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WHY SUCH SAD CRUELTY? I am glad that William Dunkerley has brought the controversies surrounding media aid programs into the open. I will start by saying that I have the greatest admiration for Eric Johnson and his colleagues in Internews and point out that their efforts have been less appreciated perhaps where they have had a more important role to play, in Central Asia. And yet, I look at Internews, which once began as a private initiative, then received a lot of funding by OSI, and now receives most of its funding from USAID or U.S. government programs, and I find it problematic in some areas. And I hope that my comments about a publicly funded entity are as permissible as they would be of any government enterprise in a democratic society, and some people might join me in this discussion without fearing that their gravy train will come to a halt. Sometimes, Internews and IREX have existed parallel along emerging media locally and created frictions and downright anger, because they siphon off resources, are more skilled at getting them than local grant-writers, and are operating in a context where the received, entrenched wisdom is that you must never give a dollar directly on the ground to locals because it will be squandered. This is what officials quoted in Janice Wedel’s fascinating book about the failure of USAID, Collision and Collusion,1 called “a Marshall Plan of Advice.” In short, Internews, IREX, and others are forced to behave like any large system required to interact with USAID, which does not have a coherent, credible, and efficient media program, any more than it has program for women’s rights or the independent bar. USAID admits this in Wedel’s book: they were used to dealing with the Third World, not the Second World. So Internews and others have to think of how they will land their next contracts and are therefore not dispassionate, disinterested bystanders in the media arena. But why do so many complain about USAID when, after all, we agree that aid must be given to the FSU for media? The obvious reason is that governments ought not to be in the business of creating civil societies. I use the term in the East European, rather than classical, sense of the word, referring to the nongovernmental, and possibly even noncommercial part of society. Governments, especially governments with a cold-war history—unlike, say, Sweden—are cumbersome, clumsy, and sometimes dangerous (due to clashing foreign policy concerns) when they go about this. (Do not forget that, in Republika Srpska, they had to “destroy the press freedom in order to save it.”) But it is also a kind of Zen of the aid business in this region that “if you could fund it properly, you would not have to.” That is, if there were full blown civic organizations and media outlets in existence requiring your support merely to get on their feet (instead of war-ravaged societies, non-societies ravaged by terror and communism for decades), you would not have to be there. If there were entities on which you could spend efficiently through a variety of non-direct, meta-media programs designed to enhance and assist rather than grow directly, you would not have to concern yourself about ill effects because that civil society you were trying to bring into existence, or trying to get to take advantage of your training, would already be there. That is why it is easier in Central and Eastern Europe than in the FSU. Did the Marshall Plan fund newspapers directly or did it fund training seminars? Let someone find Alexander King or other Marshall Plan officials and ask them about their budgets for newspapers. I share Dunkerley’s concerns about the buck-passing and falling between stools that goes on at USAID. A clear indication of this is that when Albright announced her $10 million, no one knew how the decision to break it up into three strands—stipends, training, and direct support—was made, or where to go to change it. Who is in charge of this? Give me a name, a fax, and a e-mail address. Yes, we realize that USAID is going through a certain “sliyaniye” with the State Department now. Why does the USAID page in the Internet have no distinct, coherent media section? Why does the FY98 U.S. government assistance report not have a distinct mission for media and a disaggregation of the budgets and programs for media? And why is there not a coherent foreign policy with media support and freedom mainstreamed into it? Just take one country, Azerbaijan, where the Assistance report rues that “Internews could not accomplish everything it wanted” due to repressive policies; the Country Reports from State condemn restrictions on press freedom; yet, Clinton meets with Aliyev, the Department of Commerce paves the way for oilers, and life goes on. It is a reflection of a lack of vision, and a distaste for hard-hitting strategies and rigorous methodologies with some fight in them. Nothing short of a political revolution, requiring a willingness of all those in the media aid business to demand Congressional hearings immediately, and inclusion of coherent media plans in legislation like the Silk Road Act will change that. Who will cast the first stone? Is U.S. government aid to media about making the world safe for Procter and Gamble? And if the doctrine of aid is less vicious, what is it? Eric Johnson advances the thesis of those “waiting in the wings” who had “better be there.” He and I and his colleagues have debated this over the years, and I remain perplexed about the alchemical process by which those wing-waiters, who may be the President’s cousin if not his daughter, are going to transmogrify into full-fledged card-carrying members of the fourth estate. If Internews emphatically and publicly supports the most courageous (foolhardy?) filmmakers and cable TV stations, it cannot remain in these countries, or they would find themselves in jail alongside Pavel Sheremet. It is no accident, comrade, that all the stations Johnson and others are quietly nurturing in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are having a terrible time just getting licenses. No one will bless them into existence because they constitute a threat to the powers-that-be by their very existence, even if all they do is broadcast programs about happy people eating noodle salads, with an occasional local controversial issue, like environmental dangers or health. Local, wing-waiting issues like AIDS or humanitarian deliveries are the Internews example of tough programming that may blossom into critical—meaning objective!