Missing the face in the mirror

There's an interesting piece in the Times about the English-language cable channel available in the U.S. financed by the Russian government, Russia Today-- A Voice of Mother Russia, in English .

The piece delves pretty deeply into the channel, but pays scant attention to the premise behind it and the other similar channels it names--that Americans get such a xenophobic version of what's going on in other countries that those countries need to pay for their own news channels here to 'balance' all the toxic coverage.

Yeah, of course it's not good to have a channel paid for by the government trying to 'cover' itself--but at least it's obvious what's going on there.

I'd say what's worse is that most Americans are oblivious to how skewed the coverage in American media can be. If someone doesn't even know they have a problem, it does make it tempting to smack them upside the head to try and open their eyes.

Stephen Heyman: But several of Russia Today’s journalists said they were earnestly trying to tell Russia’s story. “No one is telling me what to say,” said Peter Lavelle, the effusive host of “In Context.” Nevertheless, he said, the channel does take certain views. “Part of our mission is public relations,” he added.

Some of the channel’s specials seek to expose and correct Western biases about Russia. An episode of “Cracking the Myths” about Russia’s economy opens with Jay Leno-style street interviews with Americans, who guess that most Russians subsist on penny-a-day incomes or wait in line for hours to get bread (Watch the Video). The show then offers scenes of Russian prosperity, like a shopping mall brimming with members of the expanding middle class.

Mr. [Andrei] Richter [the director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute and a journalism professor at Moscow State University] said that this tendency to shape opinions reveals one of the channel’s flaws. “The idea of Russia Today is that our country is in a very hostile media environment,” he said. “The idea is very rotten because if you believe you’re in a hostile environment, you want to persuade others that what they think is not true.”

The concept of state-sponsored news aimed to viewers abroad is not new. During the cold war Western-financed radio stations like Voice of America, which began broadcasting in Russian in 1947, existed in part to counter Soviet spin. Russia Today has inverted the recipe, broadcasting in English from Russia in the hopes of improving Russia’s increasingly ominous image in the West. And it is but the first in what has become a veritable parade of state-financed anglophone news channels.

Since Russia Today’s debut Iran (Press TV), China (CCTV-9), France (France 24) and Qatar (Al Jazeera English) have created their own English news networks. Al Jazeera’s English spinoff is clearly the leader of this pack, drawing on the credibility of its Arabic-language counterpart and the deep pockets of the emir of Qatar.

Ben O’Loughlin, an international relations professor at the University of London’s Royal Holloway campus, studies the emergence of state-financed news channels jockeying to have a voice in what he calls “the anglosphere.”

“The journalists at Russia Today probably don’t see themselves as political pawns,” Mr. O’Loughlin said. “They might say their goal isn’t objectivity, it’s balance — having both sides. If we’re interested in a pluralistic global media, then in many respects this could be a good thing, but that’s very provisional.”

For at least one viewer the question of the channel’s independence is irrelevant. Alexandr Polin, a Manhattan event planner who left St. Petersburg in 1991, said he considered it propaganda, but not in the Soviet style. “I watched a documentary yesterday about AIDS,” he said. “In Soviet times they would never say that people were sick somewhere.”

Mr. Polin said that Western news coverage often eclipsed the good things happening back home: “It’s not only Mafia, Red Square, vodka and prostitutes.”