#24 - JRL 9021 - JRL Home
From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 05:47:59 EST
Subject: Re: Branko Milanovic, JRL 9018

Re: Branko Milanovic, Why are the American media, both liberal and conservative, so unanimously anti-Russian?, JRL 9018

Dear David,

Branko Milanovic has asked JRL readers to respond to an intriguing question: "why are the American media, both liberal and conservative, so unanimously anti-Russian?" He has offered a series of plausible hypotheses to comment on, so I'd like to take him up on the challenge.

However, first we need to be clear about the subject. Milanovic clarifies that he does not mean that reporters are all subjectively hostile to Russia, but that they are led into invariably anti-Russian positions by their premises. Most of the responses to him on JRL have ignored this, and treated it as a simpler question of pro-Russian or anti-Russian subjective attitudes on the part of reporters.

The question instead becomes one of the premises: "Why are the implicit assumptions apparently held by every major analyst and reporters of the most influential US papers, (1) that whatever problem at hand where there is some Russian involvement, it is the Russians who are guilty until proven the reverse, and (2) that the only Russian policy that is to be applauded is a policy that is supposed to serve the interests of other countries but (not) Russia."

That such premises are widely present would be hard to deny; any content analysis would confirm it, once one thought of looking for it. However, since the premises are unstated one can of course quibble over the words with which Mr. Milanovic makes them manifest.

One might also quibble over just how widespread they are. Certainly what appears on the editorial and op-ed pages of the Washington Post is scandalous in its insistent, irrational hostility toward Russia, as well as the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. Most of the American media are more moderate and try to show some consideration to Russia, out of respect both for national interests and for Russia's dramatic and peaceful changes from the days when it was our enemy. However, the assumptions to which Milanovic points remain rather pervasive, and serve to sabotage the good faith efforts that writers make at being fair.

This is not a matter of whether one thinks that Russia is right or wrong in particular matters. Rather, it is a matter of assumptions that in most cases exclude awareness of the very possibility that a Russian activity beyond its borders is ever benign or that a Russian interest is ever legitimate. Serious criticism of Russia requires greater discrimination; otherwise there is no reason for it to be paid any attention by Russia, nor by Western governments since they accurately perceive that it's important for their interests to get cooperation from Russia.

Criticism of the media's anti-Russian assumptions is also logically unrelated to whether one considers the media to be on the right or wrong side on a particular issue. On Ukraine it seems Milanovic and I both think Russia was on the wrong side and the media on the right side; yet I find the Western media's "campaign" on this subject to have been wrong in approach -- indeed, more similar to the Yanukovych campaign with its polarizing two-camp spirit than to Yushchenko's. Why did the media misrepresent its own proclaimed cause within Ukraine? We can add this question to the ones Milanovic posed.

And we can add Dmitri Glinski's question (JRL 9022) -- why is there the relentless highlighting of the negative about Russia? -- something that could be done to any country to make it look black, but generally isn't done to any other country. China gets ignored for the same and far worse faults. Why the "double standard", as Russians constantly ask in what has become an all-national complaint?

Now, regarding Milanovic proffered explanations: I think it's worth obliging his request for comment on them, rather than writing yet another general discourse. His explanations seem sufficiently on target as to offer a basis for building on. Here they are, with my comments:

"(1) For seventy years, commentators have been anti-Soviet and since obviously some of Russia's foreign policy stances will coincide with those of the USSR, their knee-jerk reaction to argue against these positions in the past carried over to the present day."

Inevitably this is a factor. Probably the main factor.

Soviet Russia was the enemy on a global scale; the West opposed it everywhere. It was an ideological war, where both sides had to try to delegitimize the other's position everywhere; so we tried to delegitimize its interests everywhere. Further: each side pinned the label of "imperialism" on any interest the other might pursue or influence it might exercise beyond its border. At the same time, each side tried to delegitimize the other domestically. The domestic delegitimization more or less ceased after Dec. 1991, although the universalist human rights and democracy ideology endured and grew even stronger, with potential for application to delegitimize any regime anywhere. But the damnation of any external Russian influence as "imperialist" continued as before. From this follows, by a strict if perverse logic, the unstated premises that Milanovic finds in the Western media: that Russia cannot have any valid interests beyond its borders but should only serve the interests of other countries and must bear the presumption of guilt in any dispute.

