite out of the actual pages in the lower corner. I beat the hell out of her, then didn’t bother calling Weir to tell him. Boyle advances.

Ian Traynor, Guardian, def. Giles Whittell, Times of London

Giles “Hamburglar” Whittell, a darling of last year’s tourney, wrote himself out of this year’s draw with the stunning lead of his February 3 piece, “Russia’s Smother of All Invention”:

“Russia’s most advanced artificial nose sits under a grey steel dome in the bowels of a Moscow engineering institute, in need of some cocaine.”

If nothing else, this is just about the weirdest lead you’ll ever see in a major newspaper. A crazy metaphor involving bowels, a mechanical nose, and cocaine. For a major newspaper to suggest openly that anything needs cocaine, even a machine, is already a plus, taboo-breakage wise. The bad pun in the headline is a minus, of course, but they’ve become par for the course lately.

Whittell had a good year. He was the first Western reporter to follow up on The Moscow Times’s expose on election fraud in the presidential vote. Unlike most other reporters in town, he also tries a few things now and then.

His opponent in this first round, Ian Traynor of The Guardian, is coincidentally, also a Brit writing about gadgetry, with a play-on-words headline. His January 25 piece, “From Moscow With Love,” is about a hand-held computer toy. Both writers describe Russia as a place with plenty of ideas, but not enough funding to realize them. Both also write in flowery script; Traynor even breaks some kind of new ground by using the word “beaver” as a verb. This is a situation where it is a shame that someone had to win. However, it is worth noting that Whittell bought us lunch last year to get out of the tournament, whereas Traynor hasn’t given us the time of day. Other entrants take note as non-lunch-buyer Tranyor advances.

The Motley Hack (8), Moscow Times, def. David Filipov, Boston Globe

This one was a laugher, a one-sided clash of opposites. Filipov is the quintessential professional journalist; his copy is always clean, he knows what he’s talking about, he speaks the language, he travels to hot spots, he gets in and out of his subject matter as fast as he can without lapsing into crude, Michael Wines-ian generalities, and he writes in a way that actually evokes his surroundings, a near-impossibility given the editorial restrictions and space constraints a major-league print writer has to conform to. His January 29 piece, “He’s Met Every Test of Time,” was a textbook work of feature-writing. In fact, it may be the only article about Russia I’ve actually enjoyed reading in the last few years. I hate reading about Russia. If I were shipwrecked on a one-tree island and a copy of the eXile washed up on shore, I’d wait six months before reading it. This is a miserable country and all of us who work here are miserable losers and everything we write about is miserable, horrible, and depressing. If my little paycheck didn’t depend upon it, I would never read another article about this place, and would move to the Azores. That said, Filipov’s January 29 article, about the world’s oldest man, wasn’t half bad. It was so good, you almost felt like you weren’t reading about Russia at all. Unlike almost every other feature written by every other hack in this town, it didn’t rush by paragraph three to some “larger conclusion” about “Russian reality” that could be divined from the experience of its paragraph one subject, in this case a very old man.

Instead, this was just a story about a person who had a long life, whose age is a mystery (he claims to be 134, but his passport says he’s 112) and who lived through experiences like the Russo-Japanese War after puberty. Filipov is generally economical and subtle in his use of witticisms—a necessity when you work for the mainstream press, which confines “jokes” to the slots occupied by canned yuksters like Dave Barry. About his subject’s experience running away to fight, Filipov writes: “He meant the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, when he was either 17 or 39.” A short sentence with no laugh track, just the way the texts in pieces like this should be written.

The Motley Hack, on the other hand, is Filipov’s opposite. The column, written by an anonymous member of the Moscow Press Corps, is meant to be a view-from-the-inside diary of a what life is really like for a mainstream journalist. But instead of saying more than his usual byline permits him to, the Motley Hack says less. He tells stories that seem to take place floating in space, involve no real people, and are centered around no real incidents—a serious flaw in a column whose author has no name or recognizable identity. The hack’s tales recall Abraham Lincoln’s crack about an opponent’s speech: “Thinner than a soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that starved to death.”

