A certain kind of Moscow correspondent, and a certain kind of hipster journalist, and a certain kind of IR Realist pundit and a certain kind of twitterer is mocking Sen. John McCain right now for supposedly being backward and out of it, and still living in the dark, old days of the Cold War -- thinking Pravda is still important and mixing up Pravda and Pravda.ru in placing his op-ed --- and then "getting it all wrong" when he talks to the Russian people.
But while I didn't vote for McCain and opted to vote for Obama in 2008 for lots of reasons, I don't think he deserves to be mocked over this and the claims about his backwardness or need for public realtions skills tutoring or Russian area studies are way overblown.
I think this is all yet another successful "active measure" for Moscow -- and no, it's not a conspiracy and no, it doesn't even have to be scripted or plotted by the FSB, as active measures these day nearly play themselves, because there are now so many ready-made agents of influence everywhere in the world that all you have to do is give it that Cass Sunstein sort of nudge, and away it goes.
Almost...but it did have some help.
When the cool kids first started hooting about this on Twitter the other day, I had some simple questions. Can we confirm that McCain himself actually approached Pravda about placing a piece?
Several Moscow correspondents including from the Telegraph and AFP smugly told me that indeed he had.
Except...it was actually a little more complicated that that, so let's go over what actually happened.
Yes, McCain said on CNN that he was ready to write a piece and place it in Pravda any day -- and he said this as a kind of generic statement, using the trope for "the Russian media" that has been used for years. McCain may or may not have had the facts and figures about what the real largest-circulation newspapers are these days or what paper truly is influential, but it doesn't matter. At that point in time, he had *not himself* devised an idea of *really* putting the article in the Russian media, he was just speaking hypothetically in reaction to Putin's bad-faith article in the New York Times that has the "progressives" swooning so.
Then what happened is that John Hudson at Foreign Policy really decided to run with that. And the description of him doing this in Salon from Joshua Keating -- "My former FP colleague John Hudson has stirred up a bit of mischief today" -- indicates that it was in fact done in a pranksterish mood rather than in a good-faith supportive effort to get McCain the best hearing in the Russian media. (And obviously as a good Foreign Policy journalist he wouldn't view that as his job anyway, but he did see it as his job to set up a kind of elaborate troll -- so go figure).
Hudson bypassed the newspaper Pravda, which is now only a small-circulation publication for die-hard supporters of the Communist Party, and headed to Pravda's online successor of sorts, pravda.ru.
In knocking McCain's faux pas, Joshua Keating has now famously described pravda.ru as " kind of cross between WorldNetDaily and the National Enquirer." He serves up a links medley of tabloidy stuff about UFOs and alien skulls on Mars and 13 weird facts about women.
Leave aside the uncomfortable truth that the hipster BuzzFeed and Huffpo and Gawker all run stories *exactly* like the "13 weird facts about women" (such lists are big traffic builders for those still living off the click-ad revenue model). Keating's description isn't actually accurate, if you read it frequently -- he's done a bit of key-word searching, most likely, and cherry-picked articles, say, from 2009 on Nostradamus' predictions or an August story about moral panic over gays and children's books, or a story about Syrian rebels supposedly training in the US.
But if you read the Russian pravda.ru - which has higher circulation and is obviously what most Russians read -- you'll see that in fact it has standard basic news of the day (it's not like Breitbart or worse, The Blaze, in its own world). For example, today it has:
Korean border guards attack Russian schooner
Bondarchuk's film Stalingrad trying for Oscar
Surkov re-appointed as Putin aide
FSB officials says hundreds of mercenaries from Russia fighting in Syria
-- in other words certainly "news" more in the vein of a standard newspaper rather than a tabloid -- not Nostradamus. The FSB official may be exaggerating about Chechen rebels in Syria, but he's not completely wrong and it's important to follow at least what the Russians are thinking or "putting out" with this rapidly-moving story -- and here's one place where you can get it.
In recent days, pravda.ru has also carried articles snarkily describing how the opposition's coordinating council has fallen apart and people have left it -- frankly, you won't find that criticism in the independent papers obviously, as they tend to favour the opposition. To be sure, what they are essentially doing is publishing what the Soviets used to call "denunciations" all in line with the Kremlin.
So the pravda.ru situation isn't as much of a cliche as Keating implies or as those reading it in English (where its stories are excerpted possibly in mind to capture a roving foreign tabloid reader) might think.
As we learn directly from Gorshenin, the chairman of pravda.ru, and Sudakov, the editor himself contacted by Hudson, pravda.ru sees itself the second largest English-language online Russian daily after RT.com
Hmm. The problem with all of this, as I know from monitoring the Russian press for my whole life, is that Russian media (like others around the world) simply lie and exaggerate about their circulation and readership. They can deliberately confuse print-run with actual purchases and exaggerate reach without counting bounces on their site and so on.
