NO NEWS FROM ARMENIA
The media: Paul Johnson thinks it high time we reported Russia freely
THE way in which we see the world, especially through our television screens, is often radically distorted. News coverage is determined by factors which sometimes have nothing to do with the intrinsic interest of one subject compared to another. To judge by what we see on television, Israel and South Africa are the two most important countries in the world. At one stage last month, when the West Bank and Gaza disturbances were in full fury, there were more television crews concentrated in Israel than anywhere else on earth. Whenever anti-white trouble breaks out in South Africa — Western television is not interested in black v. black violence, which goes on all the time in most parts of Africa — the camera crews con- verge from all over the world. Even today, with nothing much going on there, Archbishop Tutu can whistle up a crew any time he wants to make a propaganda point.
What determines this agenda? Who de- cides the priorities and relative news- values? Certainly not the viewers. What happens in these two relatively small coun- tries is unlikely to affect our lives signifi- cantly, so any symbolic value they possess has been placed there largely by the media itself. One factor is that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the media, especially television, can operate freely. Elsewhere in the region there are difficulties, liable to become quickly insu- perable if the local government does not like the coverage. In South Africa, the government now imposes some restric- tions, but even so it is easier for reporters and television crews to work there, on a permanent basis, than anywhere else on the Continent. Television networks, like most other people, tend to go for the easy option. And of course television loves riots. Riots are perfect television: live, action-packed visual material, speaking for itself, scarcely needing commentary. There are, to be sure, riots all over the world; but Israel and, until last year, South Africa were two of the few countries where they could be freely filmed.
All of which brings me to the curious black hole into which coverage of the demos and riots in Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan has vanished. Now the Soviet Union is by any standards an important country: the most important in the world, probably, after the United States. Nor can anyone dispute that the events which have been taking place in the Caucasian region over the last few weeks are potentially of great significance. The Soviet Union is the most tightly run police state in the world by far, and any unauthorised crowd- movement there is rare. According to some commentators the scale of the Arme- nian street processions — and the Krem- lin's reaction to them — are unprecedented in the 70-year history of the Soviet regime. Contrary to the earlier reports, reflecting the Soviet government's attempts to play down the whole business, we now know there has been a lot of violence and many deaths, though what exactly has been happening is still, at the time I write, obscure. This then was, by any standards, a big story.
So far, however, the regime has been almost entirely successful in preventing the Western media from covering it. So far as I can see, not a single Western journalist, let alone a television crew, has managed to set foot in Yerevan or the Nagorno-Karabakh area or Sumgait, or any other of these exotically-named places where the news is being made. Even telephoning has been difficult. By sheer good fortune, a Reuters reporter trying to phone the Communist Party headquarters in Sumgait was con- nected to an Armenian refugee sheltering 7 can't for the life of me remember where the oubliette is.' from Muslim violence in a building on the other side of the road — a curious insight into the way Soviet telephones work — who told an anguished tale of murder, rape and looting before the security services cut him off.
I did see on ITN a brief film-footage of the Armenian crowds massed together, and very impressive it was, in its silence and rarity — a unique uncensored glimpse into an empire, possibly at the precise point when it begins at last to disintegrate.
This video was apparently supplied by Sergei Grigoryants, an Armenian dissident who lives in Moscow and edits an under- ground paper defiantly entitled Glasnost. He, at obvious risk to his liberty, has been the channel through which bits of the truth, including eye-witness accounts, have trick- led through to Moscow and so to the world outside.
The Soviet regime has imposed a total ban on outsiders entering the area. But if Grigoryants can get news out of it, why can't the Western media? I have often thought that the West's press and televi- sion networks accept the rules laid down by the Soviets far too apathetically. There is a long history not so much of kowtowing to the regime as of resigned shoulder- shrugging, nothing to be done, old man, you know what the Russkies are like.
Indeed, ever since the Civil War, the Western coverage of internal affairs in the Soviet Union has been lamentable. The massive violence which accompanied col- lectivisation of the peasants, the Great Famine which followed, the purges, the camps — none of these horrifying and enormous events was properly reported at the time or indeed for years after. Often, indeed, the reporting from Moscow was deliberately slanted in ways the regime wanted, the tone being set by the appalling Walter Durante of the New York Times, whose catchphrase was, 'I put my money on Stalin.'
I am not criticising the Western repor=' ters at present in Moscow, of whom one or two are outstanding. But I think it is time that the Western media as a whole, and at the highest level, began to put collective pressure on the Soviet government to allow greater freedom of movement. From first to last the coverage of the Chernobyl disaster was managed by the government, and we still do not know the truth about it.
Now another major event has been suc- cessfully enveloped in a news blackout.
When the South African government im- posed restrictions the media constantly reminded viewers and readers that it was operating under them. No such warnings have accompanied the skimpy and patchy coverage of the Armenian troubles, where the restrictions imposed by the Soviets have been far more serious, indeed total. Why? The truth is, the Western media's whole reaction to the Soviet refusal to allow them to work freely has always been feeble, pusillanimous and defeatist.
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