Here’s an example from the Hack’s February 5 piece, “Prague Holds No Romance for the Hack.” In it, he describes being assaulted by a group of swans:

“No, they were all doing it. Alpha males, beta males, chicks, pups, yearlings and ugly ducklings. They were all hissing at me! And then it started.

“Swans swarmed around me, nipping at my coat, flapping their dreaded wings in my face, stomping all over my suburb-bred sense of inner security. (I mean, if a flock of swans can best me, what am I gonna do in the post-apocalyptic street riots?)

“Luckily, all these overblown albino vultures wanted was the bag of crackers. It was easy enough to solve the dispute. Flinging the bag deep into to the Vltava, I bolted to my waiting rent-a-Skoda and drove off to safety.”

This is the Motley Hack at work—machine-gun volleys of rim-shot producing one-liners about non-incidents provoking non-responses from an non-actor in an issueless existence. From an anonymous column, I want something more. Does the Hack beat his wife? Does he secretly hate his boss? Does he wish he could just pack up and go to the airport one day and leave everything behind, damning the consequences? Does he think about suicide? Does he have potency problems? Does he lie in his day job? Throw us a bone here. Inquiring minds want to know. Maybe they’ll still find out: the Hack moves on to give fans another look in round two. Incidentally, what a nom de Guerre… the Motley Hack. I bet Carlos the Jackal is pissed he didn’t think of it first. Certainly, he will have imitators. Maybe there will be whole generations of successive Hacks, like the Dread Pirates Roberts, only with backwards baseball caps instead of masks…. Time will tell.

Andrew McChesney, Moscow Times, def. Andrew Higgins, (5) Wall Street Journal

McChesney, the new deputy editor of The Moscow Times, lives in my building on Kotelnicheskaya naberezhnaya. I haven’t seen him once. About two months ago, I began to suspect that he was actively avoiding me, so I started to get up early in the morning and wait near the entrance for him to come out to go to work in the morning. Sometimes I even hide behind the doorway in the hope of lurching out and surprising him from behind as he walks out. No dice. I’ve asked the concierges about him, and they say I always just miss him. Once or twice might be a coincidence, but this is getting ridiculous. I hate to send Andrew Higgins out of the tournament, particularly since his paper just published another loathsome “Putin-as-Pinochet” piece, but until McChesney stops wasting my time with this cloak-and-dagger bullshit, I’m going to have to keep sending him through.

Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, def. Andrei Piontkowsky, Russia Journal

Andrei Piontkowsky technically is neither foreign nor a correspondent; nonetheless he goes into this Worst Foreign Correspondent competition as a totally arbitrary wild-card entry. Piontkowsky is, of course, a big-league talking head—one of those self-described “Russia Experts” who routinely travels to Washington on someone else’s tab to lounge around in his underwear in three-star hotels, collect room-service receipts, and give Weighty Opinions to panels of corpses. Whether or not he performs well in this role is for somebody else to report, as I have no idea. What I do know is that a key component of the whole Ricky-Nelson Travelin’-Man three-star gravy-train lifestyle is the maintenance of a public presence, i.e., publishing a column somewhere. In the past, Piontkowsky fulfilled this obligation at The Moscow Times, but about a year ago, he suddenly and mysteriously moved to The Russia Journal, where publisher Ajay Goyal doubtless encourages him to earn as much supplemental income as he can.

Goyal is also clearly a much more lenient boss than Piontkowsky’s former editors at The Moscow Times. The columnist’s appearance in this tournament, in fact, is a result of an article Goyal & Co. somehow let through on January 27, entitled, “The Merciless Russian Myth.” Here is the lead to that piece:

“At the beginning of October 1999, I wrote a small commentary that I’d like to quote in full now. I think its subject-matter could be of interest in the light of events that have taken place since then.”

After these two sentences, Piontkowsky reached for the underscore bar on his keyboard, punched out about six in a row, and then simply cut-and-pasted in the old October 1999 column, which he presumably had stored in a blast-resistant titanium bunker, so that rescue workers after the nuclear attack could assign him his proper place in history.

Not bad for a week’s work. Now here’s the punchline. Piontkowsky tried to do exactly the same thing at The Moscow Times last year, and was told to go fuck himself. According to various sources at The Times , Piontkowsky wrote a new top on an old piece last fall and tried to submit it as his weekly column, one which would earn him his usual fee. The Times editors told him that the whole point of a newspaper column was to produce new material every week. Piontkowsky cried censorship and threatened to quit. The Times called his bluff. A few weeks later, he was gone—left, as the saying goes, to wander the wilds of the Russia Journal media empire.

