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In the Summer 1996 issue

Glasnews speaks! ... And listens!

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Seeking a happy medium with Russia's media

New co-director takes charge of RAPIC's transit

You'd think Steve Bouser would be in a tough spot.

This summer Bouser took over as American co-director of the Russian-American Press and Information Center, managing one of America's biggest media assistance programs in Russia.

It's not the best of times for foreign assistance programs in Russia: On the American side, foreign aid is an increasingly tough sell, particularly in an area where the post-Cold War honeymoon is over. It's not the best of times for American news media: Publishers and broadcasters are busy trying to protect their own profits in an unsettled media market, and many of them find it difficult to spare resources for training and exchanges with journalists from other countries.

It's not the best of times for Russian media, either: They are struggling even more than their American counterparts to adjust to new economic realities. Their international credibility has been shaken in the wake of a presidential election campaign in which even "independent" media outlets became cheerleaders for Boris Yeltsin. And in this period of stronger nationalism, many Russians are becoming increasingly wary about outsiders: Some media assistance programs have even been accused in the Russian press of being part of a Western conspiracy to influence the media.

In that light, some Russian journalists may not be wholly reassured to hear that Bouser comes to his new job from the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he has been senior media adviser for the past two years. But since many of RAPIC's programs are funded through the agency, that connection is likely to help on the American side. And Bouser has other credentials that should impress even the Russians.

He was editor of The Salisbury Post in North Carolina for 11 years, and worked as wire editor, editor and managing editor for a variety of other dailies in that state, at one time serving as president of the North Carolina Associated Dailies. He also has taught journalism, spent three years as a Pulitzer Prize juror and has been a commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" as well as a professional-in-residence at RAPIC in Moscow.

During a three-year stint in the Army, Bouser was trained as a Russian linguist.

So maybe Bouser isn't in such a tough spot after all.

In his new job, Bouser says he hopes to help Russian media with the task of "structural transformation." RAPIC is a joint project of New York University's Center for War, Peace and the Media and the Russian Academy of Science's Institute for USA and Canada Studies - and Bouser recognizes that the institution is likely to become more "Russian" and perhaps less "American" in coming years. Already, most of the 45 staff members at RAPIC's six regional centers are Russian.

As Bouser prepared to move his family to Moscow, he discussed his view of the years ahead in an interview:

I don't think anybody would disagree that the election campaign and the coverage of it was not the finest hour of Russian media. I, on the one hand, was disappointed. On the other hand, I think I understand it.

The disappointment was the same kind that you feel when your friend lets you down. Maybe that's overstating it, but some of us have been involved for some time now in efforts to support the transition of the media over there to independence. ... The idea of balanced news coverage got totally lost in this campaign among, apparently, most of the newspapers over there, not to mention TV. It's disappointing.

What we don't need to be doing is preaching all the time to them about objectivity.

That is a dearly held principle with American media - although I tell you, we don't have the tradition of that ourselves that we like to think we do, especially if you go back a ways. Newspapers used to be typically started up to support a particular political party. That's why you still have so many newspapers around that are called the Democrat or the Republican.

I think probably because of several factors - one of which was just the fact that so many daily newspapers became monopolies - we came to develop as finely as we have this idea that you were supposed to cover news with balance and objectivity.

We've gone over there and spent a lot of time in seminars talking about objectivity, talking about separating news from opinion. And one thing you find out after a while is: It's not that they don't understand it and need to be enlightened about it. It's that they do understand it and they don't like it.

They don't agree with it. And it really is not part of the tradition of the Russian press, even if you go back before the revolution. And I'm not even sure it's that much a part of the Western European press.

So all that is just to say that we need to guard against being overly judgmental, first of all because it's their papers, their traditions and not ours. And secondly, because ... a lot of the editors and TV people over there viewed this election as one in which their future was at stake.

They didn't have the luxury to sit back and view it as a choice between one political party and another. It was a way of life, and perhaps their own existence and their own freedom at stake. And therefore they said, "Why should we give this guy (Communist Party leader Gennady) Zyuganov a lot of publicity?"

Now, your question was, what should we do about it.

