From: Matt Taibbi <exile.taibbi at matrix.ru> Subject: march madness continued Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000
the eXile March Madness Continues! Press Review By Matt Taibbi
Welcome back, sports fans! In case you missed the gala kickoff last issue, the eXile is holding its first annual March Madness Worst Journalist Contest. We bracketed 32 of the city's leading hacks into pairs and pitted them notebook to notebook in dog-eat-dog competition. Sixteen lucky winners advanced in our last issue; what follow are the results of round two, which determined who will appear in the tournament's final eight.
Unlike the first round, in which there was a great deal of close competition, the second round was characterized by blowouts. The match between the Financial Times's John Thornhill and the Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York, for instance, had to be stopped in the first quarter by officials when Thornhill was hit with a technical foul for taunting following a run of nine unanswered mixed metaphors. It was that kind of day for the underdogs. As far as we're concerned, though, the blowouts only ensured that there would be no weak links left in the field. See for yourself; here's how Round two went:
John Thornhill, Financial Times, def. Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail
Sometimes the worst part about a newspaper article is its headline. In this case, giant-killer John Thornhill, who knocked off #1 seed Rick Paddock in the first round, could have breezed past overmatched challenger Geoffrey York of the Globe and Mail solely on the strength of the headline from his Feb. 12 article, "Sale may signal business clean-up." Preposterously, Thornhill's article argued that the sale of some of the UK-based Trans World Aluminum company's Russian assets to shareholders of the Sibneft oil company signaled a "cleaning-up" phase in the development of Russian business. As in, Trans World's assets in Russia will be more honestly run under Roman Abramovitch and Boris Berezovsky.
This is, quite possibly, the stupidest thing to be written by a Western journalist living in Russia this year. A remarkable combination of intellectual, moral, and personal inadequacies are required to will into being an article such as this, and Thornhill clearly has all of them in abundance. For instance, take the following set of paragraphs:
'The move comes at a time when several of Russia's business oligarchs are making efforts to "clean up" their businesses in anticipation that Vladimir Putin is elected president in March.
'Mr Putin has stressed he wants to create equal rules of the game for all businesses in Russia and is increasing the pressure on Russia's oligarchs to invest at home rather than siphon their cash abroad.'
To write sentences like these without elaborating upon them, a reporter must be first and foremost a supremely lazy and apathetic person, for no diligent journalist or careful writer would ever expose to his reader to such an unseemly pile of unanswered questions. Which of Russia's "several business oligarchs" does Thornhill mean? What "efforts" can Thornhill point to that any of these oligarchs have made to "clean up" their businesses? And what, concretely, does Thornhill have in mind when he says that Putin is "increasing the pressure" on oligarchs to invest at home? Thornhill doesn't elaborate on any of this and just leaves us hanging. Even if these two paragraphs weren't the insane bullshit that they are, this would be the sloppiest of sloppy newswriting.
Which is too bad, because one cannot afford to be sloppy when one is being as crudely cynical and dishonest as Thornhill is being here. Thornhill does not answer any of these unanswered questions because, as he must surely know, there are no answers to them. The oligarchs are not "cleaning up", and there is no evidence that Putin-the man who was once the loyal chief deputy to Pavel Borodin, Russia's all-time leading capital exporter-- is pressuring anyone to invest at home rather than send money abroad. And as for attaching the names of Abramovich (who was once arrested for stealing railroad wagons full of petroleum) and Berezovsky (who was recently refused a visa to the Davos conference in anticipation of his indictment on money-laundering charges) to the idea of "clean" business? well, that's just disgusting. Thornhill should be fed his own testicles for writing such a thing.
Meanwhile, Thornhill's opponent, Geoff York, bowed out of the tournament with a thorough bio on Putin, including as an afterthought a fair part of the necessary information that the dissolute, lazy hack Thornhill elected to leave out of his. Here's a passage that Thornhill could have and should have put in his piece after his mention of Putin:
"After Mr. Sobchak lost the mayor's job in 1996, Mr. Putin moved to Moscow and became a senior aide in the Kremlin property department -- one of the most secretive and corrupt branches of the presidential administration. It used a closed bidding system to conceal its own business dealings, worth billions of dollars, and to award lucrative contracts to well-connected insiders."
We wanted York to advance because he still hasn't reviewed our book and we therefore still need the leverage, but we were helpless before God on this one. We could write a hundred books and it wouldn't justify getting Thornhill out of this tournament yet. York out; the Financial Times stays alive.