Who says crime doesn’t pay? Meanwhile, Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor is not the type to go for self-plagiarism. His is a more honest brand of cultural reporting, one which follows a grand tradition here in Moscow. That tradition goes something like this: “It’s January, I’m tired, fuck it, I’ll do the falling-icicle story.” Every year in Moscow, about ten poor saps have their heads caved in by icicles, and every year, about five big-bureau hacks write the icicle story—usually right after the “In Moscow [as opposed to the cities of civilized nations], Homeless People Die from the Cold” story, the “Ice fisherman in Karelia get drunk and fail to notice their ice floes going out to sea” story, and the “When will Russia replace Ded Moroz with Santa Claus?” story.

The Falling-Icicle story is always written in the same tone, and always contains the same elements. Most importantly—and this is something that is absolutely required—the piece has to be written in a vaguely wry, chuckling, “humorous” tone. See, the thing is, a “falling icicle” story makes big American papers not for its news value, but as “readers,” i.e., as entertainment, as comic relief. Some papers put their “readers” on the bottom of the front page; The Wall Street Journal puts it right down the center, adorned with a “funny” illustration.

If the icicle story had to make the news as news alone, it probably would be written as a two-sentence bulletin:

“MOSCOW, Russia (Boring Wire Service)—Ten people died this weekend in Moscow when a sudden warm spell after a month of cold weather caused enormous icicles to fall from roofs and balconies onto crowded city streets below.

“Authorities said the deaths were unavoidable accidents of nature.”

But that’s not what you get. Instead, you get the Keystone Kops, as is the case with Peterson’s January 24, 2001 story, “The cold war that Moscow always manages to win”:

‘’Move your cars!” bellows Nadia Gulyeva into a megaphone to the sleeping residents of a downtown apartment block. ‘Icicles will be raining down!’

“Ms. Gulyeva—whose voice is so powerful that some residents snidely remark that she doesn’t need amplification—is on the front lines of Russia’s annual war against ice.

“In a familiar Moscow winter ritual, men armed with shovels and spades scrape the sloping tin roofs clear of snow and ice, sending down one avalanche after another.”

The needle on Peterson’s humor dial barely moves here, but it does flutter a few times: with the old woman whose “voice doesn’t need amplification,” for instance, or with the exaggerated ice-removal-as-war metaphor (a “Cold War”, no less!). In the States, you don’t get to stand over the bodies of people with icicle-ends in their foreheads and write leads like this: “I just flew over to this accident site, and boy, are my arms tired!” The victims are too close to home, their relatives too likely to interrupt your editor’s platinum-card lunch with weepy phone calls. But you can do it from Russia. A lot of these people don’t even have phones.

Beyond that, these stories should be banned in any case, if only because they’ve been done so often. Rick Beeston from The Times of London by himself did so many icicle stories, you could have melted them into a skating rink. The AP uses the same one every year, I think, just changing the casualty figures. Anyway, it was a close game, but Peterson advances, tiptoeing around the red warning tape to a narrow victory.

Marcus Warren, Daily Telegraph, def. Patrick Tyler, New York Times

The key moment in this game came at 8:41 of the first half, when Warren bravely tried to use the rhetorical device of humor in his Russian alcoholism piece: “Dr. Onischenko is confident that Russia can cast off its historical legacy, drink less, cure itself of the effects of alcohol abuse—and survive the resulting hangover.”

From there, Warren ripped off six straight field goals, including two three-pointers, to put the game out of reach. Tyler, filing from Chechnya, called a quick timeout, but he never recovered, unable to even get off a bad joke against Warren’s swarming defense. His loss means that the much-anticipated meeting between The Washington Post and The New York Times in the next round will not take place. Oh well. As Katherine Graham would say, if a French doctor told her her arm could not be reconnected after a car crash in Provence: tant pis!

