the eXile - Press Review

Issue #21/102, Oct 26 - Nov 9, 2000

Above it All

By Matt Taibbi

As a result, the newspaper never gets too close to anyone beyond the elite circles connected to the federal government. This distance is reflected in many dimensions, but most clearly in the sociological tone and perspective of the reporting. When The Washington Post examines a matter of community distress, overcrowded prisons, drug violence or suburban overdevelopment, it deploys impressive resources and its method of pursuit will be thorough and cool. In college, its reporters studied sociology, political science, and economics, and they are comfortable with academic techniques of inquiry.

The one thing they cannot do is express the honest outcry of a situation. They cannot speak in a human voice that is identifiably ‘of the people’ whom they are writing about. With so many disparate audiences to serve, they are implicitly prohibited from embracing anyone’s complaint as their own. They are very strong on digging out the facts, but weak on the intangible dimensions of the human comedy. The Post’s angle of vision, reflected in its language and style, resembles a hip social-science professor’s—a fast-moving kind of pop sociology that seems to look downward on its subject matter.

— William Grieder, “Who Will Tell the People”

Grieder here was talking specifically about The Washington Post, where he once worked as Political Editor, but he might as well have been talking about virtually every other major Western print publication. Newspaper reporters today are bound by convention to write like robots, and robots are weak when it comes to the intangibles. And intangibles become important when there is nothing tangible to write about, which is the situation the Moscow press corps has been facing in the last few weeks.

This has been a bad couple of weeks for Moscow’s finest. No object of any significance has exploded, sunk, or burst into flames for more than a month [Except the Russian jet that exploded, killing 75, as this issue went to print—Ed.]. No personage with a strong Nexis/Lexis database presence has lately been assassinated—in fact, in the case of the Anatoly Bykov murder victims, a few people have actually been publicly de-assassinated. The government has not been sacked, and no teams of masked police have seized and jailed any high-profile Jews. In short, this has been a grim season for the career-conscious Russia-watcher, a time of professional agony which one suspects is compounded by envy of those former Columbia Journalism School classmates whose chose Jerusalem or the U.S. campaign trail to start their careers.

When there is no big story to keep them together, the press herd is forced to disperse, the individual members left to forage on their own. As it is for the herd animal in the wild, this time of separation from the pack is a dangerous one for the foreign correspondent. Forced to provide his own creative impetus for his reporting, he is every day in danger of sending home what will appear to his editors as conspicuously forgettable material. With every day that the rest of the Russian submarine fleet stays afloat, he moves closer and closer to acting on long-dormant goofy feature ideas about the trials of the Russian pet store industry, or about the world’s fourth-largest waterfall in some little-known part of Siberia. If his imagination is particularly bankrupt he may even give in to the temptation to write an article about the state of the Russian supermarket—the Russian supermarket being one of the three places in the entire country, aside from his office and his apartment, where he’s ever actually seen in person. (The Financial Times actually ran one such piece last week).

By any conceivable rational standard, Russia would have to rate as the world’s greatest reporting beat. It’s eleven time zones of wall-to-wall mass murder, catastrophe, thievery, idiocy, squalor, pestilence, war, evil and suffering, a human comedy of awesome dimensions. Given enough leeway, a journalist of even the faintest ability would never run out of things to write about here. But journalists don’t have any leeway at all. Everything they write about has to be news. The eternal isn’t news. It happens every day and every year, over and over again. And even when it does so loudly and colorfully and movingly, as it does in Russia, it can’t get into a newspaper.

If you think about it, this general observation about the content of newspapers—that timeless themes are not considered worth covering—reveals the root dishonesty of the whole approach of modern media. The emphasis on “news” leaves readers with the impression that something new is always happening, that the truth is located in the moment, and not across all of time. It creates a readership that is overstimulated and incapable of putting things in perspective. And it forces its envoys, i.e., correspondents, to actively avoid perspective, as giving credence to perspective and the eternal would tend to undermine the preeminence of sensation that drives the entire business.