But if this is a Cold War outlook, why do young post-1991 journalists chime in? One would have to explain this by a kind of "milieu culture", where the assumptions of analysis were deeply embedded. In many newspapers and think tanks it was habitual to produce anti-Russian analysis and to dismiss anything else as dupery of Russian propaganda. For fifty years, it was seen as a matter of life and death for Western civilization to think this way; the culture was backed by a series of circular arguments to head off any attention to other thoughts. The circular reasoning continues to head off new thoughts. Newcomers can always be expected to want to fit in.

Occasionally I also perceive a sort of "Cold War envy" among young writers: they would have liked to have been heroes of the Cold War but it was over before they got the chance. Now they can have a surrogate Cold War heroism by attacking Russia. And it's a lot safer to attack Russia today than in Soviet times, when the "opponents of the Cold War" could be expected to counter-attack vigorously. After the fact, it seems clear that it was right to fight for the Western side of the Cold War. At the time, the choice was a lot more forlorn: an arguable one made within a dangerous nuclear standoff, and more likely to get oneself attacked than applauded in the mass media.

"(2) Russia is viewed as a defeated power, say like Germany and Japan in the late 1940 and the 1950s. Hence Americans are annoyed by Russia's truculence. In other words, Russia should accept that it lost the Cold War, behave like a defeated power and keep a very, very low profile. In other words, do not box out of your league."

Russians fear that this is a major factor in American thinking. I think it is a minor one. Most of the media and public -- and most government officials for that matter -- seem unaffected by this attitude. To be sure, for a geopolitical analyst like Brzezinski, Russia matters so much that he devotes a large portion of his writings to proving that it doesn't matter. But he is not representative; he is, after all, Polish as well as American in his geopolitics.

"(3) Russia is viewed as an ultimately conservative force... Since "progressive" no longer means socialist but pro-market and "pro-democracy" and since the latter is identified with being "pro-US", then Russia is by definition on the other side of the divide."

Yes, Russia is criticized as anti-democracy and anti-American; no, it is not criticized as anti-market. Just the opposite: there are plenty of people who are angry at Russia for having betrayed Communism and gone “capitalist�. Both Left and Right get to hate Russia nowadays on ideological grounds.

"(4) Russia is viewed as an anti-progressive and anti-Semitic force ­ again harking back to the 19th century imagery...

"(5) East European propaganda has been very effective perhaps because there was some truth in it (Communism was in most cases imposed by Soviet arms), or perhaps because it is a simple story (big guys oppress small guys), or perhaps because there is a lot of ignorance among the pundits. On the latter, I wonder how many journalists know that Rumanians and Hungarians in their thousands were fighting the Soviets together with the Nazi all the way to Stalingrad (and after); or that "the nice and helpless" East European countries often fought among themselves (Hungary and Poland each taking a slice of Czechoslovakia in Munich in 1938) so that territorial aggrandizement was hardly a Russian specialty."

Well spoken, evidently by one with roots in the former Yugoslavia, where the demonic side of some small Eastern European nationalisms was seen a lot more recently than 1938.

He might have added that the West is familiar with Polish suffering from Russian domination, and rightly so, but not with the earlier history of the reverse Russian suffering. This is pertinent to the present situation.

Russians remember well the Time of Troubles, with Polish interventions in Moscow, and still earlier periods of two-sided conflict. Lest we dismiss this as obsessing over ancient history, we should remember that Americans obsessed over Britain as the national enemy for a century after 1776 (some of them still do!), reconciling only in the 1890s and only half-way; Franklin Roosevelt treated the British Empire as an enemy even while embracing little England proper as an ally in the life-and-death battles of WWII; Eisenhower did likewise in the Suez crisis. This American obsession with undermining the British Empire, even when England proper was a vital ally, shows two things: (a) it is uncomfortably similar to the present US half-embrace of Russia proper while remaining hostile to almost anything that anyone labels "Russian imperialism"; and (b) there is nothing unnatural in remembering one's countries major historic conflicts, or in past historical traumas retaining a sense of "present-ness". Indeed, for a country like Russia, it is inevitable: the territory is the same and the neighbors are the same.

