#5
Subject: talking heads/correction
From: Matt Taibbi <taibbi@exile.ru>
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002
Dear David,
I'm sending on to you a Russia Journal piece I wrote about Russia experts. There is an editing mistake in the print version which I am anxious to correct and is corrected here. The quote at the end should be attributed to Stephen Cohen, not Ariel Cohen. I've never spoken to Ariel Cohen.
Matt
[DJ: Corrected excerpt. Full article in JRL 6138]
The Russia Journal
March 15-21, 2002
Opinion on Tap
The "Russia Experts": Who They Are, Who Pays Their Bills, and How They
Shape Russia Policy
By Matt Taibbi
This is the first in a series of articles by Matt Taibbi profiling the West's leading Russia policy "experts." ....
DO EXPERTS MATTER?
Opinion is divided over whether or not experts have a significant influence on policy. The division generally mirrors the division of opinion over the question of whether or not public opinion matters in the setting of policy.
Stephen Cohen, for instance, believes the opinions of experts only comes into play when there is a division of opinion among members of the policy- setting class.
"Except for Russia experts who become government officials, as several have over the years," he says, "they play a significant policy role only when the US political class is itself divided over Russia, and even then only in a limited way defined largely by others."
But one Moscow-based journalist I spoke to, who asked not to be named for this article, had a different take.
"If there is a reason why most Americans have believed that privatization and free-trade agreements are a good thing for Russia," he said, "it's because almost every expert they hear from in the news tells them that's the case. If you believe that experts don't matter, then what you're saying is that what the public thinks doesn't matter."
The example Cohen cites as an instance in which the policy-setting class was divided was the late 1980s, when Washington was divided over whether to take Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms at face value and work with him, or whether to take a harder line.
Cohen was a proponent of taking Gorbachev seriously, and there was political will in some circles in Washington behind a like-minded approach. Though he can't say that there was a direct connection, he notes that once he took that position, he was eagerly sought out by television talk shows and influential op-ed pages to promote his view.
Cohen's position on Vladimir Putin has been somewhat less enthusiastic. It may be a coincidence, but his phone has not exactly been ringing off the hook during Putin's presidency.
The Putin question, being more or less the only Russia issue Americans know enough to be interested in lately, has been the main focus of most expert analysis lately. But as we'll see, many experts have not exactly been consistent about Putin. But neither has our government. Whether or not the two phenomena have anything in common is a question worth looking into.
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