—coverage of the President someday, after you get a mixed economy and a parliamentary democracy. But I believe the only way the wing-waiters can create a credible media is when they are engaged in a harder, and far more dangerous version of the public struggles we have had in this country, whether with New York Times Co. v. Sullivan or the Pentagon Papers. Therefore, more of a human rights advocacy role needs to be played by the U.S. government, and more proactive work needs to be done by figures like Duve, the commissioner for media freedom in OSCE. On Justice Watch, they are discussing the wise words of a Bosnian official complaining about Western pressure to speed up elections—”Elections are the roof of democracy, not the foundation.” In the same way, until there is a political struggle for democracy and some modicum of free enterprise, there cannot be a free media—this is a sequencing issue. More than aiding a real struggle against entrenched interests East and West about actual media freedom, there has to be a willingness to overcome creatively and pragmatically the very prescriptions of freedom—impartiality and objectivity—and pick sides in an ideological war, or lose it. No one likes to have discussions of content, because it looks as if we are impugning on the very media freedom we have to create. Here, I will scandalize by insisting that a vital component of U.S. aid writ large must be a robust participation in the war of ideas and ideologies. This is not a job you leave to dust-laden bureaucrats at USIA or VOA; you must design it on the Seventh Floor. After all, folks, the U.S. government has to promote its own coherent foreign policy, we cannot do it. And the failure to engage in the very real war of ideas on the ground in these countries is an appalling gap. It is considered horribly politically incorrect to point out that the communist ideology did not wane in these countries, and yet it is increasingly causing discomfort for some to explain it away. What I am raising here is the complex problem of picking your horses, not just espousing wisdom over Radio Liberty, but picking the magazines and newspapers and television talk shows that reflect and advance those values. Just as in the United States and Great Britain, supporting everything from public television education for children to The Nation or Atlantic or The American Spectator requires sustained funding from either private foundations or the state. No one talks about “dependency” or “sustainability” of The Nation or the Barney Show or frets about how they have grown too reliant on liberal New Yorkers on the West Side. Instead, you talk about a sustained commitment not only from liberal think-tanks and foundations in the private sector, but from Washington in the public sector. In the same way, some portion of the media programs the U.S. advances in the C.I.S., apart from the commercial sector and the business concerns, must be devoted to establishing and supporting directly the war of ideas. Or call it supporting peace, tolerance, and human rights if you hate the words war and ideas. I do not believe Dunkerley’s contention that U.S. aid programs have caused Russians to become anti-American. Which Russians?! Some rabid anti-Semites in the Duma? Are they our interlocutors? I have not heard any members of the intelligentsia in Moscow making these claims, nor any of the hordes of Russian businessmen stampeding to New York, and then to Virginia to buy real estate. I will say more. Recently, I participated in an interesting meeting at Freedom Forum with a dozen media executives and managers from Russia’s provinces. “What crisis?” said one enterprising fellow. “The budgetniki need to stop waiting around for their handouts and go start small businesses,” said another. “The krakh was the best thing that could have ever happened to Russia,” said still another, “because it skimmed off all those people who were making money ‘at the border.’” “Besides, the dollar/ruble exchange is much more favorable now,” he added pragmatically, “so that his mother’s factory wages, once converted to dollars and back over some months, could send her on vacations to Greece.” None of these folks—media, and therefore self-selected liberals, no doubt—complained that America’s aid had unleashed a tide of anti-Americanism in their provinces, where presumably we have to be most worried about it. Instead, they inquired busily which web address they should look for details on the $10 million. Do not mistake all the howling you hear now from a couple clans that got hit in the crash for the voice of “the Russian people.” I urged our Russian visitors to become informed consumers and not feel as if they were coming hat in hand. But here they had their first disappointment. It seems that Mad’s $10 million is already spoken for. The large media programs that already exist, whether Internews, IREX, GDF, or others, were already lining up for the RFP, and it would be divvied among them—there would certainly be no question of anybody in Bryansk or Vladivostok filing a grant proposal directly over the Internet to Peter Graves at USAID. This is a terribly controversial subject, as I have discovered from all the black and blue marks on myself when I raise this Emperor Has No Clothes question: “Gee, why can’t we give directly to Russians in the media?”! “Horrors,” I’m told by media experts, “You can’t give directly to the media—that makes it dependent and interferes with the laws of the emerging media market!” This, from folks who, I am afraid to say it, have become rather dependent themselves on USAID for their consultancies or salaries. In one other $10 million program for media development I studied, for example, I was saddened to see that out of the millions spent on meta-media—journalists’ training, broadcasting schools, summer workshops, market research, ad revenue management sessions, etc.