#7
Moscow Times
March 19, 2002
Press Dialogue With the U.S. Ambassador
By Alexei Pankin

I look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading the newspapers, live and die in the belief they have known something of what has been passing in the world around them," said U.S. President Harry S. Truman after he had left office.

Why recall these words today? Here's why. Following the press in the past few days I have experienced a growing optimism about the state of U.S.-Russian relations. I was especially heartened by the steel knot that has been tied around the legs of U.S. chickens. For as long as I can remember controversies like this have been breaking out between the United States and its closest allies. They were symptoms of healthy relations and, by this logic, the first U.S. Russian mini-trade war indicates how far our partnership has come.

The press has also written much about our differences in the sphere of strategic interests. But if you ask me, once the "nuclear winter" effect was discovered in the early 1980s, nuclear arms ceased to be a matter of bilateral relations. Russia could just announce that, if provoked, it would detonate its nuclear arsenal right here at home. I doubt that anyone would care to call our bluff.

Simply put, all of these warheads and negotiations on slashing or expanding arsenals have become a purely domestic affair -- a way to keep diplomats busy, feed the military-industrial complex and help the press fill pages and airtime. I have begun to treat negotiations on disarmament as items on the society page. They may be boring or scandalous but never very serious.

Last Tuesday I was invited to a briefing with U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow. He called the briefing to address the U.S. Embassy's concern that the Russian press was painting too negative a picture of U.S.-Russian relations. And it was then that I recalled Harry Truman. I felt myself one of his "fellow citizens," and became rather uneasy. But the ambassador allayed my concerns, convincingly stating that President George W. Bush and his administration have not changed their policy on partnership with Russia. It should come as no surprise that chicken legs and warheads interested me far less than the Russian-American Media Entrepreneurs Dialogue that opened the same day. Leaders of the National Association of Broadcasters and the Newspaper Association of America had come to Moscow for the first phase of the dialogue.

I first asked the ambassador why the associations of U.S. broadcasters and newspaper publishers, who have no business interests in Russia, were taking part in the dialogue while the big advertisers like Procter & Gamble or Johnson & Johnson -- active players in the Russian media market -- were excluded. He said the dialogue was just getting started, and would require some fine-tuning.

I then asked why a dialogue between media managers was being overseen at the government level by the U.S. State Department and the Russian Press Ministry, neither of which has anything to do with entrepreneurship. He replied that the United States had no equivalent to the Press Ministry, and that when the dialogue was still on the drawing board the National Security Council and the Commerce Department both had their say. The main players in the dialogue should be professional organizations representing the mass media, he said.

Having reached this point in my account of the ambassador's briefing, I cast my mind's eye over our constantly bickering media organizations, led by the Union of Journalists of Russia. And I elected to stop right there.

Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda)