All The News Not Fit to Print:
An Analysis of American Newspaper Coverage of Uzbekistan
by
Sarah Kendzior
620 West 8th Street
Bloomington, IN47404
(812) 361-6512
There was a revolution brewing in Kyrgyzstan, and CNN’s Miles O’Brien was on the story. “Well, it looks like we’re talking about another revolution in a country some of us can’t pronounce,” he told an audience of an estimated half million Americans on the morning of March 24, 2005. “We’re not mentioning any names, of course. It’s kind of like Kyra-stan, but it really isn’t. We’re calling it ‘The Tulip Revolution’: People power in the ‘stans, coming up!”
His co-anchor, Kyra Phillips, was intrigued. “I love tulips!” she exclaimed. “Hey, Miles, is that a new portable Playstation?”[1] And so it came to be that as citizens rioted in the streets of Bishkek, as Kyrgyzstan’s President Askar Akayev sought to find refuge in Moscow, as Kyrgyz opposition parties struggled for control of the first potential democracy to emerge in Central Asia, the anchors of America’s oldest and most respected cable news network discovered the joys of a video game system you can fit in your pocket.
The flippant tone and questionable priorities displayed by CNN are not surprising. Foreign coverage, particularly of nations like Kyrgyzstan which are low in both international prestige and, as was the unfortunate case for Mr. O’Brien, vowels, has long ceased to be the priority of the American journalistic establishment. While twenty-five years ago foreign news reports constituted an average of 45 percent of network newscasts, this number declined rapidly following the end of the Cold War. By 2001, newscasts on some nights ran no international stories at all. Newspapers, traditionally more comprehensive sources of foreign coverage, followed suit. In the months prior to September 11, 2001, foreign stories accounted for only 2 percent or less of the average daily paper’s content.[2] Despite a post-Taliban pick-up in the months after September 11, coverage of nations with which America is not directly engaged (such as Iraq or Afghanistan) remains minimal in both the print and television media. “International news coverage in most of America’s mainstream papers has reached almost the vanishing point,” writes CNN’s Peter Arnett in a 1998 article for the American Journalism Review. “Today, a foreign story that doesn’t involve bombs, natural disasters or financial calamity has little chance of entering the American consciousness.”[3]
Nowhere is this more true than in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia[4], best known to Americans, to use Mr. O’Brien’s parlance, as “the ‘stans.” The newly independent nations of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan constitute a media black hole, a faceless, inconsequential mass locked between the more engaging regions of China, Russia and the Middle East. These countries are not alone, of course, in their relative lack of media allure. Most nations outside Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and Central America are of little concern to the American press; some, such as the African republics, are covered only in terms of what are perceived to be unifying continental themes: starvation, war, AIDS, visits by Bono. Individual nations of individual people, each with a unique story to tell, are simply not worth the time, consideration or expense.
Even by these lowered standards, however, Central Asia remains a special case. Unlike, for example, the Middle East or Africa, the Central Asian nations lack palatable regional definition and defy easy cultural categorization. Originally classified by the State Department as “Europe” due to their membership in the Soviet Union, they are now part of “Asia” or the ambiguous “Eurasia”, despite being nearer to China than to any European state. As Muslims whose cultures, languages and traditions differ greatly from their media-dominant Arab counterparts, the Turkic peoples of Central Asia can prove baffling to an uninformed U.S. press, which is unable to find a familiar way to depict their identity to the public. Central Asia is therefore most notable in its absence, the only region not even worthy of inclusion in the international weather report[5]. No one cares if it’s raining in a country that doesn’t, for all media intents and purposes, exist.
What’s startling is that while coverage of Central Asia remains minimal, its importance to American governmental interests has increased dramatically since 9/11. The United States maintains a strong military presence in Afghanistan and has bases in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and, until 2005, Uzbekistan. Not a day goes by when a political pundit does not discuss the war on terror and the threat of Muslim nations ─ particularly dictatorships with a large population of unemployed young men (as is true of all Central Asian republics) ─ to the United States. The CIA and the FBI have joined the oil industry in the effort to find translators and area experts familiar with Central Asian languages and cultures. Not since receiving independence in the early 1990s (an event covered even then with far less fanfare than that of fellow post-Communist nations in Europe) has Central Asia been so indisputably newsworthy, so deeply crucial to American interests.
So why, then, has it been shunned in favor of the portable Playstation? Many would argue that it is the apathetic American people who are at fault. “The interest simply isn’t there,” said ABC News vice president Paul Friedman in a 2002 interview, “and when the impact [of 9/11] subsides, so will the interest. It’s the nature of the beast.”[6] Yet a 2002 survey by the Pew Institute shows American interest in foreign coverage as “high and unmet”[7], making one suspect whether it is the superficial quality and scant quantity of said coverage that prompts public indifference. After all, a cursory glance at the New York Times bestseller list of the past few years reveals a high demand for nuanced, informative, and in-depth reporting about Muslim and Central Asian nations. “The Sewing Circles of Herat”, “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, “The Bookseller of Kabul”, “Taliban” and “The Kite Runner”, all recent bestsellers, hardly indicate a populace uninterested in global affairs.
