#20 | October 23 - November 5, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

"No answer is a kind of answer." -Yiddish proverb

One of the key underpinnings of the whole concept of journalistic "objectivity" is that, by only recording verifiable facts, the journalist is supposed to keep his own personal prejudices out of the story, allowing his reader to draw his own conclusions.

In reality, of course, the choice of which incontrovertible facts to record is in itself a process guided by the journalist's prejudices. In fact, there are many instances in which the very decision to write about this or that subject clearly demonstrates an opinionated stance on the part of the reporter.

Journalism teachers generally disagree with this point of view, but from where I sit, it seems pretty hard to deny. If you're a reporter visiting Auschwitz in 1943 and you come back to your editor with a piece on the camp guards' intramural volleyball league, it sure says a lot about what you think about Jews, whether you mention them or not. Either that or it says a lot about how much you fear your editor's bosses. In both cases, "objectivity" doesn't play much of a role, even if, like good reporter, you get the scores of the volleyball games exactly right.

Russia had its own camp volleyball game last week. It was called the "No confidence" vote. Very few Russians with a pulse gave this little comedy more than a few minutes' thought. The Duma has been a Potemkin village opposition ever since the events of 1993; the idea that its deputies would actively pursue a course that would likely lead to a loss of their own jobs was so preposterous that no intelligent Russian even batted an eyelash when they threatened to vote no confidence.

Yet the Western press corps not only covered the whole performance en masse, they even wrote extensively on the aftermath of the "failed" no confidence bid, analyzing the affair as though it had been a genuine exercise in parliamentary politics, and not the furthering of the elaborate pretense of democracy that it was.

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times wrote in a typical Western analysis: "If passed, the no-confidence measure would undoubtedly have dealt a severe blow to the government's plans to trim the budget and broaden economic reform; and the political uncertainty, potentially destabilizing in Russia's young democracy, could have damaged severely Russia's fragile economy."

Stanley here provides support to the Yeltsin regime by furthering the fiction that the country's main threat to stability comes from the declawed, disorganized, and cowardly communists. She does so just a few days after the government survived its latest confrontation with its real "opposition"-democracy and free speech.

On the Monday before the vote, the latest issue of the magazine Profil, which is printed overseas, was held up at the border on its way into Russia. The government claimed that the magazine owed VAT, which magazines printed overseas are not obliged to pay; its editors, who appeared on television at midnight Monday, claimed there was another reason. They said that the government had intervened to prevent the publication of an article which reported that the state had not, despite prior claims, paid off its arrears to the armed services.

That issue of Profil still isn't on the streets. Russian reporters are passing around the few copies that got through like Samizdat. That seems like a big story to me. The Western press corps apparently didn't agree. Fully none-that's zero, as in not one-of the reporters in the Western press corps reported this latest affront to free speech. That's because they were all at the Duma, listening to Vladimir Zhirinovsky serve up his latest lecture on hermaphroditism. Dig, set, spike- rotate!

Another example of a story whose mere appearance revealed bias is the tale of Boris Jordan's visa revocation. For those of you not familiar with this story, Mr. Jordan, the head of MFK-Renaissance and Uneximbank's valuable link to the West, had his visa revoked a few weeks ago when he tried to re-enter Russia from London.

One Western reporter who took the admirable step of not reporting this affair explained to me the difficulty in approaching the Jordan subject.

"The only way to sell this story at home was to present it as a tale of an honest American businessman turned out of Russia by corrupt insiders hostile to reform," he said. "But my sense was that this guy was dirty, so I stayed away from it."

As the lead story in this issue of the eXile shows, the reporter's instincts were probably sound. But he was almost alone among his colleagues in his ability to resist a story that was rotten but saleable. The lead Colin McMahon of the Chicago Tribune wrote in his Jordan story was typical:

"Aiming to attract investment and turn around their battered economy, Russian officials say they are willing to roll out the red carpet for foreigners with capital. Yet on Monday, one of Russia's strongest financial backers lashed out after the rug was pulled out from under him."

McMahon went on to show that the revocation of Jordan's visa was tied to insider infighting, but never once suggested that Jordan himself, the good American businessman, might have had played any kind of insider role himself. He writes:

"For the Svyazinvest deal, Renaissance cobbled together a consortium that included financier George Soros and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. The sale brought Russia $1.8 billion, and foreign observers generally thought it fair and competitive."

Unless McMahon has been asleep for the past month and a half or so, the omission of the Alfred Kokh story, which pretty much demonstrated that the Svyazinvest bid was not fair and competitive, would almost have to be a conscious one. This is a step beyond simple unconscious bias into the world of active disinformation, comparable to asserting that not only the camp's guards, but its inmates, enjoyed the volleyball tournament.

"Objectivity" is a salve that reporters have been putting on their ailing consciences for years. It's a way of avoiding telling the truth about one thing by telling the truth about something else. That way, they can say they didn't actively mislead the public about a story, simply by avoiding the story altogether. But just as the Yiddish proverb says, avoiding reporting is still a kind of reporting.