Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 Subject: exile press review
From: "Matt Taibbi" <[log in to unmask]>Down Periscope Press Review
Matt Taibbi                The eXile
The most striking thing about foreign media [i.e., non-Russian] coverage of

the Kursk disaster was, of course, the volume of it. For
two straight weeks the sunken submarine was front-page news all over the
world, allowing it to easily surpass Boris Yeltsin's resignation and the
1998 financial crisis as the most intensely-followed Russian news story in
recent memory. The Mir space station crisis got more total ink space, but
since it deteriorated less spectacularly and over a longer period of time,
its media slugging percentage was a lot lower than the Kursk's.  When it
comes to attracting press attention in the CNN age, you can't do much
better than a disabled nuclear submarine with a slowly suffocating crew. It

contains all the elements that make the modern news media weak in the
knees: a Hollywood plotline where innocent lives "hang in the balance", an
exotic locale suitable for showing off the your network's dazzling ability
to instantly produce pictures from anywhere, and a story that is at once
simple enough for the average yo-yo to understand (crew trapped underwater;

no air underwater; try for yourself, you can't hold your breath forever;
crew therefore in sensational danger) while simulataneously requiring the
input of whole legions of experts, from divers to marine engineers to
intelligence commentators to survivors of other sub accidents.
Furthermore, the accident forced the media to fully mobilize the soldiers
of another of its favorite sub-industries, i.e. the makers
of charts, diagrams, maps and video simulations. The latter aspect of the
Kursk coverage was so out of control among the broadcast media that at
times one expected the networks to spill over into the realm of macabre
parody: "Thanks, Bernard. No, there is no means currently available of
getting oxygen to the Kursk crew, but if there was, the reaction of the
sailors would look something like this." And then a cut to a slick animated

video sequence of gasping sailors hugging, shouting for joy, etc.
When you add in the fact that the submarine was not American, making a
happy ending to the story not necessary to prevent a lot of ratings-killing

finger-pointing, then the Kursk tragedy, media-wise, turns into a grand
slam into the upper deck. It would be hard to imagine an event more
perfectly suited to the design parameters of the modern news machine.
Blizzards of communications technology, lots of grandiloquent
hand-wringing, and whole seas of canned grief-today's media is designed to
produce precisely this stuff (to the exclusion of almost everything else),
and for a few weeks the Kursk gave reporters all the work they could
handle.
Two things were clear once the Russians released details of the accident
two Mondays ago. One was that the old playbook for the Mir Space station
coverage would be revived, and the entire journalism community would agree
to refer to the Kursk exclusively as the "crippled Kursk submarine" (see
box) throughout the duration of the story. The second was that the disaster

would prompt a flood of snide, superior-sounding editorials of the
"Intervention Needed to Protect Russians From Themselves" type from the
major newspapers of the West.
These latter editorials were, uniformly, remarkable displays of political
opportunism. The Kursk sailors had not even been pronounced dead before
virtually every major newspaper in Britain and the United States had used
the accident as an excuse to argue for some West-friendly geopolitical
objective.  The New York Times was the most shameless of the bunch. Never a

particularly enthusiastic champion of environmental issues in
America, the Times in the wake of the Kursk sinking became, all of the
sudden, inexplicably lachrymose ("Russia's Unsafe Nuclear
Submarines", Aug. 18) over the fate of the Barents Sea and the Norwegian
fishing waters. That its concern was accompanied by
advocacy of an expensive corporate welfare program (in the guise of a
U.S.-funded cleanup plan) was, of course, a coincidence:
"Some of the submarines are no longer watertight and are in danger of
sinking. Radioactive waste is slowly seeping into the surrounding water and

air. Neighboring Norway is worried about a possible explosion from one of
the reactors, which could contaminate local waters, kill fish and marine
mammals and harm both nations' fishing industries.
"The United States and Norway are helping Russia to design and build
prototype facilities for storing the spent fuel. But Russia does not have
the money to continue the efforts. One way to get it would be to expand a
program championed by Senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Sam Nunn
that pays to dismantle Russia's nuclear arsenal but does not cover most of
the decommissioned submarines."
When the New York Times (which blasted the American Green Party this year
for muddying the playing field by sponsoring a serious presidential
candidate) starts worrying about the fate of Norwegian marine mammals, you
know something funny is going on. The same holds true for the exaggerated
concern for the lives of the Kursk sailors shown by the Washington Post,
which predictably used the crisis to blame all of Russia's problems on its
communist legacy. Amazingly, it did so while at the same time also arguing
somewhat irrationally the Clintonian line that Russia is a developing
democracy that has left communism behind. In a paper of record, you can
have your cake and eat it, too.
This schizophrenic Post editorial ("Candor and the Kursk", Aug. 19) first
argues that the Putin presidency has been marked by a
tightening of control over the press:
"Under President Vladimir Putin, the trend has been toward more official
suffocation of independent media and less governmental
candor, especially in military matters."
Armed with a thesaurus, the editorial writer--almost certainly former
Moscow bureau chief Fred Hiatt, incidentally--moves on to label the
disastrous handling of the accident as part of a hangover from the
Sovietdays:
"Still, Russia's handling of the accident seems of a piece with the broader

