#37 | April 23 - May 6, 1998  

By Abram Kalashnikov

Here's a handy tip for anyone who reads the news. When attempting to gauge the level of stupidity of your average journalist, guess as honestly as you can, then place him somewhere in the area of about 30% stupider than you thought. Usually, you come out just about right.

Most people, even the dumber ones, won't buy anything on the basis of a sales pitch alone. A car salesman might go on about the mileage in his company's new midsize, but you rely on your mechanic to tell you that that model has a shitty transmission. That's because you know that anyone who stands to make $19,000 is likely to lie at least a little bit if it will make you write that check faster.

Journalists are different. They'll buy anything you stick under their noses. You can sell a journalist water in a bottle. Hard as it is to believe, many journalists think it is their job to report the things people tell them, even if those things are patently ridiculous. They're like bad shoppers under the influence of a weepy sales pitch. They feel guilty if they don't buy, i.e., write things up the way their interview subjects want.

Take Adam Tanner of Reuters. Last month he did something that few Western reporters in this city have had the opportunity to do: he visited a Russian prison. A year before, state penal authorities had told him that if he wanted to see a Russian jail, he should commit a crime. Now, suddenly, in the waning days of the Chernomyrdin era, he was granted permission to visit Medyn prison in Moscow oblast.

So he went on down to Medyn, and came away with the following lead:
"MEDYN, Russia, March 27 (Reuters)-Murderer and thief Viktor Kolganov, sitting on a bunk bed in the room he shares with about 40 other men, says life in Russian prisons is no longer the brutal ordeal of Soviet times.
"'Conditions are day and night compared to what they were,'' said Kolganov, who served 11 years for murder in the 1980s and returned to jail last year after a robbery conviction.
"'It used to be hard back then. In the pre-trial detention centres, they used to feed us just once a day. Now everyone eats three times daily.''"

Leaving aside the obvious problem of an interview subject who serves 11 years in a ten-year span, Tanner's lead begs a lot of questions.

Okay, so Tanner gets to the first prisoner allowed by authorities to speak with a Western reporter after a multi-year all-Russia embargo on prison press coverage. This prisoner lives in a place where most inmates would be willing to sell out their own mothers if you offered them an extra bowl of oatmeal for a week or so, or maybe just for the privilege of not being beaten or raped for a few days.

So when this same prisoner finally gives an interview, it turns out, oddly enough, that he doesn't have anything bad to say.

Well...Quelle fucking surprise! Who did Tanner think the warden was going to give him to interview, Malcom X? No, of course not. He's going to get a plant, which makes leading a "Russian Prisons Aren't As Bad As You Think" story on a testimonial about as dumb as it gets, as far as print journalism goes.

On the other hand, Tanner might very well know exactly what he's doing, which would be worse. He might know his interview subject is a patsy and write that cozy lead anyway, simply because he knows he won't get access to a Russian jail ever again unless he gives the Medyn warden the spin he wants. Bureaucrats in this country often demand veto power over coverage before they consent to an interview, and even when they don't overtly demand the right of first refusal, reporters know they can't keep that phone number warm if they don't airbrush their interview subjects like street portrait artists.

Either way, you get a skewed view of life in Russia's jails. About the only conclusion one can sensibly reach from Tanner's piece is that Reuters believes that conditions in Russian jails are improving simply because Reuters was allowed to see them. As Tanner writes:
"By allowing Reuters to visit the facility, police authorities showed a greater openness about prison conditions. Just last year, an Interior Ministry official told a reporter he could visit a prison-if he committed a crime."

The reason Tanner's piece is worth dissecting is that the question of access to stories is a critical one for Western reporters in Russia. This is a country where it is notoriously difficult to get near people in power, and like cities willing to lower or eliminate taxes to attract factory-building corporations, reporters are often willing to lower their standards to get to see the things they want to see.

As a result, you get a lot of pieces that are suspiciously puffy. For instance, you don't often see a wire-service reporter assigned to the Presidential press corps talking about how Boris Yeltsin has looked like a walking corpse the last few months. Instead, you get the "tanned, rested, and ready" spiel as often as possible-meaning every time Yeltsin speaks in complete sentences without the aid of massive steroid injections. A pass into the presidential entourage is a legendarily easy thing to have revoked, and you can see it in the way reporters cover Russian leaders [or leaders almost anywhere in the world, for that matter].

Gareth Jones of Reuters filed a standard Presidential p.r. story from Japan this past week:
"KAWANA, Japan, April 19 (Reuters)-Boris Yeltsin, written off by many of his compatriots as too old, erratic, and out of touch to lead Russia much longer, showed this weekend in Japan that he is still a powerful force to be reckoned with.
"Looking relaxed and healthy, the 67-year-old president clearly enjoyed his two days of talks with Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto at the luxury Kawana seaside resort, where he also found time to fish, energetically play traditional Japanese drums, and kiss a young bride."

Now, it is true that Yeltsin did, in fact, look better in Japan this past weekend than he has in recent months, when he has, among other things, been caught failing to distinguish the sun from the moon. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean that reporters are obligated to tell the world that Yeltsin is a force to be reckoned with again. Why give a zombified ex-Politburo member free p.r. just because he asks you to?

When Presidents bang on drums, or play soccer with Pele (a la Bill Clinton), or drive huge speedboats, they're asking reporters to help them squeeze more mileage out of the already hugely advantageous political position incumbency gives them. Remember, few Western journalists work for state press organs, which means that in addition to holding actual political power, politicians get free advertising from private corporations whenever independent journalists tag along for staged photo ops.

I remember once attending a Yeltsin press conference where a bunch of American journalists shouted "Norrrrmm!" when the punch-drunk Yeltsin entered the room. That incident didn't get reported, but the ceremonial handshake (it was a reception of an African leader, if I remember correctly) was massively photographed, and the lame "witty" exchange between the two men was reprinted as a true impromptu dialogue. The former incident was funnier and would have told Americans more about Yeltsin than anything else that happened that day, but it didn't get in print anywhere because Western protocol dictates that extraneous details-even the ones that perfectly illustrate the scene-should not be allowed to interfere with the staged photo op.

Few foreign journalists seem to understand the central problem of access in reporting. It's pretty simple: if you can't get into the prison without quoting patsies, don't go into the prison. If you can't keep your Presidential accreditation without providing free p.r. for a half-dead autocrat, give up your accreditation. That's what being an independent journalist is all about. You set your own terms. Unless, of course, you're not really all that independent...