Apologetic laments, ex-fashionable leftist pro-Putinista ramblings or the "opinion malpractice"; distorting the truth, one article at a time:
How the American media misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine.
19 February 2014 | Issue 5313
By Stephen F. Cohen
M.N.: Opinions are just the opinions, Stephen F. Cohen (not to be confused with completely different and, in a way "antithetical" person, Ariel Cohen), be they yours, mine or anyone's else. They do not pretend to be scientific truths, they are "what you see is what you get". The pluralistic and free chorus of opinions, even if somewhat noisy and disparate, is good for us. Apparently you do not like that your opinions, just like other pro-Putinistas (I do not know how "objective", balanced, true and "independent") are in minority.
I would offer you a different angle: why don't you look into Russian attempts: massive, determined and deliberate, in my opinion, to use the "soft power" and to influence Western public opinion and mass media, which I think you are a part of. They try to do this with all means at their disposal: from RT half-truths and propaganda to "free" cultural trips, etc., etc.
Do not you see the real danger there?
Do not you see where it might lead to?
Viktor Shenderovich is well known as a writer, playwright and acerbic but witty critic of the current political regime. Shenderovich is also a big sports fan. In an article published on Ej.ru on Feb. 10, he wrote about how hard it was for him to combine joy over the victories of Russian athletes in the Olympic Games with disgust over the propaganda show created by the official Russian mass media, especially state television. Shenderovich wrote that when the Olympic Games are held in countries with authoritarian regimes, they contribute to a better image of the regime and therefore ultimately do a disservice to the people in those countries.
A reference to the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany immediately brought down a firestorm of official indignation. The very next day in a speech to the State Duma, Vladimir Vasilyev, a high-ranking United Russia deputy, called Shenderovich's text "fascist" and demanded an apology. Another deputy, former speed skater Svetlana Zhurova, declared that Shenderovich's article "fit right in with the campaign against the Olympics being run throughout the Western mass media."
It might seem strange that an article by an independent writer published on the Internet became the subject of a discussion in the Duma. But even stranger was the reaction of the state television channels that Shenderovich criticized. The channel Rossia-24 began its evening news broadcast with a bizarre, seven-minute piece mostly consisting of secretly shot footage of a naked Shenderovich in an intimate encounter.
Meanwhile, the Russian PEN center defended Shenderovich and warned the authorities that "silencing freedom of speech might release the darkest instincts in the public." This dire prediction seemed to immediately come true. On the next day, Shenderovich began to get anonymous threatening text messages calling him a "kike."
The smear campaign against Shenderovich might have been written off as an isolated episode if it were not for a whole series of official pronouncements against writers in recent weeks. On Jan. 31 in an interview to Ekho Moskvy radio, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky called a book about the World War II siege of Leningrad by one of the country's oldest and most respected writers, Daniil Granin, a "pack of lies." The minister was outraged by evidence that the city's party elite did not starve during the siege but, on the contrary, ate delicacies that were inaccessible to average Soviet citizens, even during peace time.
Writer and anthropologist Vera Timenchik was questioned by the Investigative Committee about her book, "Family Here and Abroad." The book stated that "homosexuality is rather widespread across cultures" and that there are single-sex families in other countries. These indisputable facts are being analyzed to see if they are "homosexual propaganda."
Interestingly, none of these "outrageous" texts are new. Timenchik's book was published five years ago, and Granin's descriptions have been known to historians for years. The official reaction is part of a new trend. The Kremlin wants to replace open discussion of the country's current problems and dark aspects of its history with its own "true" version that cannot be challenged.
These attempts to bring back the Soviet standard of a single state ideology are worrying more than writers. They prompted film director Alexander Sokurov to write a letter to President Vladimir Putinprotesting the official campaign to institute groupthink. "Once again, my homeland is in the trenches. Once again there are curses, frontline skirmishes and vicious speeches," he wrote. "Once again energy is being wasted on a battle instead of being spent on creativity. And once again, that battle is against an internal enemy. Watching political programs on the nationwide television channels fills viewers with despair. Officials call for people to be burned, discriminated against, exiled and killed. Being different is officially deemed a crime."
