Feature Story September 11, 2007
The World’s Sleaziest Magazine
By Mark Ames
Here's a real-life superhero dilemma: What do you do when you're the world's most powerful news and opinion magazine, carrying the English-language torch of freedom on behalf of your million-plus high-net-worth readers across the globe, and suddenly you spot injustice on the Eurasian horizon: Sham elections in an oil-rich Eurasian country, resulting in a one-party parliament; its autocratic leader just pushed through constitutional amendments allowing him to remain in power for life; and it's waging a campaign to bully Western oil companies out of their lucrative oil fields, in spite of contracts and investments made.
If the country in question is Kazakhstan, and you're The Economist, then you know exactly what to do: Put Vladimir Putin on the cover and scare the shit out of your readers by harping about the Hitlerian threat he poses to mankind. It doesn't matter that you run a version of this story almost every week. Or that the story you decide to run in the wake of Kazakhstan's sham elections happens to have been run in almost the exact same form by all of your colleagues FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.
For The Economist, the Putin-as-Fascist story isn't bound by traditional Newtonian concepts of time or space, let alone the basic principles of Western journalism. It's a story that can be played like a deck of trump cards. No matter what else happens in the world - for example, the mega-clusterfuck in Iraq, a war that The Economist screamed for in a campaign capped by its infamous "A Case For War" editorial - when a story threatens to confuse or upset their agenda, the weekly can just drop the Putin-Hitler trump card. It works like a dream, every time.
Thanks to the English magazine's clever rhetorical strategy, calibrating an effective mixture of aristocratic contempt, two-notches-smarter-than-Newsweek diction, and occasional anti-elitist populism to pander to its majority-American readership, readers trust The Economist. They - particularly American readers - trust it because they think it knows more than they do; this is its entire appeal. They even get a sick thrill being talked down to by a dirty old aristocratic prig. For Americans in particular, accustomed to the lifeless, dumbed-down, least-common-denominator prose in their own media, reading The Economist is its own reward, giving them the sense not only that they're smarter than the average Time subscriber, but that it even makes them vaguely decadent, in a British movie kind of way. They become smarter by osmosis simply by being in the imagined drawing room of The Economist's witty banter-filled editorial offices.
In reality, The Economist is one of the most appallingly wrong and evil - as in responsible-for-millions-of-dead-people evil - organs in the world today. As far as "wit" goes, The Economist ranks up there with Benson, the snappy TV sitcom butler, though it's nowhere near as delightfully entertaining as the British butler in the godawful Dudley Moore comedy Arthur.
Or as Michael Lewis, the author of Liar's Poker, observed after moving to England, "The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people. If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves."
If only it was a question of overrated wit. But it's much worse. It's a sinister and sophisticated English snowjob. Considering their influence and their influential readership, not to mention where they're leading us with their anti-Russia campaign, it's time to set the record straight, to put the "s" back in "limey" and call The Economist for the slimey fucks that they are, before they drag us all down with them again, just as they did with Iraq.
* * *
Last month's Kazakhstan/Russia coverage is a perfect example of what's so wrong with the magazine.
Just before Kazakhstan's sham elections, The Economist warned that an "ugly trade" might soon happen: Every country in the West, save two, had already agreed to overlook President Nazarbayev's out-of-the-closet authoritarianism, and give him the chair to the OSCE in 2009 no matter how disgraceful the elections turned out. The two holdouts were the U.S. (whose ambassador praised Nazarbayev's constitutional changes allowing him to be president-for-life as "a good step forward") and Great Britain, which was a bit more circumspect.
These two countries still haven't made up their minds about whether or not to allow Kazakhstan to take over the OSCE chair. Coincidentally, The Economist hasn't made its mind up either, a position manifested by its decision to allot a meager column-sized article tepidly condemning the elections. This was completely overshadowed by the multi-page lead article: Russia is "now" run by the KGB.
As mentioned above, this story is four fucking years old. There's no "now" to it. The Economist article relies on a report issued in 2003 by sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya. Back in 2003, The Economist's colleagues in the Western media covered the report as the news story it then was. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, ran a story called "KGB influence still felt in Russia" in its December 30, 2003 edition. It stated:
"Olga Kryshtanovskaya is a sociologist who dances with wolves. For more than a decade she's been Russia's premier expert on the political, business, and security elites.
"But even Ms. Kryshtanovskaya says she's alarmed by her own recent findings. Since Vladimir Putin came to power four years ago, she's been tracking a dramatic influx into government of siloviki - people from the military, the former Soviet KGB, and other security services - bringing with them statist ideology, authoritarian methods, and a drill-sergeant's contempt for civilian sensibilities."
