Different Degrees of Candor

By Patricia Blake

Soviet television viewers who watched the news one night last month glimpsed something extraordinary. There, on the screen, appeared scenes of a drug bust in Moscow, complete with pictures of needles and an unidentified white powder. While the camera showed police rushing into an apartment and arresting its occupants, an announcer explained how the suspects had tried to hide the goods, but to no avail.

That report is just one more example of Soviet Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, in the media. Over the past year the state-run press has been exploring the problems of Soviet society with unprecedented candor, discussing such once forbidden topics as drug abuse, prostitution and urban blight. In addition, newspapers and TV have covered the kinds of national catastrophes--an earthquake, an attempted airplane hijacking and the sinking of a Soviet submarine--that were once hushed up.

Few glimmers of glasnost have penetrated Soviet press treatment of the outside world, however. Capitalist countries are still routinely described as being plagued by unemployment, labor strife and racism, while news of the East bloc consists largely of stories about factory openings and trade agreements with Moscow. In one issue last week, Pravda, which usually devotes two of its six daily pages to foreign news, carried items about a student strike in France, a protest in India over the handling of the Bhopal disaster, a "crisis in the rightist camp" in Spain and a controversy about a book on the British intelligence services.

Much of the international coverage focuses on the U.S., but there is a more heavy-handed slant on some stories than on others. After U.S. News & World Report Correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was arrested as a spy in Moscow in late August, TASS declared he had been "caught red-handed" and that "it would seem proper that his bosses should still their tongues out of shame." The Soviet news agency used the episode as an opportunity to lambaste the CIA, reminding readers how the agency "prepared such subversive acts as the intrusion of a South Korean Boeing aircraft into Soviet airspace or the assassination attempt on the Pope, later falsely claiming that Bulgaria was involved."

Accounts of the Reykjavik summit, albeit dense with rhetoric, tended to stick closer to the facts. If a story continues to have mileage as a propaganda vehicle, however, the Soviets are reluctant to drop it: two months after the Iceland meeting, the press is still explaining why Ronald Reagan's Space Defense Initiative should be curtailed and blaming the U.S. for the arms race.

Under Gorbachev, news is reported more promptly, but the ideological spin remains. When National Security Adviser John Poindexter resigned, TASS immediately carried an announcement, then added, "In this way the Administration is trying to hush up the scandal over secret U.S. arms deliveries to Iran, which were carried out on the order of the White House." In a report last week, a Soviet TV correspondent in Washington called the Iranian affair "shameless and lawless, even by American legal standards."

When covering U.S. society, the Soviets often concentrate on the poor, exemplified by Joseph Mauri, a New Yorker who recently rocketed to fame in the U.S.S.R. as a prototypical oppressed worker. Last April, although Mauri had an apartment and a part-time job, he starred in a Soviet TV documentary about New York's homeless. He was then invited to the Soviet Union, where he toured factories and addressed meetings. Since his return to New York City in late August, Mauri has been interviewed repeatedly by Soviet journalists. Last month a television crew filmed him complaining that he was "literally showered with threats" after returning to the U.S.

Vremya, the country's nightly news show, uses extensive footage supplied by satellite from U.S. and European networks, but the pictures lean toward the violent: terrorist bombings in Paris, demonstrations outside U.S. military bases in Europe, prominent Americans arrested outside the South African embassy in Washington. Those selective scenes represent the height of responsible journalism compared with a Soviet report, publicized in September and repeated by TASS last month, that the AIDS virus was produced by American germ-warfare experiments.

Nonetheless, there are signs that foreign coverage is growing less propagandist. A documentary on Soviet emigres in America aired on state television in September. Though some of those interviewed on the show described the difficulties of life in the U.S., others criticized the country they left behind. International Panorama, a weekend news program, last month ran a segment praising McDonald's for its fast-food efficiency. "I get angry every time I see some scoundrel on television talking about how bad everything is in the U.S.A.," says a senior Soviet official. "There is much we can learn from America, and that kind of reporting causes ignorance and misunderstanding."

Even direct communication is sprouting. Moscow TV is experimenting with so-called space-bridge shows that link U.S. and Soviet audiences by satellite. In November, Russian viewers heard Talk Show Host Phil Donahue and his Manhattan audience sharply question Arnold Lockshin, the Houston scientist who defected to the Soviet Union with his family in October. "You must know that the KGB bugs telephones and rooms in the Soviet Union?" Donahue asked Lockshin, who had claimed that the FBI had harassed him in the U.S. Recently Pravda held its first international round-table discussion with correspondents from Western publications, including TIME'S Moscow bureau chief. Though the five-hour meeting was unexceptional by Western standards, it was a startling departure for the Communist Party's flagship paper, which printed a page of excerpts without altering the foreigners' dissenting views.

Still, as long as the Soviet Union remains a closed society, the word glasnost in Russian is bound to mean something less than openness in plain English. Alexander Vasinsky, writing in October in Izvestia, pointed out that openness is "conceivable only if there are different opinions." But if these are not forthcoming, he added in a compelling metaphor, "openness will turn into a mirror wherein one's own opinion will look lovingly at itself, like Narcissus."

With reporting by Reported by James O. Jackson/Moscow