Assuming American interest is high, or at least evident, then who is to blame for the lack of coverage? Academics often fault the journalistic profession itself, accusing it of superficial reporting, corporate pandering, and bawdy sensationalism, all claims difficult to dispute. They also accuse it of propagating a vast conspiracy to distract the American public from real issues and concerns, particularly those of cultural minorities.[8] This is false. Journalists are far too incompetent to orchestrate a conspiracy. What’s more, in today’s media recession, which has continued unabated since 2000, they cannot even afford one. “It requires a great sense of responsibility and a lot of financial support to do foreign news, to do it right, to have your own staff around the world covering the news. So you want to worry about the bottom line? You cut. You cut the foreign desk here, an overseas bureau there,” says NPR’s senior foreign editor Loren Jenkins, who estimates the cost at a quarter to a half million dollars per foreign bureau.[9] Most news outlets simply don’t have the resources, especially not to cover a remote area like Central Asia perceived as too obscure for an American audience. The newspaper world is based not on ideology but speed. The goal, particularly since the advent of the Internet, is to get the story fast and to sell the story hard. Foreign coverage, with its complications of time zones and language barriers and travel expenses and complex geopolitics, simply cannot further the corporate, and thus editorial, objective.
There are, however, a few newspapers that continue to make foreign coverage a priority. Foremost among them is the New York Times. “Every morning, the Times’ front page comes closer than any other news source of information to determining what will count as major news for the next twenty-four hours,” writes media critic Seth Mnookin in 2004’s Hard News. “The New York Times continues to serve as a beacon for the rest of the media world, and it continues to set the standard to which all media outlets must aspire or against which they must rebel.”[10] Although The Times has historically covered Central Asia more extensively than any other American newspaper, it does not currently have, nor has it ever had, a correspondent based in a Central Asian republic. Nor does or has the Washington Post, another leading paper who has long had a close, if tense, relationship with the American government, and whose editorials on Central Asia often seem to predict or mirror US policy. By any normal set of standards, their coverage of the region is abysmal. But compared to, for example, USA Today, they are paragons of journalistic ambition, as in 2004 USA Today, the most popular newspaper in America, ran no articles about the Central Asian republics at all.
The New York Times and the Washington Post (as well as the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, two other American newspapers renowned for their foreign coverage) therefore bear a far greater responsibility for what is covered in Central Asia and how it is covered than they do for nations where competing coverage exists. This raises a number of concerns. What constitutes a story as “newsworthy” for American consumption? How do these newspapers help shape public perception of Central Asia? In what ways does the coverage of Central Asia differ from that of other areas in the world, and from that of other Muslim nations in particular? How does colonialism, particularly the inaccurate yet common perception of Central Asia as a satellite of Russia, frame American reporting? And what are the repercussions of this coverage, or lack thereof, for America’s relationship with nations in the region?
To attempt to shed light on these issues, I have analyzed over one hundred articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post written about Uzbekistan in 2004. As the most populous of the Central Asian republics, Uzbekistan traditionally receives the most press, but 2004 was a particularly notable year for the nation. In March and April 2004, Tashkent, the capital, was rocked by a deadly series of suicide bombings, the first such attacks in Central Asia. In July 2004, the American and Israeli embassies were bombed, killing two people. The attacks in Tashkent followed similar bombings in Istanbul in November 2003 and in Madrid in March 2004. Yet while coverage of the “war on terror”, in which Uzbekistan is an alleged US partner, remained unabated, coverage of Uzbekistan’s own terrorist attacks remained minimal, superficial, and occasionally inaccurate. An examination of articles from the same newspapers written in 1992, the first full year of Uzbekistan’s independence, finds that while the framework of the stories has moved from the Cold War to the War on Terror, the apathy towards the subject matter and resulting journalistic inadequacy remains the same.
The style of American coverage of Uzbekistan is emblematic not only of the problems plaguing international reporting in general, but coverage of Muslim and developing nations in particular. This inability to realistically perceive, consider and convey the issues of these nations is not limited to the media, but mirrored in the actions and ideals of the American government. For impoverished, oppressed nations such as Uzbekistan, there is a moral imperative that is simply not being met by the American press. As will be shown in this analysis, as often the sole source of information about Uzbekistan, the New York Times and the Washington Post exercise an inordinate amount of influence, not only on the Bush administration, but also on Uzbekistan’s own government. More than in other parts of the world, there is a real opportunity for reporters in Central Asia to affect positive change. Whether newspapers will rise to the challenge remains to be seen.