Well, I keep sounding like the devil's advocate here, but it wasn't just the government press (that took sides), it was the independent press that tended to be very one-sided in this thing. They did it, voluntarily. They did it independently in many cases. Obviously a lot of them were under pressure because of who their sponsors were.

So the question is not exactly "independence" as much as "fairness and objectivity." This is something we have to show, if by nothing else, by example. By what we do over here and by what we can demonstrate to them over there that the American press does. We have to hold up the ideal of objectivity. We have to continue to express our feeling that the obligation of the newspaper is to its readers, to provide them with a fair and objective and accurate account of what's going on so that they can make their own decisions in the democratic process. ...

In dealing with the Russian press ... my experience has been that you oftentimes have more of an effect than you think. They may disagree with you and argue with you, but you're probably creating some kind of effect, even if it's indirect, in the way that they approach their jobs.

As far as what RAPIC can do, there are a lot of programs that RAPIC is involved in that have to do with the journalistic reporting and commenting side, but there also is a lot of the nuts-and-bolts stuff, how you manage a newspaper from the business end.

I've met with lots of Russian editors in the past, and you talk to them about this journalistic stuff, and when it's question time the first question is "How much do you pay your reporters? How do you organize an ad department? How can we break free of the government monopoly in distribution and gain control of that?" These are the kinds of things that are content-neutral that we can do.

Well, there is this reallocation of resources going on, and it's a problem. We've heard the figure (at the Agency for International Development) that ... something like 80 percent of what we're going to spend for Russian assistance has already been spent. So the money is going to be drying up. A lot of the private foundations ... are, if not getting out of foreign programs, at least de-emphasizing the foreign programs in favor of domestic programs.

I understand the reasons for that, to an extent.

But the transition over there is just not stabilized yet - the media transition to independence. It's like a tooth that's sort of half-pulled. It's not a very good time just to abandon the effort. ...

In Russia there is a much greater difference between the central press and the regional press than we understand it in this country. You have a few highly influential papers in Moscow, national papers. They tend to have a lot of Western exposure. But you go out to Yekaterinburg or somewhere, and you find out that those guys out there are in many cases just beginning to make the changes they need to make.

It's easy to go into Moscow - not only with newspapers but with lots of other things - and get the idea that they're really well along the road, when the fact is that the places where most of the people live are just scratching the surface. ...

Some people think RAPIC just sits there in Moscow and holds press conferences, and sometimes that's the most visible thing that RAPIC does. But RAPIC is a heavily regionalized thing, in terms of having half a dozen regional centers scattered across Russia. The focus increasingly is, and I hope will be, on outreach.

The other trend I would like to emphasize is that RAPIC has always been, and is becoming more and more, a Russian institution. Most of the people who work there are Russians. Most of them have been there for a long time, by the standards of the past few years anyway. All of them are learning a lot of valuable stuff about how you run programs and how you do things in a press center, so that when the time comes and the aid does dry up, RAPIC hopefully is not going to disappear. It's just going to continue the transition into a Russian institution.

Sure, I have to keep reminding myself of that.

When I was in Russia working with Russian papers, I would sometimes go back a year or two, to when I was editor in Salisbury, North Carolina.

What would I have done if a bunch of, say, Japanese guys came walking in and said, "Well, we're from Japan and we're here to help you, and we're here to tell you how we think you should change your newspaper." I obviously would have thrown them out. ...

So I try to keep that in mind. It's remarkable how patient the Russians have been with us. Obviously we have the best of intentions, but it's easy to misinterpret them. ...

One of the things I came to believe when I was over there was that the central thing we should be doing is not to say "Here's how we do things, and therefore here's how you should do things."

Every once in a while I would find somebody ... it would just be a thrill. Once I was out in this town of Rezh, two hours away from Yekaterinburg. I just met this editor who had somehow bought her own press and was printing her own newspaper and set up her own distribution system. And she was printing three other papers under contract and had started a weekly advertising insert that went in all these papers. She just blew me away.

