Issue #04/59, February 25 - March 10, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

One of the easiest ways to measure the cowardice of a Western journalist is his faithfulness to an insane concept known in the business as "the time peg".

Everything that appears in the news sections of major newspapers has to have, at least in theory, the so-called "Time Peg"--a public event or announcement which allows the newspaper to introduce a story and simultaneously insist that it happened not yesterday, not the day before, but today. Dog falls off building Thursday; expose on chronic problem of falling dogs appears Friday and not before. See the thing is, quality, thoroughness, even being right on a story--all these things are secondary in the news business. The important thing, when it comes to reporting in today's Western journalism world, is to be fast. Or, at least, not slower than the next guy.

The converse of this is that when a reporter, out of laziness, stupidity, or sheer inattention misses a story, he is left, on the following day, with a serious dilemma. Does he file the story a day late, thus admitting to his editors that he missed the story yesterday? Or does he simply ignore the story all over again--hoping it will go away, so that in the future, when asked, he can claim that leaving the story out the first time was a strict and well-informed editorial decision, and not an oversight.

Career-wise, ignoring the big story you missed the first time around seems to make sense. Most likely, everyone else missed it, too. Writing it up a day late, without a "time peg"--a new announcement, a new development, a new "thing" that happened that day (i.e. new casualties in a plane hostage crisis)--will only call attention to your deficiencies. So you turn your head as long as you can, hoping that some schmuck from the Daily Telegraph or the Philadelphia Inquirer doesn't bring down the whole house of cards and break the story in your home country, forcing you to get on the ball and admit you missed out on something big.

Most of the world didn't notice it, but virtually the entire Western Press corps in Moscow elected to take the career route a few weeks ago with a strange and ugly story called the "FIMACO" scandal, electing to turn their heads in the hopes that it would go away before their editors noticed they'd missed the thing. When it didn't, they each, in their own separate, reptilian ways, attempted to out the story in their own pages by attaching a false "time peg" to their first stories--implying that the story broke not a week before, but on the day they wrote it.

Even the eXile, in its last issue, which was published on February 10, had the wherewithal to put a little gag about Fimaco in its pages the first chance it got. Even more impressive-- as much as we hate to admit this-- the Geoff Winestock-less Moscow Times had been on top of the story for almost a week already by the time it came out in the eXile.

On the face of it, it was clearly, by any conceivable journalistic standards, a major story. A general prosecutor who is deposed outs a scheme in the government whereby some $50 billion dollars in state cash and hard currency reserves, including money loaned from the IMF, had been removed from Russia and deposited in a mysterious offshore British (Channel Islands)-based investment vehicle called "Fimaco".

It was a story that had a huge bearing on Russia's financial relationship with the West. If money was being hidden from international lending institutions, from private investors, and from just about everybody else who was owed money by the Russian state, and hidden not just anywhere but in some shady slush fund with a charter capital of $1000 and an absolutely incomprehensible semi-private status--hey, folks, that's a big, big story. I mean, that's a keeper, a real good eatin' fish. If you've been writing about little dips and rises in the dead Russian stock market, or reporting on the dreary and totally bogus economic plans forever being put forth by Russia's most recent openly corrupt government, then you damn well better not miss FIMACO, because this was the real deal. The Moscow Times, to its credit, got the story right. They stuck it on the front page from the moment deposed Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov made it an issue, and kept it there for two weeks. But what did the rest of the Moscow Press Corps do? Judge for yourself.

Reuters first picked up the story on Feb. 11th, a day after the eXile, six days after the Moscow Times, and a full ten days after Skuratov first outed the scheme in a letter to Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov. There was no mention of earlier movement on the story. Their "News Peg" was a "new" letter from Sergei Dubinin in response to Skuratov's charges. There was no mention of Skuratov--i.e. of what Dubinin was responding to-- in the Reuters piece. Reuters thus became the first major news service to stick a phony news peg on the FIMACO story.

On the following day, the Financial Times came out with a story that said that Dubinin's letter was the first confirmation of "suspicions that the Central Bank moved money offshore." This was not strictly true; first of all, Dubinin, as a former employee of the Central Bank who now works at GazProm, carried a lot less weight in his letter than Skuratov, who, up until the first of the month, had been the acting General Prosecutor of the entire country and was a far better, and more likely objective, source on the matter. The FT in its piece basically lied; they told the public the story was not important until February 11, while even the Moscow Times and eXile knew, from well-publicized sources, that the story had been out there in the open and just as important well before then.

On February 12, that same day, the Independent, again ignoring the earlier news peg and focusing on Dubinin's letter, wrote that the story was an "extraordinary saga" with the potential to be one of the "biggest scandals of the post-Soviet era." They, too, stuck a phony news peg on to cover their tracks.

On the same day, the Bloomberg news service reported first that "former and current Central Bank officials said as much as $1.4 b had legally (?) been given to [FIMACO]." This seriously underrepresented the extent of the story. Only secondarily did they report Skuratov's claims that $37 billion had been mishandled by the Central bank. They went on to downplay the story, quoting Mikhail Zadornov as saying "Central banks in many countries conduct these operations. It's really not worth being discussed publicly." One has to wonder whether that quote would have been in there if Bloomberg had covered the story from the start, and not had reason, in the fact of its tardiness, to downplay its importance.

On February 13th, the next day, the Associated Press put a shameless note of immediacy in its reports, leading off by saying that "Russia's banking community was shaken . . " by the Dubinin report. It did not say that Russia's banking community was shaken by the Skuratov revelations. It wouldn't really have mattered if that had gotten it right there, since to say anyone was shaken by the revelation in Russia's banking community is suspect, at most; few people really believe that anything will be done about the siphoning off of government funds offshore. Nonetheless, it wrote, "the mere existence of [FIMACO] has created a political uproar." An odd thing to write, since there had, to date, been no outraged statement from those parties most likely to be furious about the story--in particular the IMF and the World Bank, major creditors who could make a serious claim on the money. The better angle to take would have been the absence of an uproar, and the lack of press attention for the story in the West.

The thing about waiting around for a new news peg, like Dubinin's letter, is that it defeats the entire purpose of "speed" in news. If the emphasis on immediacy of coverage in this CNN era of ours has one putative purpose, it is to keep the public informed as quickly as possible--even if it means admitting that you missed a story a few days or even a week ago. Doing otherwise, the way these major press outlets did, is clear evidence of the pervasiveness of careerism as a deciding factor in the decision-making of editors and reporters around the world. Rather than look like fools in front of their bosses, they'll let you, the reader, stay in the dark.

Incidentally, this kind of thing doesn't happen so much at home; the commercial competition wbetween newspapers and television stations is so fierce there that the opportunity to scoop a rival paper almost never passes unnoticed. But in the clubby atmosphere of foreign journalism, where there are few bureaus that compete directly for the same audiences and where the journalists themselves often share the same office buildings and hang out at the same restaurants, a policy of deliberate restraint in the interests of protecting the careers of one's friends can easily be imagined. The even stranger thing is that-- I would think, anyway-- editors would tend to reward journalists who will admit they made a mistake in the interests of getting a good story out. Anyone who has the guts to see something big that no one else is reporting and put his weight behind it, and be right, is never going to hurt his career. If breaking big news stories in your assigned country is no longer the raison d'etre of foreign bureaus, then why have them at all? That's probably another story foreign journalists are praying their editors will miss.