recrudescence of old Soviet standards of candor and competence."
Ever mindful of its duty to support the White House, the Post then slips in

an overall apology for U.S. policies toward Russia:
"Worst of all, offers of help from the United States, Britain and Norway
were initially refused. British and Norwegian help has now
been accepted--almost a week after the sub sank. U.S. assistance, however,
is apparently still more than the Russian military can
countenance. In light of the Clinton administration's effort to engage and
reassure Moscow, this is frustrating and, as a measure of
Russian officialdom's basic capacity for trusting the former Cold War
adversary, sobering."
By now, the Post editorial is no longer about the Kursk at all, but about
Clinton's policies over the last eight years. "The Kursk
Disaster: America Tried Hard, But Russia Blew It" is what this one came
down to.  That Clinton's efforts to "engage" Russia have included advocacy
of
privatization policies that allowed companies like Boeing, Pratt and
Whitney, and Siemens to buy into Russian military factories
(http://www.exile.ru/feature/feature31.html) -- policies which would
naturally make Russia reluctant to allow American divers to have free rein
in a relatively recently-built nuclear sub -- was obviously not
mentionedhere.
The Post editorial ended in a spasm of self-love and auto-apology,
simultaneously calling attention to how great NATO is compared to the
Russian navy, and reminding readers that press freedom in Russia didn't
fare so badly in the Clinton years:
"Russia's electronic and print media have covered the plight of the crew's
families and voiced skepticism about the government's
performance. 'If this were a NATO submarine, the crew would already have
been rescued,'  one Russian newspaper declaimed. Given Mr. Putin's recent
hostility toward press critics, this coverage suggests that all is not lost

for press freedom in Russia."
This is a remarkable passage. It lauds Russia for clinging to speech
freedoms, and uses as an example of "healthy speech" a passage from a
newspaper which talks about how great NATO is. This is the kind of thing
one might have expected to see in the "foreign news" section, next to the
chess column, on the back page of Pravda about fifteen years ago:
"America's imperialist newspapers remained as unfree as ever, as evidenced
by their refusal to admit the benefits of the generous and peace-loving
arms-control proposal put forward by General Secretary of the Soviet Union
M.S. Gorbachev..."
The Financial Times ("Kursk Crisis",  Aug. 17) was refreshingly unabashed
about its jingoism in its editorial. The headline of this
piece, as it could have been for most Western Kursk pieces, might have read

"Russia Still Not Enough Like the West." One of the more appalling passages

came in the second paragraph:
"Far from living up to the western image of "hands on" leadership that he
has cultivated, [Putin] is sitting out the crisis thousands
of miles away holidaying on the Black Sea."  Let's get this straight. The
difference between a Western leader and a non-Western leader is that the
Western leader rushes to the scene of a crisis even if it means ending his
vacation, while the non-Western one... doesn't? You might have thought that

was just the difference between a good leader and a bad leader. Oh, wait --

according to the FT, the two things are one and the same!
The FT then goes on to villainously intimate that Putin deliberately let
the sailors die agonizing deaths in order to justify greater defense
spending:
"It is easy to guess at Mr Putin's motives for a certain immobility in this

crisis. He says he wants stronger armed forces, and may use
the Kursk accident to put more money into the navy."
Admittedly this passage is less obscenely offensive than it sounds at
first, given that Putin is widely suspected to have participated in the
planning of the bombings of the Moscow apartment buildings to garner
support for the Chechen war. But there was at least some evidence that the
Russian government committed those bombings, whereas here, there isn't.
Beyond that, the apartment building theory at least makes a sort of
Machiavellian sense. But this idea -- that Putin, in order to push
through increased funding for the navy, would first wait for a nuclear
submarine to sink to the ocean floor with its crew still alive, then
deliberately stall the rescue process, kill everyone aboard, incur a
massive international p.r. disaster, and then give the go-ahead for Western

divers to go snooping around his top-secret hardware -- this doesn't make
any sense at all.
What does make sense, on the other hand, is that Western observers like the

FT would seize upon the Kursk disaster as a chance to call for the further
dismantling of the Russian military. This was a persistent theme in all the

major Western editorials about the story. The New York Times warned of "the

dangers of running a nuclear navy on the cheap" and, as noted above, called

for a U.S.-funded dismantling of the bulk of Russia's nuclear sub fleet.