I would meet people like this, and it struck me that what we should be doing is identifying people who are meeting with some kind of success within that environment - Russian people. First of all, find them. Secondly, help figure out what it is they're doing, why it works. Then thirdly, try to promulgate that as widely as possible, to make sure that Russians can learn from each other. So therefore our role becomes more of a catalytic one, an enabling role rather than trying to impose anything on anybody.

I think one of the most important things organizations like RAPIC should be doing is helping with association-building, fostering either the founding or the development of professional associations, trade associations. Unions of journalists in many cases date back to the old days, and they perform a different function - not that there's anything wrong with the Union of Journalists. But the things we should be supporting are professional associations that put out trade journals and hold meetings, and enable members to learn from each other.

There are some, and there are also some that are being supported under the Media Development Program in which RAPIC is involved. One of the really neat programs is the Association of Independent Telecasters. I think it's doing good work, and we work closely with those types of groups.

New locale for 'New Media for a New World'

1996 conference about online media goes to Vladivostok

Vladivostok, one of the Far East's principal cities, serves as the host for journalists and networkers from America and Russia from October 15 to 17. The event, at Far Eastern State University, follows the first two "New Media for a New World" conferences, conducted in Moscow in 1994 and 1995.

The Vladivostok seminar is being presented by the Art Pattison Communications Exchange Program, the publisher of GlasNews, and administered by the Center for Civil Society International.

The event is supported by the Media Development Program, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and managed by Internews and the Center for War, Peace and the News Media; Vladivostok Novosti, which owns the daily Vladivostok and the weekly English-language Vladivostok News; The News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington; and the Russian-American Press and Information Center.

"New Media for a New World" aims to introduce Russian media professionals to the latest in Internet-based tools for newsgathering and publishing, opening the way for further training.

This year there will be extra emphasis given to the business of online media. Among the new presenters will be Sharon Katz, associate media manager of the advertising agency Modem Media; Lisa Gillingham, district manager for electronic media, AT&T; and Charles Powell, advertising account executive for Nando.net.

Kitty Bennett, research librarian at the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, will bring her expertise on computer-assisted research.

Speakers returning to "NMNW" for the 1996 conference include Natasha Bulashova and Greg Cole of the Center for International Networking Initiatives; David Carlson of the University of Florida's Interactive Media Lab; John Garcia, director of online journalism for New York University; and Alexander Filippov, advertising manager for Relcom.

Leading professionals from The News Tribune and Vladivostok Novosti also will discuss their online news venture.

Further details will be made available at the "New Media for a New World" Web site. For information about registration:

• Russians may contact Andrei Kholenko or Nonna Chernyakova at Vladivostok News. Fax: +7-4232-25-03-97 or 22-16-42. Phone: +7-4232-25-04-71 or 25-04-26. E-mail: news@stv.iasnet.ru.

• Another contact for Russians is the Russian-American Press and Information Center, 2/3 Khlebny Pereulok, Moscow. Postal address: P.O. Box 229, 2 Novy Arbat, Moscow 121019 Russia. Phone: +7-095-203-4403 or 203-5802, fax: +7-095- 203-6831, e-mail: rapic@glas.apc.org.

• Foreign participants may contact Jonathan Nesvig at The News Tribune. Postal address: P.O. Box 11000, Tacoma, Washington 98411. Phone: +1-206-597-8666. Fax: +1-206-597-8274. E-mail: Nesvig_Jonathan@m.tribnet.com.

GlasNotes

European monitors give poor marks to Russian election coverage

The four monitors - Bernd-Peter Lange of Germany, Richard Schoonhoven of the Netherlands, Jonathan Steele of Britain and Benedicte Berner of Sweden - found that Yeltsin was the only candidate given positive coverage on television, except for a spurt of positive coverage given to Alexander Lebed in the final days before the first-round elections in June. Just after those elections, Lebed was named Yeltsin's top security aide.

The second-round campaign coverage was even more biased in Yeltsin's favor, the monitors said. In their words, it was "perhaps an appropriate climax to a thoroughly unfair campaign in the electronic media."

The monitors tallied positive, neutral and negative references to the candidates during prime-time news and current affairs broadcasts, and gave each candidate a rating by matching positive and negative reports. Yeltsin's coverage was extremely positive, earning a rating of plus-492 in the first round and plus-247 in the second. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov's ratings were correspondingly negative, amounting to minus-313 in the first round and minus-240 in the second.