As Sokurov correctly notes, this ideological gap is reflected in a generation gap. People born and raised in the post-Soviet period reject the ideals of empire, the Kremlin's "traditional values" and officially irrefutable "truths." Attempts to foist these notions on them will simply start a fight with the most valuable asset of the nation: its young people.
It is not clear if Putin will understand Sokurov's concern. But judging by the events in Ukraine, it is clear what happens when the front lines are inside the country.
Victor Davidoff is a Moscow-based writer and journalist who follows the Russian blogosphere in his biweekly column.
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After the rule of Augustus, Rome developed an imperial cult in which emperors were declared gods, and shrines were built to venerate them. Some religious and nationalist authorities declare that Russia, the heir to Byzantium, is the Third Rome. It's no surprise that it, too, has developed a version of the imperial cult — albeit a strange variation of it.
Only Vladimir Lenin has been deified, and even though the state he founded no longer exists and his role in Russian history has been revised from highly positive to highly negative, his mausoleum still stands on the Red Square, and considerable state resources are devoted to keep his mummy going.
But rulers who came after Lenin, while often worshipped during their lifetime, were maligned once they died or lost power. True, over the past 100 years the country's political establishment tried to fight the tendency to deify the leader. Nikita Khrushchev inveighed against Stalin's personality cult, but then he built his own. He was overthrown in coup that proclaimed a new era of collective leadership, but a decade later Leonid Brezhnev emerged as an official deity, showered with accolades and awarded dozens of medals.
Soviet and Russian leaders have tended to stamp their personalities on the entire country. Khrushchev was bumbling, energetic and a bit naive. This is how I remember the Soviet Union of the early 1960s and how it comes through in literature and on film. Brezhnev's dotage colored the Soviet Union of the 1970s and the 1980s, making it flaccid, self-absorbed and senile.
The same tendency continued in the post-Soviet era. Former President Boris Yeltsin was a lush, and throughout the 1990s the country drank heavily, with alcohol of varying quality available around the clock and on every corner.
There is no question that Putin has shaped the mood of the nation. Dmitry Medvedev was timid, ineffectual and had no real power as president from 2008 to 2012, but he introduced a more gentle tone. Since Putin's return, however, there has been more divisiveness in society, and public debate turned harsher, meaner and more vindictive.
It doesn't have to be all bad. Russia would do well to emulate Putin's obsession with staying young and healthy, concern with personal safety and a lifestyle that is free of tobacco and alcohol. Unfortunately, Putin's love of sports has translated only into a preponderance of athletes in the State Duma and the splurge of the Sochi Olympics.
The Winter Games, in particular, are Putin's personal vanity project and the veritable triumph of one man's will. For better or worse, he conceived it, pushed it through the International Olympic Committee and got a massive winter sports complex and tourist infrastructure built in the subtropics. The Western media rightly termed it Putin's Games. He is all over the place, visiting Russian and foreign athletes and making frequent appearances at competitions.
Many people have said that the Sochi Olympics is Putin's legacy, the monument he is going to leave to the future generation of Russians. This is only partly true. He is now ready to embark on an even more ambitious project with a wider geographic and economic scope: the 2018 soccer World Cup.
During the Olympics, Putin's divine stature has been affirmed. Russian medal winners, sports officials and journalists have been mentioning him at every opportunity, effusively thanking him personally for creating a splendid festival. The years in the run-up to 2018 promise to be a true apotheosis of the Russian president.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, lives in New York. His detective novel "Murder at the Dacha" was published by Russian Life Books in 2013.
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CARACAS (Reuters) - Imprisoned protest leader Leopoldo Lopez urged supporters to keep fighting for the departure of Venezuela's socialist government, even as he was due in court on Wednesday accused of fomenting unrest that has killed at least four people.
