The Post-Cold War Press: A New World Needs a New Journalism

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Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.

At least one sector of the press is suffering from a serious case of obsolescence. With the defense industry, armed forces and the espionage business shrinking, many correspondents in the military/security field require difficult retraining in more relevant specialties. So do yesterday's Kremlinologists. Gone are the days when clues to Moscow politics could be read in the lineup atop Lenin's tomb and between the lines of the official press; when Kremlin intrigues, while shadowy, followed certain logical patterns. Now the Russian political scene is more open but chaotic, with most familiar signposts-left/right, radical/conservative, communist/nationalist-having lost most of their meaning.

But the problem is much larger. The press is faced with at least six new factors: history, geography, global optic, journalistic agenda, sensibility and audience.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Two social scientists, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, recently maintained in The New Republic that the "ancient hatreds" constantly mentioned in reporting of strife from the Balkans to India are really new hatreds instilled by contemporary politicians. The argument is only partly convincing at best, but the writers have a point when they say that simply using the catchall label "ancient" is intellectually lazy. Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when-and who did it first. Today's victimized Croatians were yesterday's fascist oppressors of the Serbs; today's brutal, rampaging Serbs see themselves as avengers for a Muslim invasion that began in 1389. These are among the more familiar instances of a process in which revenge is elevated to an all-embracing historical principle.