David Hoffman (4), Washington Post, def. David McHugh, Associated Press

Hoffman has been quiet lately. Probably this has a lot to do with the fact that he has been finishing up his long-awaited opus on What Really Happened in Russia over the last ten years. This shimmering beacon of truth will doubtless be on the shelves all over the world very soon, and will also, without a doubt, achieve a level of popularity exceeding the usual parameters of the dull historical-analytical genre, landing Hoffman a place in the annals of world literature as a great innovator who left behind a legacy of vital, refreshing, daring prose, work that fairly leapt off the page. In a hundred years Hoffman’s book will be read not only by people who were interested in Russian politics of the late 1990s, but by people with no interest in Russia whatsoever.

In any case, The Washington Post claims that Hoffman is “completing” his assignment here in Russia, which leaves open the question of whether or not he will continue to perform in this tournament. He may not. He does, however, have a first-round entry—the “internet chat” he gave on Washingtonpost.com a few weeks ago.

Hoffman is going to advance into the next round mainly on the strength of the moderator on the chat, i.e., the person who chose the questions. Like Hoffman himself, The Post’s “chatters” not only asked all the wrong questions about Russia, but framed them in a way that guaranteed the “correct” answer. Hoffman himself was famous for asking the rhetorical question, “Did the U.S. do enough for Russia?,” a question which by itself excluded other questions like, “Did the U.S. actively sponsor corruption in Russia?” Hoffman’s chatters, carefully steered to him by his net moderator, were exactly the same. Take for instance, this question by “MidWest”:

“MidWest: Did the US sell Russia a bum deal on democracy? Though the whole Cold War democracy was sold like once communism was gone Russia would be brought into the same opulence that the US enjoys. Did we give them unrealistic expectations of what reform would entail and what lifetime the Russians would see the fruits of that reform?”

Here’s the question that already contains the answer—the perfect Hoffmanesque format. Within this question there is no possibility for “reform” to have been, for instance, conceived from the very start as a giant scam to steal from the Russian public. It’s a yes-or-no answer: yes, we gave them unrealistic expectations, or no, our expectations were realistic, and Russia just failed to live up to them. Here’s Hoffman’s scaly little answer:

“David Hoffman: Unrealistic expectations: yes. But we didn’t have to give them, they had them already. From where? Our movies and popular culture, to start with. Bum deal? No, I don’t think so. It was the right thing to do, although it is painful to see and hear people who think it is time to pack our bags.”

There was, in addition, the question sent in by this chatter:

“Annandale, Virginia: Heard that you have a book in the works on the Russian oligarchs. What can you tell us about it and when will it be in the bookstores?”

I’d say this was Hoffman’s girlfriend writing in, by I can’t imagine Hoffman having a girlfriend. Maybe it was his accountant. Actually, I can most easily see it being some poor Puerto Rican mechanic who fixed his car at Jiffy Lube. Hoffman having given him an extra 15 bucks, negotiated down from the original demand price of 20, to ask the question on-line.

Hoffman’s opponent, David McHugh, is an old hand from The Moscow Times who has made the successful evolutionary transition into a wire-service animal. At The Moscow Times you at least knew where he sat, while with AP, you can stare into the jungle for hours and never see him as he sits camouflaged, quietly respirating on a tree-stump right in front of you. His January 30 piece, “Russia Worried about NATO expansion,” was meat-and-potatoes wire service stuff: collections of quotes, lots of connecting words and passages, assembly-line literary style. It had one good gag line:

“Sergei Ivanov, the secretary of President Vladimir Putin’s powerful Security Council, gave the blunt warning about NATO to German Defense Minister Rudolph Scharping. Germany is a key member of NATO.”

One can imagine all kinds of alternatives to that last line. My first thought was to rewrite the passage this way:

“Sergei Ivanov, the secretary of President Vladimir Putin’s powerful Security Council, gave the blunt warning about NATO to German Defense Minister Rudolph Scharping. Underwear are garments that cover the genitals.”

Or something like that. The wires always throw you off with those auto-inserted passages. But otherwise, this piece was clean; McHugh played it cool and didn’t try anything. Hoffman, last year’s champion, stumbles through round one with an uninspired performance.

