Russia, Trump and Manafort: A Test of the News

Rachel Bauman

Politics, Security, Society, Russia, Ukraine, United States

The media doesn't mind being an echo chamber.

In 1920 Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote a forty-two-page supplement for the New Republic magazine called, “A Test of the News.” They scrutinized Western media coverage of the Bolshevik revolution and aftermath. They noted that various newspapers had concluded over ninety times that the Bolshevik regime was going to collapse. Their conclusion was damning: "The news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see. The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors."

It’s a verdict that is worth recalling as overheated coverage of American and Russia is proliferating. Consider a recent article on the CNN web site, which was entitled “Russia continues to shadow Trump.” In it, the CNN correspondent Nicole Gaouette pointed to criticism of Donald Trump’s statements about Russia. There can be no doubting that Trump has created a furor with his comments about possibly lifting sanctions imposed over Russia’s takeover of Crimea and his favorable comments about Russian president Vladimir Putin. Gaouette quoted a number of critics, including former deputy assistant secretary of defense Evelyn Farkas and American Foreign Policy Council senior fellow Stephen Blank.

What Gaouette did not do was to cite any experts who might take a somewhat different view of whether or not America should seek to improve its relations with Moscow. Prominent experts that might have offered a different perspective include everyone from former ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock to Harvard University’s Graham Allison. Nor did Gaouette provide a broader political context, which is that the Obama administration is reaching out to Moscow, in the form of Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to work jointly with Russia in Syria.