If anyone in this field were to discuss in good faith, "What's the best place for an American senator who opposes Putin and is one of his biggest critics to try to get a hearing in Russia?" -- the answer might be Kommersant, a major influential business publication fairly independent from the government, or perhaps Komsomolskaya Pravda, certainly pro-government, but reporting news in the more classic professional sense than the old Soviet papers, and having a higher circulation than Pravda the newspaper. Or maybe Moskovsky Komsomolets, although that tends more to the crime tabloid than KP. People can argue strenuously about the nature of the Russian media and what it means or doesn't mean, depending on their own political views and chance impressions, but there it is.
But here's the thing: there isn't a moral or factual equivalence between the US and Russia, as much as "progressives" often look for one. There isn't a New York Times -- an independent, commercial newspaper critical of the government that also has major influence and is read by every editor in the country every day, and most college-educated people. There isn't a Wall Street Journal, the largest circulation newspaper for business people also read by every single business person every day. There's also no independent new-media equivalent -- Huffington Post or BuzzFeed, which have far larger circulations or traffic than the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal have (of course, one of the dirty little secrets for that higher traffic is that they seed their more serious news coverage and political stories with the most tawdry tabloid stuff even below the level of the Daily News -- it's National Enquirer sort of stuff, lurid crime stories, salacious celebrity gossip, weird space and animal stuff etc.)
To reach a wide Russian audience, you need to get on state television -- but that's not the venue for a serious op-ed piece, especially from a hostile foreign senator. Americans are used to getting political news now not from TV or newspapers but the Internet. Russia, on the other hand, has 30% of the population who don't have Internet access -- Russia has 60% Internet penetration, and a lot of that percentage is very newly acquired and not used frequently, especially in some areas where the Internet can get expensive. Not everybody can sit and peruse news stories frequently during the day.
Yes, there are lot of alternative news and blogs now on the internet -- and a few independent outlets -- notably TV Dozhd (Rain) and Ekho Moskvy, the radio and Internet site, where independent news appears and then gets replayed widely in blogs and other papers. Ekho Moskvy might have been a more credible setting for McCain -- this could be argued.
In any event, it doesn't matter. I made the point that even if McCain published in the Beekeepers' journal or Uchitel'skaya Gazeta, the teachers' newspaper, he could get read and then reblogged -- Live Journal is big in Russia (indeed, it was bought out from American developers by a Russian company).
But this entire story isn't about where best McCain could have appeared because he never decided this and acted accordingly after assessing the market with expert help -- instead he made a generic quip on CNN, and journalists here and in Russia set about trolling him for their own political purposes.
So now an entire enterprise of mockery has ensued, pretending that McCain is too stupid to know where to go in Russia and has "mixed up" Russia and the USSR.
Emily Parker, who informs us that she used to work at the State Department, used to work at the New York Time, and used to work at the Wall Street Journal, tells us that McCain needs PR help, he's behind the times.
Visit the timeline of Private Babette Goes to War (more to come on that subject) and you'll see the kids getting together to snort and snicker at Sen. McCain -- well, the old guy is confusing the USSR and Russia.
But it's John Hudson who mixed up Russia and the USSR, if you want to be literal about it, because he's the one who waggishly decided to aggressively go after pravda.ru and really land this gig for McCain (although he has no relationship to McCain). And it's the Russian editor of pravda.ru, a self-promoter and pro-government operative who was quick to see a score to make.
Lost in this kerfluffle of all the hipsters falling all over each other to tell us in vintage knowier-than-thou lingo that McCain is behind the times is an analysis of what he actually said.
And of course, there was nothing "behind" about what he said because it was right on target.
Even so, now comes even more gloating and lessons-learning -- "progressive" Max Fisher (who wrote in despicably bad faith about a Chinese dissident) is here to tell us in Washpo that McCain isn't just clumsy our out of date, he's actually caused damage. He's a wrecker and splitter! (as the Soviets used to say).
Only a figure as bad-faithed as Max Fisher could write that Putin's op-ed in the New York Times was "ever-so-slightly" merely nudging:
Putin's op-ed, in other words, was an act of savvy if cynical public diplomacy. It was an effort to ever-so-slightly tilt American domestic politics in a direction that would be favorable to Russian foreign policy. His points received a lot of discussion. And while he didn't do too well with his insistence that Syrian rebels were behind the Aug. 21 chemical attack and that American exceptionalism is bad, he was otherwise generally effective, in large part because his primary points were already features of the U.S. conversation. It was a big, splashy column with a relatively modest set of goals.
But Putin before this piece endlessly claimed that the rebels were using chemical weapons, implying that therefore Assad had lost control of them and they were loose and "in the wrong hands" -- and yet had the bald-faced temerity to claim that in fact the weapons could now be "controlled" by Assad. How could he have it both ways? That's not just "not doing too well" -- that's lying. Shamelessly.
