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DANCES WITH
BEARS
How to water Russian
journalism
By John Helmer
MOSCOW - England is far too sunless and wet to
be able to grow olives. In Nyons, in Provence, where the
best Mediterranean olives have been grown since Roman
times, the peasants have two bits of advice for
olive-growers. Roughly translated, the advice for proper
pruning and cutting out of old wood is, "Undress me,
says the olive tree, and I will dress you." The advice
for digging the ground and fertilizing around the tree
roots is, "Oil my feet, and I'll oil your mouth."
When it comes to journalism on Russia, the
advice for neophytes is much the same. In the days of
the Soviet Union, and in the time of the tsarist censors
before that, foreign and domestic journalists learned to
protect themselves by writing between the lines - a
space that could only be understood by those privy to
the code. For a very short time in the early 1990s, all
of the pruning and all of the fertilizing that had gone
on for years before suddenly produced a bounty of
reporting that revealed what had only to be hinted at
before. That harvest was brief. The state gave up its
property, and the commercial interests that took over
the media and now dominate it through advertising
applied different arboreal methods. Nowadays, "oil my
feet" generally means editorial favors traded for money,
delivered one way or another.
Andrew Gowers is
the editor of the Financial Times (FT), the business
newspaper based in London that is the property of
Pearson Ltd. According to his staff, Gowers has no
experience reporting from Russia, or knowledge of what
his paper's reporters were doing in Moscow in the years
before he came along. Gowers has declared that his
newspaper has not negotiated promotional coverage of
Mikhail Fridman's Tyumen Oil Co (TNK) and that the
editorial and advertising processes of his newspaper are
separate. Unknown to Gowers, there is substantial
evidence supporting the credibility of the sources who
say otherwise.
Apparently, Gowers was not
involved with TNK. In his place, Chrystia Freeland, a
Financial Times editor, has revealed that she personally
initiated an FT interview with Fridman, who controls
TNK, as well as the Alfa Bank group. She hasn't revealed
what she knows about negotiations that were taking place
in parallel and continued just before the interview took
place in Moscow.
While the record of the
Financial Times' publications may not conclusively prove
a relationship between coverage and advertising, it
certainly corroborates the promotional arrangement the
sources have reported. On March 15, the FT published an
interview with Fridman, reported by Robert Cottrell, in
which Fridman is described as "an astonishingly nice man
in conversation - a youthful 38, and by far the most
diffident and least sinister figure among the 20 or so
tycoons who dominate Russian big business". Since
Cottrell didn't spell out what he knows about the other
19 or so tycoons, let's say that his enchantment, if not
promotional in intent, was promotional in effect.
Fridman had reason to be confident that no uncomfortable
matters would be raised or reported by Cottrell. They
weren't.
On April 1, in an anonymously authored
special Financial Times report on Russia, Fridman is
again quoted with approval, and, on the same FT page,
there appears a large advertisement for Fridman's Alfa
Bank, which includes the message, "We know how you can
plug into Russia". Coincidence?
On May 6,
Fridman issued a writ alleging that he and his Alfa Bank
had been defamed in an article published on February 7-8
by Les Echos, the Financial Times' sister newspaper and
the leading business daily of France, fully owned by the
Financial Times parent company, Pearson. Fridman's writ,
filed with the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris,
claims that published allegations by Martine Royo, the
reporter for Les Echos, are false and defamatory. Among
the alleged libels in Les Echos, the text of the writ
cites allegations of corrupt takeover, tax avoidance and
other nefarious practices in the Russian oil industry,
as well as links between Fridman's companies and the
sunken oil tanker Prestige, which has recently polluted
the Spanish and French coasts.
Les Echos is
currently preparing its defense and has revealed that,
prior to publication, it had repeatedly sought an
interview with Fridman and repeatedly been refused. In
the texts of the Financial Times' interview with Fridman
on March 15 and the special Financial Times report of
April 1, there is no reference to the subject matter of
the earlier Les Echos report; nor to an internal
analysis of the Alfa group prepared by the European Bank
for Reconstruction and Development that was disclosed by
Les Echos; nor to the US and UK court cases, where
allegations of racketeering and other offenses against
Fridman and his companies have been put on the record.
One can only wonder why the Financial Times would spend
so much space on articles promoting Fridman, and at the
same time spend no space on investigating him?
On May 27, the Financial Times published a fresh
article by Andrew Jack, this time reporting what was
described as a pattern of threatening lawsuits in
Moscow, London, Frankfurt and Paris by Russian business
figures aiming to suppress newspaper coverage critical
of their business practices. The Financial Times
mentions several Russian litigants by name and a lawsuit
against its sister newspaper in Russia, Vedomosti. It
fails to mention Fridman or his lawsuit against Les
Echos. Nor does the article mention Gowers' threat,
published in a Washington newsletter on May 7, to sue
me. One rule for plaintiffs, another for defendants?
According to Gowers' US article, "our
newspaper's reputation for independence - which is
appreciated by advertisers as much as other readers -
has always been supported by a strict separation of
editorial from advertising." My report, he added, was
"entirely incorrect and libelous". The Financial Times'
claims invite readers to seek the reason its interview
and reportage of Fridman failed to ask a single question
from the public record that had been analyzed by Les
Echos. When probed for how that could have happened and
how Fridman must have anticipated it when he gave
Freeland his consent to be interviewed, Freeland did not
reply.
If Gowers himself didn't know what Les
Echos had published on Fridman and the Alfa group in
February, it is improbable that his subordinates did
not. Freeland had been the Financial Times'
correspondent in Moscow from 1995 until the crash of
1998. She rewrote her reportage in a book published in
2000 which refers at length to Fridman. In 2001, when
she was an editor at the Toronto Globe and Mail, she
employed two journalists in Moscow to report on TNK's
depredations against more than one Canadian oil company.
One of those reporters was me.
When Jack, the
author of the May 27 report, was asked questions, he
said it had been Freeland's idea to do the interview
with Fridman, but he didn't know what she and he had
said. Jack admitted he attended the interview with
Fridman. He also said that when he had been researching
Russian tactics of intimidating the press with lawsuits,
he didn't know that Fridman was suing Les Echos. A line
from his story reveals that Jack knew something of the
shenanigans in Paris, because he mentions that Oleg
Deripaska's Base Element group is currently suing Le
Monde. Asked how he could have been ignorant of
Fridman's suit, he had no reply. Asked why the FT should
disapprove of the Russian tactics but use them itself
against me, Jack continued to be silent.
In the
olive groves of Western journalism in Russia, trees will
fail to bear fruit if the roots are allowed to stay too
dry in summer and too wet in winter. Striking the right
balance is what the peasants of Nyons understand. And so
it is with journalism on Russia, too.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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