US Media: Building Newspaper Curtain Against A Fabled Foe
“Now we do not have an Iron Curtain, we have a newspaper curtain. “
Evgeny Yevtushenko (a prominent Russian poet)
– RT interview, Sept 2009.
Evgeny Yevtushenko (a prominent Russian poet)
– RT interview, Sept 2009.
Though Russia went through significant domestic changes since 1991,
the extent of Russia’s domestic achievements had rarely been
acknowledged in the United States. Instead, Russia has been continuously
criticized for not democratizing fast enough. American media ignores
positive developments in Russia and concentrates on the negative. Russia
made significant changes from the Soviet totalitarian system, but
instead of acknowledging this progress, Russia is characterized
by exploiting misleading historical analogies as ‘closed’, associated
with the KGB, the Soviet Union, ‘relentless propaganda’, ‘government
control’. The opinions of the Russian citizens on their political system
or their president as well as the actions by the Russian state that do
not fit the description of ‘dictatorial power’ are typically omitted
from Western media coverage. The result of this “selection bias” builds
up over time to construct a negative overall image of the country and
its president.
Creating an external threat perception in the eyes of the Americans
and Europeans becomes an instrument of uniting the public on foreign
policy issues, as expressed by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his text, The Grand Chessboard:
“As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find
it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues,
except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived
direct external threat.” (p.211)
