( Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik / Associated Press )
The journalist Masha Gessen recently wrote a piece called "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" in the New York Review of Books. Rule #1 is: "Believe the Autocrat. He means what he says." But when a leader makes false statements or contradicts himself, how should he be covered?
Gessen warns that in the Trump era there will be an impulse to normalize, causing coverage and thinking to drift in a Trumpian direction. She saw that drift when she returned to post-Soviet Russia after years of living in the United States, and noticed that even the way certain words were used had become constrained. She talks to Brooke about how the press need to bridge the gap between reporting the facts and telling the truth, and how historical lessons offer a way forward for covering Trump.
Song:
The Hammer of Los by John Zorn
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In a recent talk with ProPublica, journalist Masha Gessen suggested that the Trump era could inspire reinvention and renewal for journalism and maybe even a few new beats, specifically a language beat or a language watch. It’s advice that’s in keeping with Gessen’s study of autocracies, like Russia, and in line with her widely-shared piece for The New York Review of Books, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” in which she warns that there will be an impulse to normalize, causing coverage and thinking to drift in a Trumpian direction. She saw that drift firsthand when she returned to post-Soviet Russia after years of working in the US.
MASHA GESSEN: It was almost a physical sensation, how constraining the Russian language was because so much of it had been abused, and so we couldn’t use the language, to give you an example, words that were in any way connected with ideology. And I don’t mean, you know, sort of Communist words, I mean words like “freedom.” We had been saying for decades that the Soviet Union was the freest country in the world. There was a popular propaganda song that we sang as children, there is no country where a man breathes as freely as he does in the Soviet Union.
So how do you use the word “freedom” when you've been using it to lie for all those years?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: The fact is you don’t, and the response that the first generation of Soviet journalists invented was to use very sort of choppy businesslike language that had no high concepts, that reported just the facts this minute sort of thing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: It worked. As an antidote to that abusive language, it worked. It was also hugely impoverishing because we couldn’t discuss big things in small language.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In your piece on six rules for surviving an autocracy in The New York Review of Books, Rule #3 is institutions will not save you. And you note that it took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system. In Turkey, it happened faster, in Poland it took less than a year. And you can see that American institutions are much stronger. We have checks and balances here, we have a stronger press. But you still said we need to stop thinking that America is so exceptional. And you’ve also suggested it's a failure of imagination to think that it can't happen here.
MASHA GESSEN: Right, most Americans and the media certainly didn’t believe that there was even a possibility that Donald Trump would be elected president.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: And I think part of the reason for that disbelief was an inability to look around at the world and consider the possibility that the United States is part of a worldwide trend of reversal of democracy -
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: - and a worldwide trend of right-wing populists coming to power. If we looked at European elections, European democracies falling like dominoes at this point, I think we would have a lot more concern. And I'm not saying there are exact parallels, but there are certainly always lessons to be learned from what's happening elsewhere.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here’s a great parallel that you wrote about. You quoted the chess champion Garry Kasparov recently, his metaphor about Putin and playing chess as a way to understand our media’s relationship with Trump.
MASHA GESSEN: Yeah, so his metaphor when he first stopped playing chess and went into politics full time, he said, it’s like playing chess with somebody who keeps knocking the, the figures off the chessboard.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The papers failed to write the big story that he wasn’t playing chess. The endless fact checking is like saying, okay, he opened E2 to E4 and he knocked all the players off the chessboard. He knocked the bishop off the chessboard and knocked the knight off the chessboard, [LAUGHS]
MASHA GESSEN: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In other words, fact checking was like checking moves and we’d gone past that.
MASHA GESSEN: Right. When you have a candidate who’s lying more than 90% of the time, then checking each one of his lies is probably not the best way to go. Probably the best way to go is to say, okay, so what he is trying to say by lying 90% of the time? What is this new game that we’re playing –
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: - if we continue talking about games? But I think that this is where, actually, Putin and Trump are incredibly similar.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You have felt that they've been likened too often and that the idea that Putin is controlling Trump is completely overwrought, that Trump is well, svaya brawni [LAUGHS] – maybe how you would say it -- he’s himself.
MASHA GESSEN: I think that one thing that they do share is the cacophony of lies that they produce. And I think that the larger message there is, I claim the right to say whatever the hell I please. That’s a really important thing to understand, that the lying is the point, not only in the sense that Trump really wants you to believe that millions of people voted illegally. The point is, I will say whatever the hell I want and that is also a component of my power.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you still want the media to call them out, right? I mean, you did take some comfort, for instance, in The New York Times's willingness to call a lie, a lie. The headline that comes to mind is, “Donald Trump Clung to Birther Lie for Years and Still Isn't Apologetic.” I mean, that's not a Trumpian direction. That's a new tack altogether.
MASHA GESSEN: Oh, absolutely, no, I completely agree with that. I don’t mean don’t call him out on his lies. I mean, tell the bigger story. So that headline is brilliant because it points to the bigger story of he’s being consistent in lying. The tack in the normalization tendency is to say, oh, you know, all of that stuff that he said was just campaign rhetoric. It’s hyperbole and now he's going to become a normal politician, which is, you know, wishful thinking, simple and clear. We have to believe the autocrat.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let me just say that that was your first rule of surviving autocracy, believe the autocrat.
MASHA GESSEN: So the question then is, well, how do you believe him if he keeps contradicting himself?
BROOKE GLADSTONE: When he takes so many positions on every issue, depending on his audience.
MASHA GESSEN: So two things. One is that his constant contradictions are a message in itself, and that message is, part of my power lies in my ability to control reality. Once we understand that, we have to believe that, no, he is not to become a normal politician. He is going to be creating this cacophony of nonsense, precisely to undermine our ability to exist in a fact-based reality. We as journalists really need to be listening to that.
There are things that he’s actually been consistent on his sentiments, if not on the specifics. His anti-Muslim sentiment has been consistent. His racist sentiment has been consistent, long before he even became a politician.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: His anti-immigrant sentiment has been consistent. And so, when –
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Might as well throw in his misogyny, while you’re at it. [LAUGHS]
MASHA GESSEN: Oh yeah, we can, we can – we can go with his misogyny. [LAUGHS] His legitimation of violence in many different forms has been consistent.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
MASHA GESSEN: So there isn’t much point in focusing on whether the wall is going to be all brick and mortar or partly chicken wire. Whether it’s a metaphoric wall or a physical wall doesn't matter. What matters is that we’re entering an era of a new level of animosity and hatred toward immigrants in this country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: As you told ProPublica in an interview, we have to figure out how to tell the truth and not just report the facts.
MASHA GESSEN: Right and that’s – it’s a huge question. I was just reading Marty Baron’s, the editor of the Washington Post’s, speech when he was receiving the Christopher Hitchens Award. He said, well, everybody is asking what do we do now, and the answer is simple, just do our jobs, and our job is to tell the truth as near as it can be ascertained. I was really disappointed because I thought it was glib, because what I really would have wanted him to do is focus on the gap between facts and truth. We have to figure that out. We have to figure out sort of its size and its shape and how it keeps changing and how we bridge that gap. And just saying, you know, let’s just do our jobs doesn't really go there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thank you so much, Masha.
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MASHA GESSEN: Oh, thank you. It’s really great to talk to you. It makes me think.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Masha Gessen is author of Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. And you can find many of her articles in The New York Review of Books.
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, it turns out that a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media.