From May 6 to July 3, the three top Russian TV networks - Public Russian Television, RTR and NTV - devoted 53 percent of their election coverage to the Yeltsin campaign, with the rest divided among nine other candidates, according to the monitors.

The team leveled particular criticism at:

• Russian journalists for accepting orders from Yeltsin campaign officials and failing to investigate key issues such as Yeltsin's disappearance from the campaign in its final days. They criticize the Russian press for not giving full and objective attention to the candidates' various positions on key issues.

• The Central Election Commission for not dealing adequately with the preferential treatment given to Yeltsin.

• Yeltsin administration officials for putting political and financial pressure on media outlets to provide favorable coverage to the incumbent's campaign.

For further information on the monitors' report or on the European Institute for Media, please contact Anna Pouliaevskaya in Moscow by phone (+7-095-229-8993) or fax (+7-095-229-7958); or Monique van Dusseldorp in Dusseldorf by phone (+49-211-9010-479), fax (+49-211-9010-456) or e-mail (100443.1705@compuserve.com).

Russian resources on the Net

The explosion of the World Wide Web has brought hundreds of new sites about Russia, some of which have been touched upon in past issues of GlasNews, and most of which can be found using a search engine such as Alta Vista. Here are a few new or expanded sites of particular interest to those in the communications business:

• Johnson's Russia List is a digest of news and analysis about Russian affairs provided by David Johnson, research director for the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. Most of the stories cited are from the Western press, but they tend to take an unorthodox point of view: that Russia's "democrats" may not be the best defenders of democratic values. In addition to the Web archive, Johnson sends out the digest via an electronic mailing list. Send a message to David Johnson if you want to be on the list. He hopes the service can become self-sustaining through contributions; ask him about suggested contribution levels.

• Internews, which has taken on a variety of media assistance programs in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, has installed a Web server in the Moscow office of Internews Russia and is making computer capacity available for Russian media organizations such as the Glasnost Defense Foundation. There are more than 250 files about media developments in the former Soviet Union, most of them in Russian.

• The RJOUR-L mailing list provides a Russian-language forum for journalists, with items from the OMRI Daily Digest. the Russian-American Press and Information Service and other organizations regularly posted by the USIA Media Assistance Clearinghouse. To subscribe to the list, send the message "subscribe rjour-l" to listserv@irex.ru.

• Russian President Boris Yeltsin may be feeling poorly after his election win, but he has now joined the ranks of the wired by having his own Web page: http://www.maindir.gov.ru/.

New publications

• "The Post-Soviet Handbook: A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources in the Newly Independent States" is the outgrowth of years of work by M. Holt Ruffin, Joan McCarter and Richard Upjohn of the Center for Civil Society International. The handbook, published by the University of Washington Press, documents hundreds of grassroots initiatives in the former Soviet Union - and shows how the Internet can knit them together with the world at large. Its 386 pages are packed with brief descriptions and contact information for environmental, social, civic and media organizations (including GlasNews). Much of the information is also available via CCSI's Web page.

• "The Russian Journalist in the Post-Totalitarian Era" describes the contemporary problems facing Russian journalists are facing. The 300-page book was written by Josef Dzyaloshinsky, chairman of the Freedom of Information Commission and president of the Association of Independent Regional Publishers. It costs 25,000 rubles within Russia and other former Soviet states; $25 if ordered from elsewhere. For ordering and shipping information within the Newly Independent States, contact the Vostok Publishing House at Annenskaya 21, Moscow 127521 or phone +7-095-219-6330, fax +7-095-219-8244. For orders from other countries contact the USIA Media Assistance Clearinghouse (phone +7-095-290-4016, fax +7-095-203-6831, e-mail nwpilugin@glas.apc.org).

  Speaking of the Media Assistance Clearinghouse, Nicholas Pilugin reports that his funding for the clearinghouse from the U.S. Information Agency has run out, but he's hopeful that the project will be revived with new funding within the next couple of months.