The degradation of mainstream U.S. press coverage of Russia, a country still vital to U.S. national security, has been underway for many years. If the recent tsunami of shamefully unprofessional and politically inflammatory articles in leading newspapers and magazines — particularly about the Sochi Olympics, Ukraine and, unfailingly, President Vladimir Putin — is an indication, this media malpractice is now pervasive and the new norm.
There are notable exceptions, but a general pattern has developed. Even in the venerable New York Times and Washington Post, news reports, editorials and commentaries no longer adhere rigorously to traditional journalistic standards, often failing to provide essential facts and context; to make a clear distinction between reporting and analysis; to require at least two different political or "expert" views on major developments; or to publish opposing opinions on their op-ed pages. As a result, U.S. media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.
The history of this degradation is also clear. It began in the early 1990s, following the end of the Soviet Union, when the U.S. media adopted Washington's narrative that almost everything PresidentBoris Yeltsin did was a "transition from communism to democracy" and thus in the U.S.' best interests. This included his economic "shock therapy" and oligarchic looting of essential state assets, which destroyed tens of millions of Russian lives; armed destruction of a popularly elected parliament and imposition of a "presidential" constitution, which dealt a crippling blow to democratization and now empowers Putin; brutal war in tiny Chechnya, which gave rise to terrorists in Russia's North Caucasus; rigging of his own re-election in 1996; and leaving behind, in 1999, his approval ratings in single digits, a disintegrating country laden with weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, most U.S. journalists still give the impression that Yeltsin was an ideal Russian leader.
Since the early 2000s, the media have followed a different leader-centric narrative, also consistent with U.S. policy, that devalues multifaceted analysis for a relentless demonization of Putin, with little regard for facts. Was any Soviet Communist leader after Stalin ever so personally villainized? If Russia under Yeltsin was presented as having legitimate politics and national interests, we are now made to believe that Putin's Russia has none at all, at home or abroad — even on its own borders, as in Ukraine.
Russia today has serious problems and many repugnant Kremlin policies. But anyone relying on mainstream American media will not find there any of their origins or influences in Yeltsin's Russia or in provocative U.S. policies since the 1990s — only in the "autocrat" Putin who, however authoritarian, in reality lacks such power. Nor is he credited with stabilizing a disintegrating nuclear-armed country, assisting U.S. security pursuits from Afghanistan and Syria to Iran or even with granting amnesty, in December, to more than 1,000 jailed prisoners, including mothers of young children.
Not surprisingly, in January, The Wall Street Journal featured the widely discredited former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, branding Putin's government as one of "deceit, violence and cynicism," with the Kremlin a "nerve center of the troubles that bedevil the West." But wanton Putin-bashing is also the dominant narrative in centrist, liberal and progressive media, from the Post, Times and The New Republic to CNN, MSNBC and HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher," where Howard Dean, not previously known for his Russia expertise, recently declared, to the panel's approval, "Vladimir Putin is a thug."
The media therefore eagerly await Putin's downfall due to his "failing economy" — some of its indicators are better than U.S. ones — the valor of street protesters and other right-minded oppositionists, whose policies are rarely examined, the defection of his electorate — his approval ratings remain around 65 percent — or some welcomed "cataclysm." Evidently believing, as does the Times, for example, that democrats and a "much better future" will succeed Putin — not zealous ultranationalists growing in the streets and corridors of power, U.S. commentators remain indifferent to what the hoped-for "destabilization of his regime" might mean in the world's largest nuclear country.
Certainly, The New Republic's lead writer on Russia, Julia Ioffe, does not explore the question, or much else of real consequence, in her nearly 10,000-word Feb. 17 cover story. Ioffe's bannered theme is devoutly Putin-phobic: "He Crushed His Opposition and Has Nothing to Show for It But a Country That Is Falling Apart." Neither sweeping assertion is spelled out or documented. A compilation of chats with Russian-born Ioffe's disaffected, but seemingly not "crushed," Moscow acquaintances and titillating personal gossip long circulating on the Internet, the article seems better suited, apart from some factual errors, for the Russian tabloids, as does Ioffe's disdain for objectivity. Protest shouts of "Russia without Putin!" and "Putin is a thief!" were "one of the most exhilarating moments I'd ever experienced." So was tweeting "Putin's [expletive], y'all." Nor does she forget the hopeful mantra "cataclysm seems closer than ever now."
