{"id":180916,"date":"2021-03-15T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=180916"},"modified":"2021-03-13T07:21:06","modified_gmt":"2021-03-13T07:21:06","slug":"the-sovietization-of-the-american-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/03\/the-sovietization-of-the-american-press\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sovietization of the American Press"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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12 Mar 2021 – <\/em>I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow\u2019s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia\u2019s <\/em>celebration of Gagarin\u2019s flight, a Pravda <\/em>account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek <\/em>with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.<\/p>\n

These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it\u2019s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda <\/em>headline in advance. What else but \u201cA Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People\u201d fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but \u201cSuccess of the Republican Fleet?\u201d Who could earn an obit headline but a \u201cFaithful Son of the Party\u201d?<\/p>\n

Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a \u201cRight-Trotskyite Bandit,\u201d a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue \u2014 95% of most issues of Pravda <\/em>or Izvestia <\/em>were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like \u201cglittering,\u201d \u201cfull-hearted,\u201d \u201cwise,\u201d \u201cmighty,\u201d \u201ccourageous,\u201d \u201cin complete moral-political union with the people,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:<\/p>\n