MEDIA
Manoff, Robert Karl
MEDIA Robert Karl Manoff Reinventing Politics in the Soviet Press Americans can hardly open their newspapers these days without encountering another story about reform in the Soviet Union. Even...
...compliance with SALT II...
...When it ran that interview in February, Moscow News advised in a large-type introduction, "The unwritten journalists' law does not allow the interviewer to argue with the interviewee...
...Vladimir Posner, who has become something of a media celebrity in the United States as spokesman for U.S.Soviet rapprochement, put it more starkly in a recent conversation...
...To learn democracy which makes it possible to see people with an opposite point of view as worthy opponents and not to brand them as enemies...
...Its traditional role, by and large, has been not to promote political discourse but to squelch it...
...He objected to "political errors in the ideological stance of the newspaper" and warned that "glas-nost needs wisdom...
...duct will determine whether the program succeeds or fails...
...This means, for example, that while the paper can now print a half-page interview about U.S.-Soviet relations with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's former national-security adviser, it must explain why it is doing so to readers who don't understand the new rules of political discourse...
...As part of its effort, it must teach its readers what the press is all about...
...He is repoliticizing culture, the social sciences, and—to a certain extent—the Soviet economy...
...The revival of political discourse in the Soviet Union has barely begun, and it is impossible to say how far Gorbachev intends to take it or whether he will succeed...
...The editor, Yegor Yakovlev, replied that the reader may have thought he was taking issue with the newspapers, but actually was out of tune with the times...
...Ogonyok, a pictorial literary weekly once so orthodox that a graphic from its pages adorned Stalin's bedroom, has a new editor—poet Vitaly Korotich—who has made a specialty of publishing accounts of official abuses of power...
...At its most radical, his program will transform atomized Soviet public opinion into a public composed of individuals who sense their potential power and are ready to begin wielding it...
...Gorbachev is attempting to reinvent Soviet politics...
...But even now, awash in reports about glasnost and democratization, the U.S...
...The first was by Senator Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, who saw no need for further U.S...
...For years—for decades—Americans have been kept uninformed or misinformed about the complexities of Soviet life...
...His magazine has announced it will run some of the most controversial anti-Stalinist literature now being cleared for publication...
...Even Jeane Kirkpatrick announced to startled readers of her syndicated column that things are changing in the land of Lenin...
...What is happening in the Soviet Union today is nothing less than the fostering of political discourse in a country that, for most of its history, has had none...
...To learn to work in conditions of unfolding democracy...
...This letter," Yakovlev wrote, "indicates that it is absolutely necessary and extremely urgent for us to learn democracy...
...In the spirit of glasnost, the journalists who have cast their lot with Gorbachev's efforts have been forthright about their stakes in the struggle...
...Gorbachev has put some new people in charge and has met with reporters and editors, exhorting them to be more active and assert greater independence...
...The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 promised to create a political community—a true public—that had never been allowed to exist in Czarist Russia...
...There have been some visible results...
...Through the press, the leadership can talk directly to the party cadres, the workers and professionals, whose conRobert Karl Manoff is co-director of the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University...
...Soviet television producers, once noted for their indifference to the preferences of their viewing audience, told me during recent negotiations that they must have programs that will be "interesting to 200 million people...
...In this far-reaching effort, Gorbachev has called on the Soviet press to play a leading role...
...If Gorbachev loses, I'm dead," Posner told me...
...press can't quite get the story right...
...He is repoliticizing politics, and since there can be no politics without a participating public, he is reinventing a Soviet public...
...The media's intense interest in Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to revitalize Soviet society is a welcome departure from their customary coverage of Soviet affairs...
...Conceivably, glasnost could culminate in the final destaliniza-tion of Soviet life...
...Alexander Bovin, a political commentator known to be close to Gorbachev, wrote in New Times, "I cannot escape the feeling that we underestimate the scale and power of resistance that is opposed to our strategy...
...But before the press can perform that task, it, too, will have to be reinvented...
...The reporter's function is to ask questions and report the answers with maximum accuracy...
...Moscow News, formerly little more than a propaganda sheet, is another outlet for the new thinking...
...Missing from most of the reporting on "reforms" is any inkling of the magnitude of the change taking place...
...Politics was depoliti-cized...
...I'm just dead...
...But as the Soviet State consolidated its power in the 1920s, and especially after Stalin took full control of the Communist Party apparatus and the State, the political process was reduced to the status of administrative procedure...
...People who had given up reading Pravda long ago now eagerly scan it for the latest news—and for the commentaries by Western political figures that have begun to appear under the heading "From Different Positions...
...Moscow News published a letter from a reader who identified himself as a Communist Party member since 1939...
...There was no further room for political discourse...
...Not everyone likes the new rules...
Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5
