One of the big frustrations over the past few months has been watching Western media fumble its reporting on Russia so badly. A big part of this is due to insufficient expertise, where many of our most prominent reporters, pundits, and bloggers, lacking personal experience in the area, are nonetheless willing to launch themselves boldly forward, relying too much on superficial, sometimes inaccurate understandings of Russian politics. We do have a lot of very good, very informed journalists and pundits working in the area, but for various reasons they’re not the ones driving the conversation right now. That trickles down to blogs (heck, we’re experts at feigning our own expertise), which in turn launches stories on social media, stories that spread widely regardless of quality. This problem is far from limited to Russia (I won’t even presume to know who to trust on Syria), but since Russia’s currently in the crosshairs of American media (for good reasons), it’s hard to ignore how glaring the problem is.
Russia is a massive country with a complex, difficult history, not a simple “thing” that can be understood with a website or a book or two. There are competing parties, competing interests, long-term animosities and power plays and shifting public opinions. Putin’s exaggerated “image” has traveled farther than the man, though even the Putin of 2017 is not the same as he was a decade ago, something that barely registers in Western writing on Russia. Words and concepts (like “oligarch” or “state-run media”) get applied without nuance or ambivalence, as if each were a mummified object ready to be dropped into an analysis. A wide ranging, sometimes hostile group of enemies might be all labeled Putin allies for no other reason than some kind of proximity to Russian power.
Bad reporting makes it easier to believe just about anything, and if there’s one lesson we can learn from the last decade or so of Russian history, it’s how dire a situation we find ourselves in when the basic channels of information (for that matter: the basic trust that information is reliable and accurate) break down. Steady erosion of press freedom will do that. We’re seeing the same problem in the U.S. now, albeit for different reasons, and it’s likely to get worse. If we’re going to survive this, we have to become better consumers of media.
With that in mind, I wanted to put together a short diary on sources for information about Russia (in English. If you can read Russian already, you’re a few steps ahead.) But this is not a passive list of “good” versus “bad” writers: it’s a challenge to engage with various writers according to their strengths and weaknesses. It’s a call to shape your own understanding of the news by reading a handful of these writers in dialogue with one another to get a better sense of the reality that feels, at the moment, so depressingly contingent.
What are some qualities you should be looking for?
GOOD: expertise in the region. Have your sources studied or worked on Russia and/or Eastern Europe? Do they speak the relevant languages? This might include people who were born and raised in Russia or the former Soviet Union, current citizens and emigres alike (Masha Gessen, Julia Ioffe, Alexei Kovalyev, Tanya Lokshina, Ivan Nechepurenko, Simon Ostrovsky, Leonid Ragozin, Mikhail Zygar, among others); and non-native correspondents, journalists, and editors with work experience in Russia (Catherine Belton, Miriam Elder, Mark Galeotti, Alec Luhn, Christopher Miller, Kevin Rothrock, Max Seddon, Matt Taibbi, Joshua Yaffa, and many more).
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should take their word uncritically, and some of the names above do give me pause for reasons related to politics, methodology, or just plain bad behavior. They are not all of equal quality. But they generally won’t fall for the kinds of easy mistakes that sometimes mar the work of broader, non-Russian speaking journalists and pundits. Juxtaposing a few of them at a time can also help you decide which ones you think are doing better quality work, and which are more disposable.
Similarly, blogs and other sites dedicated to Russia are going to give you a better return on reading investment than generic political blogs. The Moscow Times publishes in English and is editorially independent (so much so that it’s run into trouble in the past). RFE/RL is an easy-to-use resource for news by people in and about the region. I’m a fan of NYU Jordan Center’s All the Russias blog, which posts some great, casual academic writing. Jim Kovpak’s blog, Russia Without BS, is also a very good resource (and sometimes partners with StopFake, a Ukraine-based site aimed at analyzing propaganda of all kinds). The internet’s a big place and there’s lots of good stuff out there, so you might as well find the stuff that studies Russia seriously rather than intermittently.
