#23 | December 4-17, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

I helped a friend of mine build a dacha this summer. It was pretty monotonous work-I blew at least two weekends kneeling in the mud and laying bricks in the back of the house. My friend got the more interesting job painting the lattice work in the front.

It never occurred to me to sign my name to those bricks. It was my work, sure, but... bricklaying is not the kind of thing you want to stick your Abram Hancock on, if you know what I mean.

My colleagues in Moscow's Western press bureaus don't worry about those kinds of distinctions. They'll stick their name on anything, even a story a lab animal-or a Russian bricklayer-could write.

Editors of straight-press publications are great sticklers for form. Like the great cane-bearing matrons who pace the halls of English grammar schools, they are inevitably horrified if one of their charges wears his schoolyard knickers at vespers or allows his hair to grow a quarter-inch below the regulation level at the ear. In journalism, the rules pertain not to clothes, but to article types, of which there are only three acceptable species in the straight press: straight news articles, "readers," and op-ed pieces.

Because the reading public is assumed to be disinclined to think for itself, articles which appear in Western- and particularly American -publications are divided up into these rigid categories so that the reader knows where to look if he is seeking opinion, entertaining copy, or pure information, and, more importantly, where not to look if he wants to avoid any of those things. For this reason, informational "straight news" pieces must never display characteristics of opinion pieces, entertaining "readers" must never break news, and so on. These rules of engagement were drawn up ages ago, in the Hearst era, and editors have been expecting, and getting, strict adherence to them ever since.

The human urge toward critical and creative writing has been so adulterated in "straight news" pieces over the years that it's a wonder any reporter would sign his name to one, just as it would have been strange if I had signed my bricks. Yet wire-service soldiers like Timothy Heritage of Reuters and Dave Carpenter of the Associated Press are still routinely asked to accept the humiliation of having their bylines stuck on the robotized, formulaic pieces their grim editorial masters force them to lay on the public.

To get a better picture of how much of straight news pieces are based on formulae and how little of them are borne of the reporter's own initiative, let's look at one closely. A very typical example of the genre is Timothy Heritage's recent piece entitled "Russia basks in the glory of rare diplomatic success":

"MOSCOW, Nov 21 (Reuters) - Russia basked on Friday in the glory of staging a rare diplomatic coup on the world stage by negotiating a way out of the crisis between the United Nations and Iraq."

Heritage in his first sentence answered the only three questions that matter in the world of straight news lead etiquette. They are:

What is the date? Heritage: "on Friday..." Check.

What, in one sentence, happened? Heritage: "Russia...negotiating a way out of the crisis between the United Nations and Iraq." No second sentence here. Check.

Why does Reuters, and not the reporter himself, consider this newsworthy? Because, as Heritage writes, it is a "rare diplomatic coup." Check, Next graph.

One should never forget that wire articles, like any other product, are items that have to be sold to its buying audience, and that the first sentence always contains the pitch. That pitch might be a "scandal that imperils the reform effort," a "series of crimes that has shocked the small southern Russian city of Rostov," or a "story that has warmed the hearts of people-and elephants- all across Southeast Asia," but it has to be there.

"Rare diplomatic coup" is a phrase that does the job, since it might have been written by the hundred thousand or so other reporters in this last century who were ably taught to have faith in hackneyed semi-alarmist language as the source of the most surefire and profitable pitches of all.

When you have all of these things to worry about in one sentence alone, things like writing style and individual commentary go out the window. Therefore you get sentences like "Russia basked in the glory of staging a rare diplomatic coup" when you could have had "Russia basked in the glory of a rare diplomatic coup." And when he gets down to the business of analyzing what happened, Heritage's editors quickly crack the whip and start him dragging a drozhky full of borrowed opinions:

"Russian media, used to lamenting Moscow's weakness in international diplomacy since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, for once praised foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov for his mediation.

"But some newspapers cautioned that the crisis over U.N. arms inspectors could still turn nasty and analysts said Moscow would remain far short of the influence it had in Soviet times."

Those last two graphs are classic J-school language in another sense: they provide "balance." No assertion can be made without a counter-assertion. That's why nearly every straight-news piece contains at least one and usually two paragraphs that begin with "but."

The "balance," however, is usually a sleight-of-hand trick, like a magician forcing a card. He holds out two hands, but one a little more prominently. The well-trained reader knows that the post-"but" assertion weighs a little more in a straight news article than the pre-"but" one. In this piece, the disturbing and very real news that Russia had actually shown up the west in the international diplomatic arena is successfully qualified by a reference to invisible "analysts," who in the end reassure Reuters readers with the purely argumentative and untenable yet soothing future scenario of a Russia unable to regain its former influence.

For some reason the latter is given as much play as the former in the Heritage article. Editors would call that balance, but it might just as easily be called stroking your customers. Either way, this is a formula at work, not a human being called "Timothy Heritage."

In fact, the only statements Heritage makes without referring directly to analysts are a pair of background sentences in the middle of the piece: "Ending the sanctions would clear the way for Iraq to start repaying Moscow billions of dollars in Soviet-era debts.

"Russia has shown signs of envying the U.S. role as the only superpower. Washington remains vital to Moscow's foreign policy but Russia has seemed keen to diminish U.S. influence over Europe and is developing ties with the Far East and Middle East."

Hardly very daring stuff. And in the entire piece there is only one-count'em, one qualititative judgement that Heritage makes on his own. And he even screws that up. It comes in paragraph 11, when he describes the newspaper Izvestia as "influential":

" 'Geneva is our little triumph. More exactly, it is Primakov's triumph,' the influential Izvestia newspaper said."

Izvestia as an independent press organ is not influential, since it doesn't exist as an independent press organ. What it is is the mouthpiece of the powerful Oneximbank, which really is influential. Calling "Izvestia" influential is akin to calling a gun homicidal. It deflects attention from the operator.

As far as straight-news writing goes, Heritage did all of the right things. In the interests of not scaring off dumb readers, he didn't write any paragraph longer than two sentences, with more than 75% containing just one. He made his pitch, upheld the illusion of "balance," and successfully avoided providing anything resembling either a narrative personality or his own opinion. Most importantly, he was willing to attach his name to the series of tired fill-in-the-blank phrases and systematic constructions that made up the entire article, allowing Reuters to leave readers with the impression that its articles are written by flesh-and-blood people, not automatons bending to a formulaic will.

Why did he do it? For the same reason he used the word "influential"-he wants more leeway, more than one word, anyway, to use adjectives without outside interference.

Would that make him feel better? We'll see what he has to look forward to when we look at "readers" in the next issue of the eXile.