For weeks, this toxic coverage has focused on the Sochi Olympics and the deepening crisis in Ukraine. Even before the Games began, the Times declared the newly built complex a "Soviet-style dystopia" and warned in a headline, "Terrorism and Tension, Not Sports and Joy." On opening day, the paper found space for three anti-Putin articles and a lead editorial, a feat rivaled by the Post. Facts hardly mattered. Virtually every U.S. report insisted that a record $51 billion "squandered" by Putin on the Sochi Games proved they were "corrupt." But as Ben Aris of Business New Europe pointed out, as much as $44 billion may have been spent "to develop the infrastructure of the entire region," investment "the entire country needs."
Overall pre-Sochi coverage was even worse, exploiting the threat of terrorism so licentiously it seemed pornographic. The Post exemplified the media ethos. A sports columnist and an editorial page editor turned the Olympics into "a contest of wills" between the despised Putin's "thugocracy" and terrorist "insurgents." The "two warring parties" were so equated that readers might have wondered which to cheer for. If nothing else, U.S. journalists gave terrorists an early victory, tainting "Putin's Games" and frightening away many foreign spectators, including some relatives of the athletes.
The Sochi Games will soon pass, triumphantly or tragically, but the potentially fateful Ukrainian crisis will not. A new Cold War divide between the West and East may now be unfolding, not in Berlin but in the heart of Russia's historical civilization. The result could be a permanent confrontation fraught with instability and the threat of a hot war far worse than the one in Georgia in 2008. These dangers have been all but ignored in highly selective, partisan and inflammatory U.S. media accounts, which portray the European Union's "partnership" proposal benignly as Ukraine's chance for democracy, prosperity and escape from Russia, thwarted only by a "bullying" Putin and his "cronies" in Kiev.
Not long ago, committed readers could count on The New York Review of Books for factually trustworthy alternative perspectives on important historical and contemporary subjects. But when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, the NYRB has succumbed to the general media mania. In a Jan. 21 blog post, Amy Knight, a regular contributor and inveterate Putin-basher, warned the U.S. government against cooperating with the Kremlin on Sochi security, even suggesting that Putin's secret services "might have had an interest in allowing or even facilitating such attacks" as killed or wounded dozens of Russians in Volgograd in December.
Knight's innuendo prefigured a purported report on Ukraine by Yale professor Timothy Snyder in the Feb. 20 issue. Omissions of facts, by journalists or scholars, are no less an untruth than misstatements of fact. Snyder's article was full of both, which are widespread in the popular media, but these are in the esteemed NYRB and by an acclaimed academic. Consider a few of Snyder's assertions:
• "On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship." In fact, the "paper" legislation he is referring to hardly constituted dictatorship, and in any event was soon repealed. Ukraine is in a state nearly the opposite of dictatorship — political chaos uncontrolled by President Viktor Yanukovych, the parliament, the police or any other government institution.
• "The [parliamentary] deputies … have all but voted themselves out of existence." Again, Snyder is alluding to the nullified "paper." Moreover, serious discussions have been underway in Kiev about reverting to provisions in the 2004 Constitution that would return substantial presidential powers to the legislature, hardly "the end of parliamentary checks on presidential power," as Snyder claims. Does he dislike the prospect of a compromise outcome?