ALSO GOOD: narrow focus and/or expertise on relevant subjects. Expertise need not be linguistic/cultural alone. For example, if you’re interested in Russian online trolling, you should be reading Adrian Chen, an expert in internet behavior but not Russia who nevertheless parlayed his expertise into required reading on Russia’s troll farms and disinformation campaigns. Likewise, if you’re interested in cybersecurity and Russia’s information war, you should be reading Jeffrey Carr, who’s written extensively and smartly about both. Because the “Russia” theme touches on so many different areas — the aforementioned, plus U.S. government issues, surveillance both foreign and domestic, long-term geopolitics, economic trends, etc. etc. — it’s worth seeking out people who’ve spent time exploring the many niches individually to have a better sense of the whole.
As above, read these people skeptically, especially when they drift into culture-specific territory (I recently winced my way through a paragraph of Russian media analysis by one of the above), but they’ll generally be your best filter for news relating to the issues themselves. So, for example, if you come across a news story about Russian trolls, it’s worth checking to see whether Chen has weighed in, since he’ll be able to provide perspective often missing from the more superficial treatments of the topic.
This ties into the next point:
NOT SO GOOD: general-purpose pundits. If you have a go-to voice on Russia and Syria and U.S. healthcare and SCOTUS and climate change and gerrymandering and trade conflicts, you’re probably not getting the best or most sophisticated take on this issue (or any of them, for that matter). These are often the pundits who drive the public conversation because they already have a built-in audience for their overall politics or approach, but their work can be blind to nuance and ambivalence at its best, and sloppy and oversimplified at its worst.
We shouldn’t fetishize expertise uber alles — experts have their own blind spots, their political motivations, their biases — but politics in Russia is neither a small nor a simple issue, and it’s hard to expect good analysis from a pundit who may not be familiar, or only superficially familiar, with the major players, their histories, their conflicts, etc. You want someone who can tell a Kalugin from a Kulagin.
Now, it is true that experts can look at a topic too narrowly, and that people with broader areas of interest might be able to spot macro-patterns that aren’t always apparent to the near-sighted. Moreover, general-interest pundits can provide an accessible entry point into the material, where some experts are too technical and often writing for each other: if I told you Dmitri Kiselev said something crazy today (it being a day ending in -y), you may not know who he is and whether or not it “matters”, so generalists might provide the right kind of introduction. In connecting with a broad, non-expert readership, pundits do have a role in disseminating information.
It’s a very good habit, though, to do two things: 1) check these general-purpose pundits against the experts in the areas where they’re wading, and 2) check if the pundit you’re reading has done the same (i.e. sought out that expertise before clicking “publish”). The quality material will stick out, and what you’ll often find is true of the weaker pundits is that, in an overzealous rush to “connect the dots,” these various dots and lines of connection turn out to be ambiguous, contentious, or outright mistaken, creating the wrong impression about How Things Work.
A final warning on this point:
BAD: pundits who treat every development as another nail for their sole, persistent hammer. You know the type, so I won’t name names, but there are certain writers whose opinions you can predict regardless of the information they digest, so there’s really no point in reading them: they’re often just squeezing other people’s reportage into their own inflexible molds. If everything coming out of Russia is just a proxy for another story, a handy metonomy for the writer’s usual concerns... don’t bother. If they do manage to unearth some previously unknown fact (since even bad journalists/pundits can do good work sometimes: facts don’t care who discovers them), take a minute to see how more informed figures respond. That’ll provide you with a decent barometer.
One thing I’ve tried to do in this diary is suggest that there are no real “absolutes” here. The new media landscape requires us to be active consumers. You need to be conscious and informed about the sources of your news and try your best to make good choices, to check and double-check information against more than one person with an eye toward each person’s level of knowledge and engagement. Add to my lists above: they’re not exhaustive! Ignore the ones who disappoint you: your time is precious! But I will draw one absolute line in the sand:
Don’t waste your time reading Louise Mensch.