Christian Caryl (3), Newsweek, def. Ed Lucas, Economist

Human rights activist Ravshan Gapirov is now rotting in a Kyrgyz jail, probably being tortured on a daily basis with electrodes from car batteries and innovative contraptions like the notorious “slonik ,” the gasmask rigged to prevent the intake of air. It’s Newsweek bureau chief Christian Caryl’s fault that he’s there, but not, as one might be led to believe, because he writes using phrases like “the alpine foothills were stippled with color.” No, the reason Gapirov was arrested is because Caryl sent a photographer to cover a demonstration Gapirov was involved with, and the photographer attracted the attention of the Kyrgyz authorities. There’s nothing to be done about that—just an unfortunate consequence of Covering the Story. Caryl felt so bad about it that he wrote an article, the January 19, “Declining Democracy.” Here’s his summation of the incident:

“When photographer Stanley Greene arrived to take pictures of the unrest for Newsweek , members of the security service accused Gapirov of provoking the demonstration. Within days, they arrested him.

“Two months later, he remains in detention. His fate is unknown, but human-rights workers familiar with the area fear he has been tortured.”

I could almost see the animated illustration to Caryl’s story: “And if Gapirov had been tortured, human-rights experts say that scene would have looked like this.” And then the car batteries, the slonik , and so on.

Two facts bear observing here. One is that Caryl’s piece came out two months after Gapirov was arrested. The second is that Caryl’s photographer came down to Kyrgyzstan after Caryl did. Both facts add up to the conclusion that Caryl flew in, did his interview, split, sent his photographer down to clean up, and then never called again. In the meantime, his interview subject was thrown in a medieval jail. Interview subjects often complain that journalists never call back to say hello, but this is something else entirely.

Meanwhile, Gapirov’s plight was almost certainly not improved by Caryl’s latest piece about his jailing. If he is indeed being tortured, one of the questions they’re asking him is almost certainly, “What the fuck does ‘stipple’ mean?” Or: “Aren’t all foothills ‘alpine’? Talk!” Caryl is a ponderous trader in journo-cliches, as surely even the Kyrgyz security service agents can see. He is a person who can write a phrase like “Democracy in Kyrgyzstan seemed to be flourishing” without pissing his pants from pure guilt. All his phrases are canned, from the “volatile cocktail” of Islam and poverty (how many “volatile cocktails” do Time and Newsweek crank out every year?) to the description of Gapirov as a “self-styled human rights activist” to the approving portrayal of the younger Askar Akayev as a “thoughtful intellectual fond of quoting from the writers of the American founding fathers.”

Ed Lucas of The Economist, on the other hand, would never be impressed by a Central Asian Khan quoting the American founding fathers. He would find it as grotesque and undesirable as the poor hygiene he condemns at length on the Johnson’s list. Christian Caryl: he almost makes you understand the British. Evelyn Waugh-creation Lucas massacred in round one: third seed Caryl on for more.

Maura Reynolds and Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times, def. Geoff York, Globe and Mail (Canada)

Reyndolds and Dixon gain an automatic pass into the second round by virtue of the recent reappearance of Carol J. Williams on the Russian reporting scene. Her February 5 piece, “Ice Hardens as Russia, U.S. Security Officials Wrangle,” filed from Munich, smacks of UNLV-style recruiting violations. When a team is stacked like this LA Times squad, you know the underclassmen are driving shiny new Buicks and doing eightballs in the locker room. By all accounts, Carol J. should have graduated and been drafted into the NBA years ago. But she’s still hanging around campus. Something stinks here.

York on January 27 wrote a piece about Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s protests over the elimination of the environmental and forestry committees. At last someone put a thinking Solzhenitsyn in the news after he made his embarrassing public endorsement of Putin last year. But of course, the Canadians still know who Solzhenitsyn is.

Anna Dolgov, Associated Press, def. Matthew Fisher, Toronto Sun

A whim of a ping-pong ball was all that prevented a first-round meeting of The Sun’s Fisher with The Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York, also a West conference entrant. The meeting would have been dramatic but bittersweet, as the two Canadians are close friends, often seen holding hands while walking the boulevard between Pushkin Square and the New Arbat. However, it was not to be: instead of drawing each other, York and Fisher both drew heavyweights in the first round.