• "Through remarkably large and peaceful public protests … Ukrainians have set a positive example for Europeans." This astonishing statement may have been true in November, but it now raises questions about the "example" Snyder is advocating. The occupation of government buildings in Kiev and in western Ukraine, the hurling of firebombs at police and other violent assaults on law enforcement officers and the proliferation of anti-Semitic slogans by a significant number of anti-Yanukovych protesters, all documented and even televised, are not an "example" most readers would recommend to Europeans or Americans. Nor are they tolerated, even if accompanied by episodes of police brutality, in any Western democracy.
• "Representatives of a minor group of the Ukrainian extreme right have taken credit for the violence." This obfuscation implies that apart perhaps from a "minor group," the "Ukrainian extreme right" is part of the positive "example" being set despite the fact that many of its representatives have expressed hatred for Europe's "anti-traditional" values, such as gay rights. Still more, Snyder continues, "something is fishy," strongly implying that the mob violence is actually being "done by russo-phone provocateurs" on behalf of "Yanukovych [or Putin]." As evidence, Snyder alludes to "reports" that the instigators "spoke Russian." But millions of Ukrainians on both sides of their incipient civil war speak Russian.
• Snyder reproduces yet another widespread media malpractice regarding Russia, the decline of editorial fact-checking. In a recent article in the International New York Times, he both inflates his assertions and tries to delete neo-fascist elements from his innocuous "Ukrainian extreme right." Again without any verified evidence, he warns of a Putin-backed "armed intervention" in Ukraine after the Olympics and characterizes reliable reports of "Nazis and anti-Semites" among street protesters as "Russian propaganda."
• Perhaps the largest untruth promoted by Snyder and most U.S. media is the claim that "Ukraine's future integration into Europe" is "yearned for throughout the country." But every informed observer knows — from Ukraine's history, geography, languages, religions, culture, recent politics and opinion surveys — that the country is deeply divided as to whether it should join Europe or remain close politically and economically to Russia. There is not one Ukraine or one "Ukrainian people" but at least two, generally situated in its western and eastern regions.
Such factual distortions point to two flagrant omissions by Snyder and other U.S. media accounts. The now exceedingly dangerous confrontation between the two Ukraines was not "ignited," as the Times claims, by Yanukovych's duplicitous negotiating — or by Putin — but by the EU's reckless ultimatum, in November, that the democratically elected president of a profoundly divided country choose between Europe and Russia. Putin's proposal for a tripartite arrangement, rarely if ever reported, was flatly rejected by U.S. and EU officials.
But the most crucial media omission is Moscow's reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West's ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO's eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a U.S.-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it — not Putin's December financial offer to save Ukraine's collapsing economy — is deceitful. The EU's "civilizational" proposal, for example, includes "security policy" provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO. Any doubts about the Obama administration's real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the U.S. ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the "leak" and on Nuland's verbal "gaffe" — "[expletive] the EU." But the essential revelation was that high-level U.S. officials were plotting to "midwife" a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president — that is, a coup.
Americans are left with a new edition of an old question. Has Washington's 20-year winner-take-all approach to post-Soviet Russia shaped this degraded news coverage, or is official policy shaped by the coverage? Did U.S. Senator John McCain stand in Kiev alongside the well-known leader of an extreme nationalist party because he was ill informed by the media, or have the media deleted this part of the story because of McCain's folly?
And what of Barack Obama's decision to send only a low-level delegation, including retired gay athletes, to Sochi? In August, Putin virtually saved Obama's presidency by persuading Syrian President Bashar Assad to eliminate his chemical weapons. Putin then helped to facilitate Obama's heralded opening to Iran. Should not Obama himself have gone to Sochi — either out of gratitude to Putin, or to stand with Russia's leader against international terrorists who have struck both of our countries? Did he not go because he was ensnared by his unwise Russia policies, or because the U.S. media misrepresented the varying reasons cited: the granting of asylum to Edward Snowden, differences on the Middle East, infringements on gay rights in Russia, and now Ukraine? Whatever the explanation, as Russian intellectuals say when faced with two bad alternatives, "Both are worst."
Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus at New York University and Princeton University, is contributing editor to The Nation, where this comment appears in its March 3, 2014, edition.
