#34 | March 26 - 31, 1998  

By Abram Kalashnikov

I once saw a book in the self-help section of an Amercan bookstore entitled "Bloom Where You're Planted." As the title suggests, the author's goal was to convince people to stop looking for new solutions to problems in their lives, and to learn to be content with what they had. In essence, it was a 400-page way of saying, "Look on the bright side!"

I left that bookstore feeling sorry for whoever the poor sucker was who was destined to pay $14.95 for that kind of advice. You might as well have handed him a hard-boiled egg and a handwritten note reading, "Suck on this!"

You can open any one of a dozen major American newspapers almost every day lately and have those hardboiled eggs spill out all over the place. That's because rather than ask their readers to take an active interest in their own affairs, newspaper reporters-particularly those covering foreign countries-prefer to give their audiences hermetically-sealed portraits of a world where the things they can change are in perfect working order, and things that are going wrong are out of their hands.

For years now, news hacks have been turning Russia into a goose that will keep laying that pirite egg. Last week the goose worked overtime. A good example was a piece by Thomas Lippman of the Washington Post, who wrote about the accomplishments of the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission. Lippman leads his piece as follows:

"When Vice President Gore took on the task of 'reinventing government,' he probably wasn't thinking of the Russian government as well as his own. "But today his files include entries on labeling Russian foods, developing the oil fields of the Russian far east, testing Russian children for lead in their blood, mapping the Russian Arctic..."

Excepting a later reference to the tax code, Lippman's list of inocuous back-page initiatives would seem to be standard resume-building fare for a sitting Vice President with an eye out toward a presidential campaign. Lippman, though, intends to make it out to be more than that:

"It has put Gore in a unique position for a vice president, as virtual day-to-day manager of one of this country's most important and difficult international relationships."

This passage would seem to open Gore up to a lot of criticism, considering the rapidly-accumulating pile of hot-button issues-- NATO expansion, the failures of reform, Russia's powerlessness in the U.S-dominated global economy-which have caused antipathy toward the U.S. to rise dramatically among Russians in recent years. But Lippman lets the "thousands of jobs" created in some sattelite project Ivan Q. Voter has certainly never heard of act as a lone "yea" vote on the Gore-Cherno commision from the Russian side. The only difficult issues Lippman goes on to raise are quarrels the U.S. has with Russia-distress over the Russian religion law, complaints about Chechnya, and so on. There is no hint anywhere that Russia is in any way dissatisfied with U.S. policy.

The Washington Post reader gets nothing out of an article like this. It tells him nothing about Russia, outside of the highlights of a few showpiece projects spoon-fed to Lippman by Gore's press service. It also measures Gore's performance solely on the basis of interviews with his allies, leaving the reader to conclude that, hey, everything is okay. The only thought or action the piece invites the reader to is support of a Gore candidacy and support of the U.S. in its campaign to change the Russian religion law. Which is just another way of saying "Bloom where you're planted."

Articles like the Lippman piece aren't directlyinaccurate. They're just irrelevant. Space in the Washington Post is valuable, and to waste it on a vapid piece of saccharine pre-election p.r. when there are so many real Russia stories out there, ones that could even be addressed via the Gore-Chernomyrdin angle, just demonstrates how uninterested the press really is in informing its readers.

Newspapers often give readers an egg full of dreary foreign news as a means of helping them forget how bad things are at home. A good example was a Reuters piece that ran last week entitled "Russian Doctors Set Aside Pride to Learn in the U.S.." The article described a program under which a group of Russian doctors took an all-expenses paid trip overseas to tell the world how much worse things are in America than in New Jersey. Reuters hack Daniel Bases writes:

"Russia's nascent insurance industry...forces most patients to buy their own needed drugs and sterile supplies before they even walk into a hospital for care...While some private hospitals that cater to the rich have achieved Western standards, they are a minuscule minority."

Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that, prior to reforms funded by the West, Russia had universal health care-maybe not the highest quality care, but universal all the same. Bases was also careful to avoid the obvious phone call that would have muddied his rhetorical line. In this case, he could have checked Rand corporation data showing that there are 40 million people without health insurance in the United States, and that that number is growing by 1 million every year. That same data shows that 35-40% of autopsies in America show misdiagnoses of the deceased.

Which is neither here nor there-unless you want to write a story about how great American health care is compared to Russia's. Then it becomes relevant, and a reporter who wanted to provoke his reader to think would include it to shed some light on his own life. But again, like the Lippman piece, the Reuters article doesn't aim to be provocative. It just gives another banal presentation of good news at home and bad news abroad, giving the reader one more reason to root for the home team.

This is the "Bloom where you're planted" pitch all over again. Only in this case, considering the autopsy bit, it's a pitch with a bit more sinister angle.