Then Fisher curiously takes McCain to task for telling the truth about Putin -- that his country is poor (while petroleum-rich, he has kept it impoverished in part by allowing endemic corruption among his cronies and maintaining an enormous military-industrial complex) and that it is not respected. It isn't. If it were, more people than Gerard Depardieu and Edward Snowden would be defecting to it.
Fisher also wrongly takes McCain to task for making a distinction between the Russian leadership, which he opposes, and emphasizing that he supports the Russian people, or civil society. Snarks Max, "Pro-tip: When you have to clarify that you don't categorically oppose the entire nation that you're speaking to, you've already lost."
No. McCain's differentiation is vital in the endless false claims of "Russophobia" that Max's fellow "progressives" endlessly keep alive (on sites from Center for American Progress to EurasiaNet.org). McCain doesn't hate the Russian people. He hates their tyranny. The roots of Russian tyranny may be a little more complicated than just the presence of a tyrannical leader, given how he gains his legitimacy and power, but basically the paradigm is a good one: take away the KGB brutality, assassinations, media control, suppression of democracy, and it would be a lot harder to keep that tyranny going. That is about a certain set of leaders and not just "mentality".
In any event, we can see what this is really all about: a fundamental debate and very deep disagreement about the nature of Russia and therefore the nature of Russian policy for the United States, and the insistence of one side in this debate -- the "progressives" and IR Realists and outright pro-Kremlin forces in using ridicule and pranks and trolling to try to prevail in the argument.
Some American intellectuals think that when they appear on RT.com to debate state-manipulated and paid-for propagandists, that they are "getting the word out" even in that tendentious setting. To truly "get the word out," you actually have to behave as Jamie Kirchick did in putting on your gay-pride suspenders and actually interrupting the Moscow narrative to say something different.
Those mocking Sen. McCain so strenuously or looking for geopolitical gaffs and backwardness are forgetting that he most certainly "got the word out" in this piece in a way that it could have a longer shelf-life in Google searches and blogs and social media. He said of the Kremlin's harsh practices:
They write laws to codify bigotry against people whose sexual orientation they condemn. They throw the members of a punk rock band in jail for the crime of being provocative and vulgar and for having the audacity to protest President Putin's rule.
Sergei Magnistky wasn't a human rights activist. He was an accountant at a Moscow law firm. He was an ordinary Russian who did an extraordinary thing. He exposed one of the largest state thefts of private assets in Russian history. He cared about the rule of law and believed no one should be above it. For his beliefs and his courage, he was held in Butyrka prison without trial, where he was beaten, became ill and died. After his death, he was given a show trial reminiscent of the Stalin-era and was, of course, found guilty. That wasn't only a crime against Sergei Magnitsky. It was a crime against the Russian people and your right to an honest government - a government worthy of Sergei Magnistky and of you.
President Putin claims his purpose is to restore Russia to greatness at home and among the nations of the world. But by what measure has he restored your greatness? He has given you an economy that is based almost entirely on a few natural resources that will rise and fall with those commodities. Its riches will not last. And, while they do, they will be mostly in the possession of the corrupt and powerful few. Capital is fleeing Russia, which - lacking rule of law and a broad-based economy - is considered too risky for investment and entrepreneurism. He has given you a political system that is sustained by corruption and repression and isn't strong enough to tolerate dissent.
Everything said here is true -- and it's rarely if ever said on the pages of pravda.ru, and only said in pieces on independent websites like Ekho Moscow. What's important about McCain's piece is not only that it is said as a coherent whole world view -- that the economic crimes that Navalny exposes are denounced along with the anti-gay law and Magnitsky case that Navalny rarely mentions -- but is said with the moral authority and weight of a freely-elected senator who commands the attention of the nation and the world not only becuase he was once a hostage held prisoner in Iran, but because of his consistent positions standing up to Russia's bullying in the world on a whole host of subjects from Kosovo to Belarus to Syria. That matters. That counts.
Now, to be sure, there are numerous comments from the peanut gallery on pravda.ru and elsewhere purporting to tell us what "the Russian people think" about this piece. Sorry, but judging from comments on pravda.ru itself isn't persuasive -- the FSB's use of sock-puppets and the swarms of pro-regime trolls that volunteer to heckle and harass all on their own are notorious in Russian social media. Go to some of the sites like snob.ru where people use their real names and you get a higher level quality of comment.
That doesn't mean that in fact there is an enormous amount of free-floating hatred of America and Americans in Russia -- a lot of it whipped up deliberately by the state-controlled media. There is, and it comes out in waves during an event like the McCain piece.
It doesn't matter. The moral message will reach that many more people than could have been reached by a Voice of America broadcast of McCain's speech in Congress, or just by individual Russian opposition people on their blogs. And it spells a long-term vision for a Russia without such tyranny where there is both more human rights and security for our peoples and more of a true common cause when bad faith is eliminated from the equation.
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