Jon Hellevig: Time And the Incredible Shrinking Brain

In its latest edition the US magazine Time did its own bit of pre-election ranting about Russia and Putin with its cover story "Russia's Incredible Shrinking Prime Minister." The message is in the subhead which reads: "His grip on power is shakier than ever. That makes the world a more dangerous place." Intrigued by this caption, I signed on to Time's website to get the whole story, but there was none. In vain I searched the whole site over and over again, but all I found about Putin and Russia was a story by Simon Shuster under the heading "See Putin Run: How the Prime Minister is Relying on Russia's Heartland." After all this must be it. I thought. Begrudgingly I read the stuff a couple of times hoping to detect the analysis by which Time motivated its bombastic claims. But all I found was an insipid diatribe focusing on Putin's campaign trip to Kurgan, one of the provincial towns of Russia with a population of 300 thousand people. It turns out that either Mr. Shuster wrote the wrong story, or the editor in charge of the front cover did not read Shuster's story. Whatever, but in the article nothing much about Putin's "shrinking support," and why the world would be a "more dangerous place" for that. Shuster's article is written in the evergreen style of American exploring journalism. In this genre the gallant and unrelenting journalist is placed in a setting of ordinary people whose sentiments the journalist with his keen and receptive mind catches as his material goes about their everyday life. This style is eminently well suited for propaganda, because here you can ignore all the facts. No analysis will be needed for you are supposedly just reporting what you observe, and being an "independent journalist" representing the "free press" you are a trusted source. And this precisely overcomes the problem that the anti-Putin propaganda otherwise bumps into: it is so difficult to bend the facts to suit the story line as Russia's achievements under Putin are so truly remarkable.