Journalists deal with this problem in two ways. One is to avoid the whole question entirely by constantly seeking out “news.” The other is to give the appearance of perspective through various non-news items sprinkled throughout their publications. Generally these are columns, editorials, analyses, and feature stories. Of these genres, only the last two are really open to the ordinary staff writer of a foreign bureau or wire service. Your Mitchell Landsbergs and Celestine Bohlens, when they’re not writing news, generally have to rely on the feature for a change of pace.

But there’s a dual barrier to writing anything like a good feature built into the profession. Grieder talked about the first, which is that the audiences these writers are addressing are so disparate that the language they use must necessarily be watered down, in order to avoid alienating any of them. It’s the same problem that makes politicians so bland and unappealing—because they’re after everyone’s vote, they can’t do anything special to get yours.

But a politician can at least make a joke every now and then, or talk with a Southern accent, or shoot a promotional spot with Vinny Testaverde…. He can have some kind of personality. Journalists from big papers can’t. In their tone and style, they have to be exactly like every other journalist. This is the other half of the double-barrier–a feature has to be written by everybody, from the point of view of nobody.

For Russia reporters, this means that covering even this insane and wildly interesting place has to be written about in the language of a Hallmark card. As a result, we get features like a recent monstrosity by Karl Emerick Hanuska of Reuters, entitled “The waters of Russia’s Karelia hold their allure.” It is hard not to share the agony of Hanuska’s professional predicament when you read the lead to this piece, which goes as follows:

“LAKE ONEGA, Russia, Oct 24 (Reuters)—Crossing Russia’s vast Lake Onega on a stormy autumn day, the steely grey sky is the only thing which seems still.

‘Just fix your eyes on something far off in the distance. That will calm your stomach,’ an elderly woman advises a queasy tourist as the hydrofoil packaged with passengers bound for the island of Kizhi lurches from wave to wave.

“Glancing back at as Karelia region’s capital city Petrozavodsk fades from sight and at the dark waves rolling ahead, one cannot help but be taken with the enormity of Europe’s second-largest lake long enough to forget about nausea for a few moments.”

I’d rather read just about anything than this kind of stuff. The nutritional information on a box of Apple Jacks reads like Shakespeare compared to Hanuska’s “stormy Autumn day,” his “steely grey sky,” his “enormity of Europe’s second-largest lake.” Some 150 words into it, the most interesting thing about this article is the fact that the author has three names. Why does Karl get to have his “Emerick”? Why can he have “Emerick,” while David Hoffman only has a last name?

We’ll never know, because we’ll never know anything about Karl Emerick Hanuska—what he thinks, what he looks like, what his real impressions about Karelia are. Hanuska’s perspective on his subject is predetermined. It’s the same perspective every other reporter has about everything else. That he is a significantly clumsier and less imaginative writer than most other Russia reporters is immaterial. Even a good writer working for Reuters would simply write more skillfully about the same crap. When you’re bound to be impersonal and distant in your writing, even your non-factual subjects end up being reduced to collections of facts. The size of a lake. The color of the sky. The wave-like motion of a wave.

If you read the news often enough, you stop noticing how absurd this all is. But if you stop to take a second look, it’s hard to avoid being amazed that this stuff actually makes its way into print. Take this second passage from Hanuska’s piece. At first glance, there’s nothing to it. But on second glance, there’s REALLY nothing to it:

WATER EVERYWHERE

“Water is the defining characteristic of this vast region, which spreads hundreds of kilometres (miles) along the Finnish border and is host to more than 60,000 lakes and 27,000 rivers.

“A full quarter of its 40,000 square km (15,000 square miles) is covered by water.

“‘The water is the most important thing to people here,’ said a little bearded man named Viktor, taking a long drag on a cigarette before crushing it out under a red rubber boot.

“‘We depend on the water for the fish we eat and the ships that sail into our ports. The land is where we build homes and grow a few vegetables, but out on the water is where we live.’

“Fair with blue eyes, he identified himself as a Karel — an ancient people who now account for about seven percent of the region’s population of about 800,000.”

This is a grown man—addressing an audience of grownups—about this place called Karelia where there is a lot of water, in which people fish for food, and on which they sail their ships. Aside from the water in this place, there is land, in which, by contrast, people do not fish, but instead grow vegetables. Instead of piloting ships on this land, they build houses there.

