Issue #26/51, November 5 - 18, 1998  

by Abram Kalashnikov

They've lost just about everything lately, but one thing that Russians have gained since the August crash is stealth. Now that they can't afford to buy anything the West is selling, Westerners, and particularly Americans, are having trouble seeing them. Their photographic images are becoming hazy. Soon they will completely disappear. Then they'll have room to move, and presumably redeploy their forces. The New York Times Magazine reported this past weekend that the number of foreign news reports broadcast by NBC-TV dropped from 1,013 in 1988 to 327 in 1996. This is a trend in most network television programming. All of the Moscow bureaus have cut back. Some (two of the big three, to be exact) have already cut their staffs to such an extent that their permanent correspondents have left, replaced by on-air people who fly in on a rotating basis.

The reasons for this are varied, but chief among them is that Westerners are entering a new age of unrepentant stupidity and isolationism. If the collapse of communism ushered in the End of History, the collapse of the world's emerging markets this year has brought about the End of Thought. Perestroika-era Americans thought they'd conquered evil; Americans at the millennium just don't want to see any of it. They've got their eyes, ears and mouths covered up, with one lone cable sneaking through to pump Jerry Springer, WNBA games and NASDAQ quotes straight into their cerebral cortexes.

New York Times Foreign Affairs managing editor Fareed Zakaria, in a decidedly un-Timesian display of accusatory spleen, laid the blame on the self-obsessed xenophobia of his own readers for the abrupt bottoming out of post-cold war euphoria that was marked this past summer by the failure of Russian reform:

"It is difficult to mark the end of an era with precision, but just as Russia's embrace of the Western model ushered in the beginning of a new age in world affairs, so the collapse of Russian reform this past July heralded its end... It remains difficult to see on the horizon a worldwide depression or a large-scale war, but gone is the expectation that the post cold-war world was inexorably evolving into something new and better... [It] is not the world that has given up on America but America that has given up on the world. Historians will surely look back on this decade and be struck that at America's moment of greatest global triumph-when all the world looked to Washington for leadership-in the midst of an almost-unprecedented economic boom, Americans became uncharacteristically small-minded in their ambitions."

As is often the case with Times writers, however (the last Press Review noted the same thing), the righteous-sounding Zakaria fell just short of making a real point in his piece. The Times has earned its reputation as an "intellectual" paper mainly through its occasional willingness to make the mildly probing but completely obvious observation in print. It can do so because its chief local competition, the New York Post, only counters with items in its news section like this one about a dog owned by star couple Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke:

UMA: Shaved Pooch
[Thurman and Hawke] are loving their new Greenwich Village home. But their pet chow has had a hard time of it. The pedigree pooch came down with a case of fleas recently that was so bad, the star couple had to have it shaved.

Ever since the eXile started publishing a Press Review, victimized reporters have complained that they're not really guilty of any of the things we accuse them of, mainly because editors and producers back home won't run any story worth reading. Like Zakaria, they ultimately blame the American public, whose responses to marketing surveys and Nielsen ratings fuel the assignment decisions editors make, for being too "small-minded" to digest anything but rah-rah softball stories in 500 words or less. But the truth is that the small-mindedness of Western audiences is the result of a systematic problem whose sudden preponderance journalists like Zakaria were very much complicit in bringing about. It's a chicken-and-egg question.

Audiences are too stupid to read the news. But they're also stupid BECAUSE they read the news. Editorial content is moving sharply downward for the same reason reform in Russia collapsed. When foreign policy was left to the market, Russia was left with an ideologically bankrupt government that met with full international approval as long as its financial indicators looked good. Soon, however, the complete absence of civic values or industry made Russia's five years or so of stable currency and low inflation seem like pretty meager accomplishments. The market doesn't build nations alone. It needs a little common sense to make things work.

The press is the same way. Left to the mercy of the market, every paper in America will have 100 pages of daily shaved-dog updates by the millennium. Readers don't want to work hard any more than they want to get up out of bed in the morning. If you don't make them work, they won't. Reporters can complain about editors all they want, but the truth is that the news doesn't come out without reporters. Don't like the garbage your boss is assigning? Tired of writing fluff pieces in a desperate attempt to get your Russia story in print? Well, then, don't. You can quit. There's always McDonald's. That's the chief difference between the West and old Soviet Russia. Because in all other aspects, the system isn't much different. Probably 90% of Soviet reporters hated writing propaganda pieces for the party and lies about capitalism, but, cowards that most of them were, they didn't refuse the work, and in so doing kept the system going for over seventy years.

When you, the hack, write down to your audience, you're doing the same thing. You're making the world stupider, making it harder and harder for real debate to appear in print, allowing the system of stupefecation to proliferate.

So if you're a hack weighed down by his post-collapse prospects, please don't complain that no one cares about Russia, or that everyone is "small-minded", or give any other excuses, for that matter. If you can't work they way you like, it's your fault as much as anyone else's. And don't ever forget it.