After withdrawing in 1991 to a geopolitical position not too far removed from that of the Time of Troubles, how could Russians fail to notice the historical analogies? The only real alternative -- integration into a common defense structure offering wider assurances, such as NATO -- was denied them (while their neighbors got in, with the criteria bent to discriminate against Russian interests much in the manner described by Milanovic); they were left to think of their own security in traditional historic geographical terms.

At present, the long national memory plays into Russian fears about Polish influence in Ukraine, whose revolution is seen as another step driving back Russia with an ultimate goal of breaking up the Russian federation (a goal that some Ukrainian nationalist emailers confidently informed me of when they found that my support for the Orange Revolution did not extend to support for further revenge on Russia). In my view the Russian fears are misplaced, but before dismissing them out of hand, we might consider that their fear is not of Poland and Ukrainian nationalists per se but of their influence on the superpower of the day, America. They point to the prominence of Eastern European ethnics in our democratization NGOs and quasi-governmental agencies, which help define who is to be regarded as "a democrat" in the former Soviet space and sometimes treat anti-Russianism as a criterion. Not to mention Mr. Brzezinski, whose thoughts, while clever and sometimes generous in what they propose for the future, always seem to boil down in the present to a need for Russia to cede more geopolitical positions and territory.

Indeed, as Mr. Milanovic has observed, if one were to judge America from its media, one would have to say that Americans think Russia has no right to any interests at all or to any actions to defend them. Is it surprising that Russians draw what seem to be the logical conclusions from what our media say -- that Western pressures will not cease until Russia has collapsed and broken into pieces? This is an all too natural conclusion in Russian eyes, even if our media are unconscious of the premises of their own arguments and would not imagine themselves ever to embrace such further deductions as that Russia ought to break up. Can we be sure that the media are right in their presumption of their own future innocence? Would it be too much to ask the American media to be more sensitive to how they sometimes seem to confirm Russia's worst fears?

"(6) Analysts and pundits know better but they try to play to the popular prejudices which are anti-Russian (which of course begs the question, why are they anti-Russian?)"

No. Just the opposite: the public does not view Russia as an enemy. Part of the elite acts that way despite the public. It thinks it knows better than the public, which has been hoodwinked into thinking Russia has changed: this has been a constant theme ever since the elitist Bush-Scowcroft-Eagleburger reaction against Reagan who they thought was naive about Gorbachev.

Polls regularly show since 1991 that, when Americans are asked who is America's main enemy, only 1-2% name Russia. About 50% usually have given the diplomatically correct answer that we have no national enemy. Substantial percentages name terrorists, Islamic extremists, or China as the enemy. Then comes a trickle naming various other countries, such as Germany or Japan, or France, or Britain; Russia is well down on the list. There is no mass sentiment of enmity to Russia. This contrasts to the Russian public, where similar polls regularly show about 25% naming America as Russia's main enemy in the world -- dwarfing the percentages that name Chechnya, Islamic extremists, terrorists, China, or anyone else.

"or to play to the preferences of the US administration..."

No again. A big role is played, however, by the exact opposite mechanism: the traditional adversarial relation between media and Administration. By attacking Russia, the media gets in a patriotic-sounding attack on the Administration for not being anti-Russian.

Articles and TV programs on Chechnya almost invariably make a major point of saying that the US government is failing properly to denounce Russia for Chechnya and is "giving Russia a pass" (a revealing phrase in itself). In most cases it seems it is this criticism of the US government that is the main purpose of the articles, not criticism of Russia or concern for Chechnya, about which most editorialists and pundits know little and care less.

The media also criticize themselves for not being anti-Russian enough. In a space of a few weeks at a time not very long ago, practically every major medium reaching the DC area -- PBS, another TV network, BBC, Deutsche Welle, NPR, Washington Post -- had a major program on Chechnya. Each one was a program styled to whip up sentiment not to promote comprehension. Each one deplored the war in near-identical terms, reaching for the "g" word, blaming the US and Western governments for not attacking Russia over this -- and, strangely, attacking the Western media themselves for ignoring the war. In reality, Chechnya has been over-covered when measured in proportion to other wars of similar scale and character. Sudan's mass murder-war against black Muslim Darfur has probably beat out Chechnya in recent coverage, probably because it has risked becoming a genuine and fast-moving genocide, but its decades-old mass murder-war against the black Christian-animist South has received far less attention. One of the pieces on Chechnya was titled, without realizing the irony, "the forgotten war". The desire to be in the opposition was carried to the point of reductio ad absurdum: the media was in campaign mode, and attacked its own campaign for not being loud enough.

