When it comes to news these days, it seems to be a case of either feast or famine. Surveys indicate that in many American news markets people would hardly be aware that elections were underway if they had to rely solely on the broadcast media.
Readers of the nation’s daily newspapers, by contrast, could be forgiven for thinking that nothing else of any significance other than politics and politicking ever took place.
Okay, so this is not entirely fair. But, even so, it is possible to argue that the Soviet media provided “the masses” with a broader perspective on world events back in the days of Leonid Brezhnev than folks in America generally get today.
It is amazing how much news was available in Moscow in Brezhnev’s day for those who craved it. For starters, there were far more current affairs publications in Moscow in the 1970s and ’80s than are available in many U.S. news markets today.
To be sure, all were censored, but, even so, people were adept at reading between the lines. And, journalists, being what they are, were always searching for ways to sneak news past the censor.
Moreover, the Soviet press was far from monolithic. Pravda, was the Party newspaper, while Izvestia was the government’s newspaper, and Trud was the paper of the trade union movement. Then there were the newspapers owned by the municipalities, the youth organization and the military, as well as those produced for the intelligentsia—economists and the like.
All of these were Communist–controlled entities, but they by no means shared the same agenda, and their interests and policy positions could be quite diverse. Certainly wading through the Soviet press was a pain in the neck. But a determined soul could read between the lines of a sufficiently broad spectrum of newspapers and periodicals to get a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world.
Here in the U.S. by contrast, there is often only one daily newspaper available in a market. Television and radio do not adequately compensate as an alternative news source. In the age of the soundbite, rarely does a news story which takes more than 15 seconds to transmit ever make it to the air waves. This would not be utterly intolerable if the newspapers filled the void. But they don’t.
The problem is not so much that the political opinions of the editors influence both their selection of the news stories they print and the “spin” that is put on them. Certainly, the America’s press tends to toe a left of center “party line” as assiduously as the Soviet press of the Brezhnev era.
But the truly irritating thing about U.S. newspapers is not their politics, but the fact that they are so incredibly boring. Their “yawn quotient” exceeds even that of Soviet Life. But the journalists who produced that dreary organ had no choice. They were victims of an oppressive political system.
This excuse isn’t open to the folks who work for America’s newspapers. It’s awfully sad when the best reason for reading them is the obituaries—a fact that might explain why our daily papers are rapidly heading for extinction. GPH✠
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