For The Economist's brand of quantum journalism, time is relative, depending on the observer - or rather, the observer's agenda. A story like this is like a fine wine, meant to be stored in a cool place, to be popped open for their readers to help them forget all that other depressing, confusing news coming out of Kazakhstan or Iraq. Thus, four years after the Monitor's story, The Economist arrives to sound the alarm.
What's strange is how sloppy The Economist is about this, to the point where it reads like a classic case of four-years-late plagiarism.
But most readers would never know how dated the peg to the recent cover story really is. "Political power in Russia now lies with the FSB, the KGB's successor," declared the magazine. Note The Economist's sly insertion of the word "now" - giving the reader the impression that news about the siloviki's rise is hot out of the box. "Now" in the weekly news world literally means "now." It doesn't mean four years ago, or even four months ago. It means last week, or perhaps sometime in the last four weeks.
The Economist betrays even more nervousness about running a story this belatedly with another strange insertion in the opening sentence:
"On the evening of August 22nd, 1992 - 16 years ago this week [note the ludicrous time-peg, "16 years ago this week" - Ed.] - Alexei Kondaurov, a KGB general, stood by the darkened window of his Moscow office and watched a jubilant crowd moving towards the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka Square..."
Let's leave aside for now the very strange decision to anchor an anti-silovik story to Kondaurov - a former KGB general who was a top Yukos executive (respect to the PR firm that helped arrange that). A couple of paragraphs later, we are introduced to Kryshtanovskaya and her four-year-old study. Here, The Economist pulls a classic example of censorship-by-omission: "According to research by Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a quarter of the country's senior bureaucrats are siloviki-a Russian word meaning, roughly, 'power guys', which includes members of the armed forces and other security services, not just the FSB. The proportion rises to three-quarters if people simply affiliated to the security services are included. These people represent a psychologically homogeneous group, loyal to roots that go back to the Bolsheviks' first political police, the Cheka."
They never mention when the report was published, because if they did - "According to a report four years ago..." - it would kind of contradict the "now" in the sub-header. So you just don't mention it. Instead, you crudely manipulate her findings: "the proportion [of siloviki] rises to three-quarters if people simply affiliated to the security services are included."
Is that really what Kryshtankovskaya reported? In an interview with Radio Free Europe last year, she explained "The 78 percent figure...is not a precise figure." But precision, a quantum journalist might argue, is itself a relative concept.
* * *
For the last few years, The Economist has been waging a relentless, obsessive-compulsive campaign to rebrand Russia and Vladimir Putin as a Fascist state and a Fascist regime. Consider last year's "The Hardest Word":
"It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading towards fascism."
That's as serious a charge as can possibly be levied - Nazi Germany with thousands of nuclear weapons. Fascism in the popular consciousness has a pretty simple, straightforward definition: a country that will invade and enslave the world by force, and gas its Jews. Is that Russia? Because if Russia really is Fascist, then what the fuck are we doing here? Every foreigner should run screaming for the border, the West should demand the immediate and unconditional surrender of the Kremlin or else it blow the whole fucking world to smithereens by midnight tomorrow. I'm serious: If Russia is Fascist, what are we waiting for? Isn't this the lesson of the 30s - attack now! Don't wait!
The Economist gets around this problem by softening up its definition of Fascism, thereby making it fit Russia while at the same time defusing its seriousness: "History also offers a term to describe the direction in which Russia sometimes seems to be heading: a word that captures the paranoia and self-confidence, lawlessness and authoritarianism, populism and intolerance, and economic and political nationalism that now characterise Mr Putin's administration."
Yep, that's right, Fascism doesn't mean violently aggressive militarism, invasions, and the industrial slaughter of millions. Nope, you had it all wrong. In these multicultural times, we need to expand Fascism's meaning, to make it accessible to other cultures we dislike. It now includes "self-confidence, lawlessness, populism"... Let's see, what else is happening in Russia that we can put in there? Why not add to that Economist definition, "a word that captures the dima-bilan mullets and gopniki, face control and purse dogs, people who say 'da' and also say 'nyet.'"
This sleazy redefinition of the word Fascism allows The Economist to effectively rebrand Russia by working backwards from Russia to Fascism. The implication is obvious. The Putin regime must be destroyed before it destroys us. Maybe not right away - but soon. That's what our leaders have always promised to do should Fascism ever rear its ugly head in Europe again.
* * *
It wasn't always this way. In fact, if you hopped aboard The Economist's own DeLorean time machine, you'd find that there was a time when they downright loved their li'l Fascist spy in the Kremlin. Sometimes they loved him, that is. And sometimes they didn't. Kinda depended on the day of the week.
And it continues: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070903/016818.html
____________________________________________________________________________________ Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more. http://mobile.yahoo.com/go?refer=1GNXIC