A third-round meeting between the two Canucks was still theoretically possible, but Anna Dolgov put an end to that with her first-round effort, “Yeltsin Still a Compelling Presence” (January 31, 2001). In it, she writes:

“Yeltsin released a remarkably emotional, personal memoir last fall, in an apparent attempt to counter the wave of hatred that engulfed him during his last years in office.”

Yeltsin not only didn’t write Presidentsky Marafon, he probably didn’t even read it. As has been widely reported, the book was actually written by Valentin Yumashev, with some assistance from Tatyana Dyachenko. You can say just about anything you want about a ghostwritten memoir, but you can’t call it “remarkably emotional and personal,” particularly when the purported author routinely drools in his public appearances.

Fisher, meanwhile, continues to be a model all foreign correspondents should follow. He likes hockey, so he writes about hockey. What’s so hard about that? Stick to what you know. Here’s an excerpt from his Feb. 2 piece, “Russians Pine for Past Glory”:

“The game, like most in Russia’s premier and first divisions these days, was typically Russian in that it had a high tempo and featured lots of passing. But it was woefully short on skill or dynamic play. A few of the forwards even had trouble skating.”

The forwards had trouble skating…. That’s maybe the most interesting thing I’ve read all year in a Western news article. You pick up any political analysis piece written by any Westerner, and you won’t find a single observation as keen as that. They don’t notice anything, because they don’t know what the hell they’re looking at. But Fisher, at least he knows his hockey. You can tell, he was genuinely disappointed—or maybe saddenedis the better word—to see that these guys had trouble skating. Anyway, he’s out; Dolgov moves on to the next round.

Colin McMahon, Chicago Tribune, def. Ron Popeski (6), Reuters

I have my secretary researching the etymology of the name “Popeski,” on the off chance that it means “little Pope.” So far no results there. Meanwhile, Popeski’s opponent in the first round, Colin McMahon, whipped off a doozie with his February 1 piece, “Russian System Isn’t Coping at All with a Surge in Mental Disorders.”

I’m getting really tired of reading news reports about Russia’s health care system that don’t mention the fact that Western-sponsored reforms ended subsidized medicine here. McMahon goes one further, attributing even Russia’s current health problems to “state-sponsored” medicine:

“Beyond that, Russia’s state system cannot afford the newest generation of drugs that have proven so valuable in treating depression, schizophrenia, and other maladies in the West. What Galina and other doctors have on hand, they dispense. What they lack, they prescribe, but few of Galina’s patients can afford such medicine.”

It’s not the state system, but the end of it that has so many loonies walking the street, carrying hacksaw blades. It’s the same in the United States, where mental health facilities are being emptied as the state “privatizes” mental health care. In the U.S., you can’t get insurance companies to pay to take care of a plantar wart, much less for feeling sad. This is a global problem, the brainchild of corporations that don’t want to pay for mental health costs, not an endemically Russian problem. Granted, it’s worse here—the economy is terrible, and there are more reasons to go crazy—but the place would be a lot better off if it was considered OK for the state to pay for medicine.

Beyond that, McMahon included the following passage, describing one psychiatrist’s innovative treatment method:

“Goland uses inventive measures to treat his patients. One seasonal trick, for example, is to hang a fir tree, complete with blinking lights and decorations, upside down from the ceiling of his basement meeting room.”

If I were sick enough to be hospitalized with schizophrenia and someone hung a blinking Christmas tree upside-down in my basement room, I’d run straight through the nearest window in a shower of glass, sprint to the road, and commit a series of brutal highway slayings. McMahon couldn’t have said that, of course, but he does seem to suggest such innovations as an alternative to the government picking up the tab for more expensive forms of treatment, such as lithium.

In contrast, Popeski’s January 22 piece, “Putin Puts Changes to Criminal Law on Ice,” was more or less harmless. It even seemed to suggest that giving the Prosecutor’s office unlimited powers might be a bad thing. The wires continue to perform poorly in the first round; the No. 6 seed goes down, and The Chicago Tribune advances.

Paul Starobin (7), Business Week, def. Andrew Jack, Financial Times

Starobin’s high seeding was granted mainly on the strength of his performance earlier this year in an article about the emerging middle class, in which we caught him on the phone admitting that he wouldn’t want to raise his children in Samara, which he’d called in print “a wonderful place to raise a family.”