In addition, Hanuska introduces us to a person from this place. The person is little, has a beard, fair hair, and blue eyes. His name is Viktor. He smokes and has red rubber boots.

There are children’s pop-up books more thematically complicated than this article. In fact, your average children’s book runs laps around Hanuska. A children’s book would at least tell us that Viktor was a good Karel or a bad Karel. His boots would be magic boots. A dragon would rise out of the water, forcing people away from the fish. The story might even develop into a tale of how the Karels discovered agriculture—who knows. But at the very least, all of these details that Hanuska saw fit to include would be wedded to some kind of emotional or rhetorical content. In the Reuters piece, though, the details are unadorned by anything at all. They’re just there.

It would be easy enough to dismiss this article as one isolated example of horrible writing. But it isn’t just one incident. This mania for distance and emotionlessness pervades virtually every published article in the mainstream press. When a newspaper writer isn’t being utterly moronic like Hanuska, he usually opts instead for a more sophisticated form of unevocative writing, i.e., glibness. Reducing a living human being to a mannequin with a beard and blue eyes isn’t much different from standing at a distance from some controversial dilemma and affecting to have no opinion about it one way or another. In either case, you are, as Grieder puts it, standing aside and seeming to look downward on your subject matter.

This extreme other end of Hanuska-esque frigidity was perfectly expressed by a recent New York Times editorial run on the occasion of the death of American Communist Party leader Gus Hall. The Times’s treatment of Hall in this smug eulogy was no less absurd than Hanuska’s treatment of his Viktor. The same paper that spent some 60 years eviscerating Hall every chance it got could be observed last week flinging the following Hallmark card, entitled “America’s Bolshevik,” at his corpse:

“Don Quixote himself might have despaired at the prospect of leading America’s Communist Party during the cold war, but not the indefatigable Gus Hall. Mr. Hall died last week at the age of 90. His life story, improbably enough, is a genuine American tale…

“…The 1930’s were exhilarating times for a young Communist. The Great Depression had revealed the frailties of laissez-faire capitalism, and Stalin was then leading the fight against Fascism. But the next half-century sorely tested his Communist faith. Mr. Hall’s advocacy of a violent revolution earned him an eight-year stay at Leavenworth. He was in prison when Soviet troops quashed the uprising in Budapest and Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his show trials. But none of that cooled Mr. Hall’s Bolshevik ardor…

“Mr. Hall was on the wrong side of history, and stayed there with what ultimately became a comical consistency. His favorite Soviet leader was Leonid Brezhnev. He condemned Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as ‘the wrecking crew,’ and proclaimed North Korea the latest miracle to emulate. He never wavered from his sclerotic orthodoxy, and never attempted to transform the party of the proletariat into a more trendy leftist alternative. That would have offended his native Midwestern stubbornness.”

You’d never know from the tone of this cutesy editorial, with its affectionate salute to the deceased’s “Midwestern stubbornness” and his “genuine American” life story, that The Times was writing about Gus Hall. Cary Grant or Adlai Stevenson would probably have gotten exactly the same treatment in the paper. On the other hand, The Times would probably take the death of someone like Kurt Cobain more seriously. Cobain’s death was news—he died at the height of his celebrity, when he himself was “news”; he died a death that “meant something.” On the other hand, the modern media beast doesn’t really distinguish between people like Gus Hall and Adlai Stevenson, once their celebrity has passed and they are no longer “news.” Like Karelia or a Moscow supermarket, their meaning is reduced to an ironical collection of glib details. Commenting on them, the mainstream media stands far above the fray, professing to no strong feelings one way or the other, content to merely point out the blue eyes, the red boots, the eight-year prison term, the sclerotic orthodoxy. If it’s not news, they’re not there. They’re above it all.

There’s an implied message in this detached sociological approach, which by now is thoroughly ingrained in Western reporting. The message is that outside the news, life is a desert. The only thing that is really timeless in the world the newspapers describe is the unwaveringly dispassionate eye of our faithful observer, the press. To put it another way, the only thing that’s eternal is the media’s refusal to engage its subject.

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