The Post made a similar argument at the close of its editorial. Like the
Financial Times, which argued that Putin's irrational desire to
beef up his navy cost the sailors their lives, the Post sounded the
familiar "Russia can't come to grips with its humiliating loss of
status" theme. "What does this incident reveal," the paper writes, "about
whether Russia truly possesses the money and trained personnel to operate
safely the large fleet of nuclear-powered ships -- not to mention the vast
arsenal of nuclear weapons -- that the great-power ambitions of its current

leaders seem to require?"
All three papers, it should be noted, supported the war effort in Kosovo.
This makes it hard to sympathize with their point of view on
the Kursk disaster. You can't bully around Russia's allies against her
objections, then cry foul -- whining about a lack of "trust", and a failure

to respond to being "engaged" -- when she refuses to abandon her nuclear
fleet. That is, you can, but . . . it's asking an awful lot, isn't it?
When Western newspapers weren't using the Kursk to argue against the perils

of Russian sovereignty, they were usually busy pinning medals on each
others' chests for beneficience and good behavior during the tragedy.
In general the Kursk story narrative read a little like the Nietszchean
fantasy of a moderate/neo-liberal "Boho in Paradise": a
Russian attack submarine, gloomy symbol of the pre-Fukiyama Cold War period

of the Bohos' parents, gets rescued by Scandanavia, the cheerily pragmatic
home of their Volvos and Ikea furniture. Western commentary about the
accident was dominated by unsolicited criticism from the morally perfect
Boho peanut gallery, which blasted Putin for his refusal to "accept Western

help" and spare no expense to save those poor sailors' lives.
This righteous, humanistic take on the tragedy gives rise to an interesting

philosophical question, if one takes into account the
announcement on August 21 that Russia's population had already declined by
some 425,000 people this year. At what point do human lives become worth
saving at any cost? Would the same commentators who blasted Putin for not
funding adequate safety programs be in favor of restoring Russia's
universal health care program, which was dismantled partly in order to
comply with Western structural adjustment policies? Surely more than 118
people die every hour in Russia for want of access to emergency health
care. Not to say Putin shouldn't have done everything in his power to save
those sailors -- he should have -- but outrage over his failure to do so
seems a little disingenuous, coming from the same people who've been
insisting for the last ten years that Russia end all social guarantees to
its citizens in the name of "austerity".
The orgy of moral self-congratulation reached its highest pitch in the
Moscow Times, which, under the leadership of old friend Matt
Bivens, has lately adopted a sort of "I'd like to buy the world a Coke"
image of itself in relation to its host country. In the past two weeks the
Times -- in yet another in a string of elaborate and unnervingly intense
efforts (beginning with its election-eve "We mean
you no harm" Russian-language editorial depicting a happy multicultural MT
newsroom) to convince Russians of the essential
decency of its Western readership -- has repeatedly called attention to the

flood of letters it has received from Americans expressing their sympathy
for the accident victims. While the world's leading marine engineers and
naval rescue experts debated on how best to save the Kursk crew, the Times
printed letters from zipperheads in places like Dallas suggesting that
oxygen be fueled in through the torpedo tubes. One must assume the Russian
navy took this under serious consideration.
Apparently sensing that the the ostentatious display of reader support
wasn't enough to keep Russia focused on American benevolence, the Times
twice unleashed on the Kursk debate its secret weapon: columnist Suzanne
Thompson. If the Times's Russian readers hadn't yet caught the implication
that Americans had shown themselves at their best in response to the Kursk,

Thompson was there to make the case for them explicitly. Here's how she led

off her Aug. 26 column, "Russians, Americans, and those Evening Bells":
"Over a period of nearly two weeks, The Moscow Times has received dozens of

letters from readers around the world, an unprecedented outpouring of grief

for the men trapped at the bottom of the sea. But as an American, I find it

interesting that most of those letters have come from my compatriots.
"One of my colleagues suggested that we have received so many letters about

the Kursk from the United States because Americans comprise the majority of

our online readers. Still, I argued, that doesn't mean they had to write in

with their thoughts. No, I contend that there is a special tie between
Russians and Americans, a link that, when divorced from all the official
propaganda that both nations' governments have crafted over the years,
leads them to a deep understanding of each other on a human level."
Yikes! This is a passage that calls for one of those Gogolesque narrative
interjections: What humility! What delicacy of language!
Thompson isn't proud that most of the letters came from America, she just
-- aw, shucks -- finds it "interesting". Ugh.
Unfortunately, there isn't time to list the other peculiar features of the
West's Kursk coverage -- like, for instance, the sudden
invocation of prayer and Christian feeling by a suspiciously high number of

previously secular columnists. In general, it's hard really
to know what to say about the press frenzy surrounding the Kursk. After
what seems like decades of Elians and O.J.'s one feels
powerless to oppose these onslaughts. One thing is certain: when it wants
to, today's media can focus the attention of the entire world on a single
spot on the Earth, no matter how remote, for an indefinite length of time.
That this power is almost never used to
make us examine our own problems is becoming a given. That it is frequently

used to reaffirm the status quo and apologize for the
actions of our leaders is becoming almost equally axiomatic. That we expect

to see it used regularly to humiliate and demonize foreigners and
dissenters is just plain sad. But it's a fact, and the Kursk proved
itagain.