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In Peter Lefcourt’s 2005 novel, The Manhattan Beach Project, producer Charlie Berns has a problem. Working for a rogue division of ABC, known as ABCD, he has begun secretly taping a reality TV series -- pitched as “‘The Osbournes’ meets ‘The Sopranos’”-- about the family of a warlord in Nukus, Uzbekistan. Trouble is, Nukus is in the province of Karakalpakstan, and there are too many languages (Uzbek, Russian, the Kazakh-like Karakalpak) to translate for the subtitles. The solution, according to his associate, Buzz, a Peace Corps worker turned producer, is simple: just make it up.
“Charlie, let me ask you something,” he says. “How many Americans you think understand Uzbek?”
“Not a whole lot.”
“How many of them are eighteen-to-thirty four with disposable income?”
“Even fewer.”
“And how many of them have a Nielsen box?”[11]
The conversation is fictional, but for American journalism, the sentiment is all too familiar. Covering a nation like Uzbekistan involves a minimum of journalistic accountability. Who, after all, will catch your mistakes or judge your errors? Certainly not the Uzbeks themselves, who exist in a media blackout under the dictatorship of Islam Karimov. Still fewer are the Americans with enough of an interest in the region to root out discrepancies or critique ethical considerations in the mode of reporting. For prestigious newspapers such as the Times and the Post, the impetus for public accountability is even less, as they lack the media competition that traditionally encourages newspapers to check their facts and consider their sources.
And who, exactly, are the sources of information for the US media? To gain any insight into the methods of reporting in Uzbekistan, one must look first at the nation’s history. Uzbekistan, Uzbek ethnicity, and the Uzbek language were simultaneous constructions of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Prior to Russian incursion in the mid-nineteenth century followed by Soviet domination in the early twentieth, Uzbekistan was part of Muslim Turkistan, a vast land of rival khanates marked by both nomadic traditions and a rich Islamic literary and cultural heritage. The primary languages spoken were Tajik, a form of Persian, and “Uzbek”, a Turkic language standardized and, to a great degree, transformed by the Russian Soviets. Following Uzbekistan’s entrance into the Soviet Union in 1920, Russian became the language of the educated, the elite and the powerful, and Russian suppression of Uzbek cultural, religious, and literary traditions continued unabated until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Uzbekistan became independent, yet Soviet influence remains evident in the dictatorial style of its president, Islam Karimov, and in the widespread economic stagnation, environmental devastation, and religious, media and political suppression for which this nation is known. Recent years have been marked by brutal conflicts between Karimov’s administration and the increasingly religious Muslim population, who are seeking to reclaim their faith as well as their independent national identity. Attempts to cover such stories in the Uzbek press have led to torture, imprisonment, and sometimes death for Uzbek journalists.
In short, not an easy nation from which to report. But instead of showing sensitivity to Uzbekistan’s former status as subject of Russian colonial domination and current status as dictatorship where fellow reporters are suppressed by a post-Soviet entity, the American press instead bases its coverage of the oppressed from the land of the oppressor. The average article about Uzbekistan, excluding those from wire services, bears a Moscow dateline. On the rare occasion a reporter actually ventures into Uzbekistan, they almost always remain in Tashkent, by far the most Russian-speaking, and atypically cosmopolitan, city in the nation. Given the low priority of Central Asia in the journalistic establishment, one must assume these reporters do not speak Uzbek or Tajik, but are carrying out their interviews either in Russian or through a government-supplied (and likely Russian-speaking) translator. In Uzbekistan, whether one can or cannot speak Russian is revealing of both social and economic status. A Russian-speaking Uzbek is much more likely to be educated, urbane, and wealthy than the bulk of the non-Russian speaking Uzbeks who live in impoverished villages away from the capital.
Focusing reporting on Tashkent not only mars the quality and diversity of coverage, but also is revealing of an inadvertent colonialist mentality among the American press. “It would be impossible to be taken seriously as a reporter or expert on Russia, France, Germany, Latin America, or perhaps even China or Japan without knowing the requisite languages,” notes Edward Said, “but for ‘Islam’ no linguistic knowledge seems to be necessary since what one is dealing with is considered to be a psychological deformation, not a ‘real’ culture or religion.”[12] Said here writes of reporters’ inabilities to learn Arabic or Persian, but his comments are even more relevant for Central Asian Turkic nations, who face not only an anti-Muslim media prejudice but are at times portrayed as indistinguishable from Arabs, their fellow Muslims, or Russians, their fellow Soviets. Not only do few journalists learn the languages, there appears little awareness of what languages there are to be learned, and what relying on an outmoded lingua franca, Russian, says about American perception of the region. Mired in Cold War policies and prerogatives despite all evidence that these standards are obsolete, the American press is the Condoleeza Rice of international reporting.