#11 | July 5 - 16, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

What an easy life Russian reporters have. When they want to make a point, they can just go ahead and do it. Not so for Western journalists. When they have something to say, they have to find somebody else to say it for them. Inevitably the careful reader notices them crawling all over articles written by Western writers-hired analysts, "talking heads," quoted in newspapers, particularly in politics stories. These are professional mouthpieces who all have improbably long, regal-sounding names, and all work for organizations called "Centers" and "Institutes" that themselves sound like course titles in American liberal-arts colleges: the Center for Comparative Political Studies, the Institute for Ethnic Studies, etc.

News reporters refer to these people as experts in the know about political and cultural events, but in fact they have the same jobs as reporters themselves: to read the news and write reports on current events for academic and commercial clients. They have access to the same information reporters do, and usually don't know any more than reporters do.

Every "respectable" Western journalist quotes them, however, because the modern Hearstian Journalistic Ethic forbids reporters, particularly American reporters, from offering their own opinions in news stories. Instead, the great Law of Objectivity, which decrees that journalists must express their unavoidable natural bias in the dullest language possible, forces Western reporters, when they want to make a point, to find a talking head with a long-winded name and title to do their dirty work.

Such a system would work well if it weren't for our old pal human nature, who has been so useful over the years to Western observers, who constantly cited it as the reason our Russian communism couldn't possibly have worked. Turning the tables on them, human nature precludes their cherished "objectivity" in the following way; instead of calling other people to find out what their opinion on a certain political event is, Western journalists generally first decide what opinion they want to showcase, and then call analysts until they find the one who expresses it.

Therefore when your editor says, "We need someone to say that Russia's semi-inclusion into the G-7 is the first step to full inclusion"- a point any person who has matured past the toilet-training stage should have the confidence to make himself-you the Hearst-fearing American reporter must immediately flip through your phone list until... Oo-rah! You find, as Colin McMahon of the Chicago Tribune did last week, Alexander Konovalov of the "Institute for Strategic Assessments," who delivers with the following: "For me this is important as the start of a process-a first step, with a long way to go..."

Curious as it may seem, analysts are not always familiar with the stories they are quoted as commenting on. Often reporters desperate for a quote will call an analyst who hasn't read the news that day, explain the story to him over the phone, and then ask him for his opinion. Western journalists even call analysts on one continent to ask for a comment on a news story going on in another.

Konovalov, found by an American reporter in Moscow, was commenting on a story unfolding in Denver. That same week, a British reporter, Lynnley Browning of Reuters, found Catherine MacDougall, an analyst in London, to comment on a story unfolding in Moscow.

Sadly, in no place but America are people gullible enough to swallow boring watered-down opinion and believe that they're doing so in the name of Truth. British readers know the Daily Mail is going to color every story and every fact in favor of the conservative side; Russians know that every factual assertion in a Segodnya news story is only as reliable as the government which commissioned it. But Americans sincerely believe that the Chicago Tribune and papers like it are loyal to no one but Objectivity.

Unfortunately, when Western reporters veer from their policy of objectivity, it's usually only to dabble in sheer incompetence.

Case in point: Michael Binyon of the Times of London. In an "analysis" piece-a type of article in which Western reporters, instead of having no opinion, are allowed to have half of one, remaining limited by the third person voice-Binyon tried to compare Alexander Korzhakov's recent book blasting Boris Yeltsin to every assassination attempt in history. It was a reach to begin with, but Binyon, obviously desperate to return to the safety of "objective" reporting, pushed it to the point of absurdity:
"Korzhakov is hardly an impartial accuser. He is the classic assassin-a man bitter at the loss of power, resentful at being kept out...Russian history is full of such examples."

"Such examples" included Tsar Alexander I, who died in "suspicious circumstances," and Alexander II, who was assassinated by radicals. It also included Rasputin, Nicholas II, an assassination attempt against Lenin by one Fanya Kaplan, and an incident in which a soldier fired at Leonid Brezhnev. None of these incidents involved assassins who were in any way analogous to Korzhakov, and still fewer had written books, which is, after all, what Korzhakov had done.

Doubtless Binyon wished he'd found an analyst to make the following leap of logic for him: "Treachery and Assassination run like a leitmotif through the work of Dostoyevsky. But though the Russians may be given to plotting [Dostoyevsky=all Russians?-A.K.], they have no monopoly on assassination. Brutus killed Caesar, Caligula was killed by Cassius Chaerea..."

In less than two paragraphs we have moved from the publication of a mildly bitter book to the violent assassinations of ancient Rome.

Caligula in the Times scheme prompted references to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, which somehow recalled the denunciation of Margaret Thatcher by Geoffrey Howe, which led, finally, mercifully, back to Binyon's point:
"Korzhakov knows that the weapons of today are the TV camera and the word processor." Well, some word processors. Not the Times's, anyway.