Moscow Meets Main Street.

Moscow Meets Main Street

In Moscow Meets Main Street (The Media Institute, 3017 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007; $12.95), Ted J. Smith III offers an explanation for wide-spread popular resentment of our national purveyors of news and opinion. His book is a first-rate, elegantly written inquiry, centered on two case-studies reflecting the national television networks' treatment of news stories concerning the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. In these examples, Smith thinks, the basis for the pervasive but inchoate belief that the media pose a threat to both American democracy and American defense is discoverable.

According to John Corry, a formidable television critic for the New York Times who contributes a stylish and tough-minded introduction to the book, "Perhaps the single most dramatic finding in this... work is that, from 1981 to 1985, there was a 550 per cent increase in the number of times Soviet citizens appeared on American network evening news broadcasts. Glasnost? Hardly. Cultural exchange? Not much. Most of the Soviet citizens were government officials. I am not sure I know all that this means...but obviously we are in a new age of information. Soviet apologists can speak to us over television with comparative ease; constant viewers may know the faces of Vladimir Posner, say, or Georgi Arbatov or Gennadi Gerasimov, as well as they know the faces of most of the President's Cabinet." These men--"trained propagandists" for the Soviet Union, in Pat Buchanan's pungent phrase--for some years have been allowed by the three major networks something like equal opportunity (if not equal time) to present the Soviet side of major international disputes to tens of millions of Americans, under circumstances that suggest that their statements carry the same moral and intellectual authority as those of American officials.

Perhaps the most notorious example is ABC's decision to invite Vladimir Posner, of Radio Moscow--along with Representative Jim Wright and a number of TV journalists--to comment on President Reagan's speech of February 26, 1986, in which he asked for public support for an 8 per cent increase in military spending. In this instance, the flagrancy of the idea, underscored by David Brinkley's spoon-fed questions to Mr. Posner, who was happy to respond with predictable lies, half-truths, and evasions, outraged even the American press, although the two other networks supported their competitor ("It is part of what we do," as ABC News Vice President Richard Wald explained.) Another instance, or string of them--comprising Mr. Smith's second case study--is the networks' treatment of the destruction of Korean Airlines Flight 007 by a Russian fighter on August 31, 1983. Two days after the tragedy, and one day after President Reagan's announcement that the flight had been shot down by a Soviet pilot, the Soviet Union launched a vicious propaganda attack, in which it maintained that 007 had been a spy plane for the United States and that the Soviet interceptor had recognized it as such. Smith argues that the spy-story version, though absurd on its face, was nevertheless pressed by the Soviets in order to facilitate the acceptance of a slightly less exculpatory explanation: namely, that they thought 007 to be spying, and destroyed it in honest error. The Reagan Administration's official position was that, while there was good reason to suspect the Soviets of knowing or at least suspecting the plane was a commercial airliner, and attacking it anyway, it was possible that they simply hadn't known or cared--that they were guilty, in other words, of either murder of criminal negligence. Despite the reasonableness of the American position, however, and the comparative unreasonableness of the Soviet one, the American networks, for the next 12 months, constantly announced "findings" compatible with the Soviet version, which they presented without criticism or comment, while simply ignoring the American explanation. Mr. Smith describes such practices as representative of what he calls "the New Objectivity."

The New Objectivity, he believes, combines the neutrality of the "old" journalistic objectivity with the "reformist zeal and commitment to deeper ...truth" of the New Journalism. The new ideal is "skeptical objectivity," according to which the enlightened journalist "advocates no positive position whatsoever, not even the verities of his own culture, but instead criticizes all those proposed by others." Skeptical objectivity is culturally relative, and therefore supranational; it is also fundamentally nihilistic, as skepticism always is when placed in the service of some ideal of perfection. "If this analysis is correct," Smith concludes, "it means that we face a profound dilemma. On the one hand, if the press continues its current practices American culture could be destroyed, or gravely weakened. On the other hand, popular reaction in the defense of culture could destroy, or at least curtail, freedom of the press. Given this choice, there are several reasons to believe that the more likely casualty is freedom of the press."

Moscow Meets Main Street is a fine book, indispensable to friends, as well as critics, of the American media.