Subsequently we had complaints from various corners that Starobin had gotten a bad rap, that he isn’t such a bad guy and had just made an honest mistake. It was even claimed that he is not such a bad journalist after all.

Starobin’s recent piece, the January 29 “The Trials of a Drug Czar,” about Vladimir Bryntsalov, is, indeed, not so bad on its face. He gives a good description, in the lead, of Bryntsalov being the animal that he is in most interviews, ripping the head off a sucking pig. He provides a wealth of information about the Russian drug industry and about Bryntsalov himself. Actually, there isn’t much to say about this piece at all, except to comment on this following passage:

‘The institute gave Bryntsalov a $5 million insulin production line in 1998: The line was purchased initially for the state with foreign credits guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers’ money through Eximbank.”

Starobin doesn’t follow up on this piece of information, despite the fact that it raises an obvious question: if Bryntsalov is such an out-and-out scumbag, how come the United States is in the business of providing loan guarantees for him? Starobin didn’t even call Eximbank for a comment;there is not a single sentence more about Eximbank’s connection to Bryntsalov. That’s enough to put him past Andrew Jack, who is going to have to get a lot worse fast if he hopes to reach John Lloyd status.

Dave Montgomery, Knight-Ridder, def. Peter Graff, Reuters

Every now and then, it takes the national exposure of the March Madness tournament to bring a great talent to light. Who in the world had ever heard of Wally Sczerbiak before he threw in 43 in the first round of the Big Dancea few years ago, to lead unheralded Miami (Ohio) over Washington? Nobody, that’s who. But now he starts for the T-Wolves, throwing alley-oops to Kevin Garnett and running “Wally World” basketball camps in the offseason.

Something like that may be in store for the Knight-Ridder service’s Dave Montgomery, if he keeps performing like this. Knight-Ridder isn’t exactly the Hofstra or even the Miami (Ohio) of American journalism—it has a giant chain of newspapers, including a few majors, like The Philadelphia Inquirer —but when the big names of Moscow journalism come to mind, Montgomery’s tends not to come up. But make no mistake about it: this guy has Game with a capital G. Check out this lead from a piece he wrote last year on the Russian health care system:

“PSKOV, Russia—Yuri Lebedev, a cheery outdoor vendor in this north Russian city, is an endangered species, a Russian male. He chain-smokes cheap Russian cigarettes and suffers from heart disease. In just over a decade, health statistics suggest, he could be dead.”

Now if that isn’t the dumbest lead I’ve ever seen, then I don’t know what is. In just over a decade, he “could be” dead? He could be dead already. He could live to 450. He could grow muttonchops, walk across Belgium on stilts, and marry Paula Abdul. According to statistics, a lot of things are possible. There are all sorts of other things wrong with the article (by the way, is it healthier to smoke expensive French cigarettes than “cheap Russian ones”?), but that lead…. Jesus. Anyway, Montgomery’s more recent effort, the January 3, 2001 effort, “Dreams of Better Life End in Sexual Slavery,” is a perfect example of the Montgomery technique. Here’s the lead:

“DNIEPRODZHERZHINSK, Ukraine—It was the simple dream of working in an honest job for a modestly better life that got Yelena into trouble. Like so many others, she ended up forced into sex slavery and imprisoned in brothels and dreary hotel rooms while her captors stood guard.”

This lead reminded me of a little bit of a movie spoof from the Zucker brothers film Kentucky Fried Movie . They did this trailer for a fake movie called Catholic High School Girls In Trouble , which showed a huge pair of tits being mashed over and over again against a glass sliding door in a shower, along with the voice-over: “Never before has the beauty of the sexual act been so crassly exploited!” Montgomery couldn’t wait even a sentence before he started mashing those tits against the glass door. Now, everyone knows the press is sensationalistic, that what sells papers is war, plane crashes and hot, dripping snatch. But most reporters for “respectable” newspapers at least throw hats over their hard-ons before they put this stuff in print. They at least pretend that there are real issues at stake. They’re hypocrites, of course, but so be it. Montgomery doesn’t try to be less of a hypocrite—he’s just too dumb to hide his true nature. The result is a bizarre combination of perverted ravings hidden under a clumsy and very thin veneer of faux-concern. The boys at Knight-Ridder must love him. Take this passage from the piece, when he describes the experiences of a 15-year-old St. Petersburg girl—a “blond with a ponytail-who’d been forced into prostitution:

“…another girl persuaded her to meet two Azerbaijani men at a cafe near a St. Petersburg subway station. Looking downward as she clutched a small black and white stuffed dog, Julia recalled the terrifying two weeks that followed.”