On JRL readers may recall how Masha Gessen launched into an attack on the media for being pro-Russian, the meaning of it being that most of the media were not as relentlessly anti-Russian as her own writings and the Washington Post. But then, it would be bad form for American media to display a fixed hostile polemical attitude toward another country (and people are noticing that it is bad form in the case of the Post). It is only toward their own government that journalists can really feel proud of taking a fixed negativist attitude. But there they run into a problem: the public -- their audience -- resents it as unpatriotic.

Here is where Russia comes in to save the day. Attacking it is a convoluted way of playing domestic politics; the media get to act out a national-patriotic role and an adversarial anti-government role at one and the same time. Of all foreign countries, Russia is the most useful for playing domestic politics against. It was the main turf for politicizing foreign policy questions throughout the Cold War years. "Being soft on Russia" was the kind of charge that could always arouse interest. Today it has the further advantage of no longer sounding like "anti-Communism", a distaste for which among the literary classes restrained such accusations during the Cold War years.

Nowadays attacking Russia has a politically correct tinge to it, since Russia is a white Christian country. By contrast, attacking China still suffers from being susceptible to counter-charges of racism and anti-Communism. Perhaps this is the source of the strange double standard in which Russia is attacked just about any day for just about anything while China is virtually ignored day after day, month after month for the same and far worse.

Attacking Russia is especially "correct" when it is a matter attacking a Republican Administration for being soft on a Russia that is beating up on Muslims. One doubts that much of the American public shares the media's sensibilities on this. Picture bubba listening as Dan Rather launches into Russia for beating up on Muslim Chechens; he'll probably be telling himself, "there the liberal media go again, standing up for our enemies and blaming our allies the Russians for fighting back". Among Americans who write about politics, only Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter dare to say such things, but many more think it, in whole or in part.

The importance of adversarial culture for the media can be seen from the Bush I administration, which truly was anti-Russian. The media bashed Bush I for this; it became ambivalent on Russia, taking on a more pro-Russian hue than any time before or since. As soon as Clinton got a pro-Russian reputation, the media switched back to Russia-bashing mode. It was Clinton-bashing that was the real point.

In other words, the media should not be taken as a barometer of U.S. government policieson Russia. It is more often an indicator of the opposite.

What does it matter? A lot. The media drumbeat against Russia has an enormous impact on public policy, not only in the US but in every Western country, and in Russia itself. It makes it hard to think clearly, or even to see clearly. It fosters and fans conflict. It promotes a tit for every tat.

First, the effects on Russians. The media play an enormous role in convincing them that we're an enemy. They can see CNN, BBC and other Western media daily, at length; they hear from our government only rarely, and practically never from the American people. They can see the Western media's implicit premises far more clearly than the media themselves do. Mistakenly assuming these premises to represent Western policy, they draw what would be the logical conclusion: that we are their enemy. If Russia does in turn become an enemy again, the media will have been a major cause of it.

Second, effects on Western policy-making are just as damaging. Instead of helping the Western governments do their thinking, the media block out most of the space for it. They make it harder for the West to think out loud about such matters as how to build active alliance relations with Russia, or how to overcome the remaining Cold War standoffs. They make it harder to follow a steady course where cooperation has been agreed, They have done much to cause the West to be an unreliable partner for Russia, an unreliability that democrats in Russia noted with profound regret throughout the 1990s. They prioritize conflicting interests over shared interests, encouraging every minor divergence of interest to grow into a major opposition. Their audience ratings flourish on conflict; and no longer fearing it as risking war or nuclear incineration, they promote it shamelessly.

If we end up with a new Cold War -- and the risk is becoming a real one -- it won't be a small thing. It would mean a nuclear superpower once again ranged against us and the world plunged back into a bipolar disorder, only in more unstable conditions. In that case, the media will no doubt turn around and denounce as "reckless" those who carry out their painful duties in the conflict. The truly reckless ones, however, will have been those in this era who so freely did so much to bring it on.