—only one project, an actual printing press in Vladivostok, represented what I would call direct funding. Getting a grant for a little newspaper out in the sticks that might be the life or death or democracy in the rust belt or a place like Neftekamensk is harder than pulling teeth. Here NED tells you that USAID has ruled that media is not a priority, especially not print media, and they are discouraged, and USAID tells you that you cannot interfere with the media market (hello?!) and make a newspaper “dependent.” And yet whenever I talk to Russian editors and journalists, I hear that they need help to subsidize subscriptions, because ad revenue is down and unlikely to grow for a while. I will save my other case histories from Belarus and Azerbaijan and my reaction to the appalling NPI proposal (representing the absolute triumph of the “Marshall Plan of Advice” school) for my next post, after I pull the flaming arrows out of my back. One more thing: journalists’ stipends. I am reminded here of the Mahabharata. A story is told about a student who goes to a spiritual leader for training and is taught the art of archery. He becomes so perfected, after constant, rigorous training and harder and harder targets, that he returns to the Master and asks how he can reach ultimate perfection. His teacher tells him to cut off his thumb. (The idea, for the non-initiated reader, is that he has become too ‘attached’ to his perfected archer’s thumb and must now renounce it to grow spiritually.) “Why such sad cruelty?” asks the student hearing this story. “Because the world is young,” another Master answers enigmatically. Indeed, after eight to ten years of media aid programs, most of which have gone to fund Western institutions and meta-media institutions in the C.I.S., and not directly to media outlets and journalists, why such sad cruelty? Why would anyone want to deny journalists—our brethren!—stipends, or to hope that the stipends will be a “small part” of the budget? Russia is not a happy place right now. We have trained them to death, they are ready, but they have nowhere to go, because there is no genuine media market. Why not stabilize provincial editors’ labor costs and help them out personally and help out some struggling newspapers cover certain costs so they can survive the elections? In Belarus, where a famous journalist left the leading independent daily to go to the state-run Sovietskaya Belarus, the scandal occurred due to the inability of the editor to pay competitive wages with the state. Maybe this is not an issue for Moscow anymore, but I find it hard to believe it is not true of Chechnya or Tatarstan. If some journalists, especially those outside the zakazukha and zhintsa circuit in a place like Bryansk, need a stipend, to keep them from having to go into another profession (such as working as a communications expert for a large and baggy World Bank project devoted to the rule of law), or from going to New York to seek phony political asylum, why not? Talk about waiting in the wings—are not poor journalists the very force that is waiting in the wings? So often, these media projects look from the top down, from the perspective of management or media businesses. And yet media reform heavily depends on the reporters on the line, and their willingness to investigate corruption and the safety that can be provided them, and what they need is moral and material support, not just lessons in ethical journalism from foreign trainers. The International Science Foundation funded by Soros, where Eric Johnson and I once worked, gave out over $20 million in $500 stipends to scientists. We gave them American Express gift checks redeemable for cash because there was not—and still is not!—a normal checking system for private banking customers in Russia. Many scientists still speak with gratitude for that aid, which at the time was a half year’s wages. What on earth would be wrong with the U.S. government buying itself some good will in that horrible anti-American atmosphere that, we are led to believe, exists in Russia by laying out some cash for journalists’ stipends for even a fraction of that $20 million George Soros spent? Do not ask the opinion of meta-media bureaucrats in Moscow about this—they will advocate an uravnilovska of disadvantage for everyone, because they will despise their fellow journalists employed outside of meta-media programs getting an extra buck. And frankly, why not a more creative approach to this task, where some of the awards could be granted competitively for investigative journalism or research projects? Aid programs to the C.I.S. have failed for the same reason foreign policy has failed: the generation of aid bureaucrats who came into this in the Clinton Administration came with experience in Asia and Africa, but not the Former Soviet Union. (How could they have experience when programs did not even exist there?) They bring a United Nations-style development approach that is pernicious even in the Third World areas of the world, where they are deemed failures. These new aid bureaucrats are not the cadres of the cold war, because they are young Democrats, but their break with the considerable experience gathered over the decades was too sharp. Everyone believed the Soviet Union collapsed, and communism was rolled back with everyone turning to markets. Yet, eight years into this, we still have Communists in the Duma and the land is not really for sale, and the biggest problems of “reform” is that it was not really ever tried in about eighty-five percent of the country. So we need to look seriously at the war of ideology, as repugnant as it sounds. The riddle we must consider is of the poor TV man in Bryansk. He did not “cover” the official who supported the White House uprising, although if he had listened to his ethical journalism trainers or even just hung around Committee to Protect Journalists, he would have realized that “good journalism” involves covering this fellow, too, in the nightly news. We all know how the Russian media discredited itself in the presidential elections by unabashedly backing Yeltsin and how the government interfered with the natural media market by printing up millions of issues of Ne Dai Bog. And yet, had he let the guy on TV—and he was not the only provincial television executive making this hard decision—and had the belodomovtsy prevailed, what would have happened? By keeping the Communist off the air, he set up a trap for his future, where now they want to take him off the air. Who can solve this riddle, especially when the belodomovtsy are again at the gates? Let us hope the man in Bryansk gets an infusion of cash to his offshore account to survive, and not just a visit from an NPI operative who will train him in cooperative advertising buying with other people who want to kill him. Catherine Fitzpatrick Note: 1. Janine R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998 (1998). |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
Policy Newsletter |