The little black-and-white stuffed dog is the giveaway here. No detail Montgomery could possibly have thought up would have been more guaranteed to send his middle-aged male readers in Philadelphia reaching for their peckers; they’d be acting out of the Pavlovian response developed after years of reading passages just like this one on websites like frightenedlolitas.com and chicksincages.de. Montgomery writes the word “terrifying” here, but if he felt even a second of anything like terror, then I’m a gay pastry chef. This is an article that was typed with one hand, that’s guaranteed.

Montgomery’s opponent, Peter Graff, is a rank amateur in comparison. He shouldn’t even be in this tournament. His February 4 article, “Russia Frees U.S. Aid Worker Gluck in Chechnya,” was a total disaster from a basketball-journalism point of view. There were no defiled 15-year-olds with stuffed animals in it at all—just a bearded ex-hostage and a yawning quote from overworked FSB spokesliar Alexander Zhdanovich. Montgomery on to the next round; get your glass slippers ready folks, it’s Cinderella time.

Robert Burns, Associated Press, def. Laura Belin, RFE/RL

Burns isn’t really a Moscow-based reporter, although he did file a Russia-related story from Munich last week, having been at the same presser as Carol J. Williams. Burns is, however, the namesake of a famous Scottish poet, which should not escape the attention of The Moscow Times. The Times a few weeks back ran a series of eight-square ads for some kind of “Robert Burns Night” at the Baltschug-Kempinskaya, then mysteriously ran a “Weekend” inside section piece about the event just before it happened. Somebody has to pay for that, and it isn’t going to be Laura Belin.

Rob Cottrell (2), Financial Times, def. Masha Gessen, U.S. News and World Report

Cottrell earned the eXile’s eternal enmity with his piece a few months back asserting that Putin’s KGB past “only adds to his allure” because it “makes him sound all the more plausible when he promises the smack of firm government.” That piece, in addition to the fact that he is the inheritor of an exatled office that in the past has been held by the likes of such famously bad journalists as John Lloyd and John Thornhill, guaranteed him the second seeding in this tournament. In fact, there was a popular movement in town to give Cottrell a bye into the semifinals for his relentless ass-licking vis-‡-vis Putin in the last few months. The calls resounded with even greater fury when his predecessor, John Lloyd, published an article called “The Miracle Worker” that depicted Sibneft headcrusher Roman Abramovich as a sort of Santa Claus, dispensing goodies to the needy in Chukhotka. Given all of these circumstances, it would have taken a remarkable piece of work indeed for Cottrell to get himself out of Worst Journalist contention early on. He failed, writing the loathsome January 27 article, “Putin Offers Yeltsin Gift of Immunity.”

In this piece, Cottrell argues, as he has repeatedly, that Putin’s strong-arm policies have been designed to subdue “headstrong” elements of society in order to restore order and bring about prosperity, happiness, and Peace on Earth. In this particular article, he implies that an “obsequious” gangster is better than a loud one:

“Mr. Putin has already chased the most headstrong of the old oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, out of Russia, using legal actions or the threat of them. The businessmen who came to the Kremlin on Thursday were, by all accounts, a more obsequious bunch.”

Cottrell goes on to depict Putin as a sort of Christ among apostles, dispensing his charges with the instruction to do good works:

“Mr. Putin told them to stop buying political influence in the Duma, give money to charity, and trust him to deliver decent laws.”

Presumably Putin also told them to be kind to stray animals and to call their mothers.

I had thought that Cottrell’s opponent, Masha Gessen, had gone missing when I saw her picture hanging on the wall of a New York City post office a while ago. But it turned out the missing person was a 10-year-old Turkish boy. My mistake. Also, Gessen’s January 29 piece, “Russia’s Boys Behind Bars,” was solid as usual. Cottrell advances.