Historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cautions on the Press

We might all have our personal favorites including those more explicitly in the advice category from George Saunders at Syracuse quotWhat I regret most in my life are failures of kindnessquot to Drew Houston at MIT quotThere are 30000 days in your lifequot Then there are the commencement speeches that are addressed seemingly to the worldatlarge rather than to the graduatesOf these commencement speeches aimed at the spirit of the times this tradition is perhaps most longstanding at Harvard There was Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 2002 describing how he saw America in the early days of the new century and Benazir Bhutto in 1989 with his quotDemocratic Nations Must Unitequot speech Perhaps most famous of all was George Marshall when he outlined the blueprint for what would become the Marshall Plan at Harvard in 1947But of all the famed Harvard commencement speeches in my view one amp8212 above all others amp8212 is both the most important and is also quite applicable to the news media of today It comes from Nobel Laureate in Literature winner and Soviet critic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1978 The speech is well worth considering again as the world commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall39s fallAt the time of his speech Solzhenitsyn had been living in Vermont for two years having settled there shortly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974 Given that he had taken refuge in the United States and had become quite popular in many prominent American circles many expected Solzhenitsyn39s remarks amp8212 his first public comments since arriving in the United States amp8212 to consist of fawning for American lifeInstead he opted for a different course Beginning his remarks by foretelling that quotsome bitternessquot was to come in the speech that would follow he first stressed that his cautions would quotcome not from an adversary but from a friendquot After criticizing the lack of civic courage he believed was ascendant in the West as well as rampant materialism he saved his most protracted criticism for the Western pressIn this context Solzhenitsyn described the welldocumented perils of living in a nation without freedom of the press Then he suggested that the Western alternative an environment where there is little accountability amp8212 legal or social amp8212 for putting forward information that is either false or uncouth is not ideal either To this effect Solzhenitsyn argued quotIf journalists have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper It hardly ever happens because it would damage salesquotAs I described in quotWhen the News Is Wrongquot about the erroneous reporting on the alleged execution of North Korean diplomat Kim Hyokchol far too few corrections or retractions are routinely made in cases when news outlets including the most respected of publications get the facts wrong For instance today nearly six months after the reporting on Kim Hyokchol the Reuters story along with similar stories in other publications still stands without a single correction and retains its original opening quotNorth Korea executed its nuclear envoy to the United States as part of a purge of officialsquotIn a sense this is also what Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi a Russian collusionskeptic from day one was sensing when he wrote earlier this month quotAmazing that the reporters who swallowed the Russiagate fantasies whole aren39t told to worry for their reputations while the few of us who didn39t bite are treated like lepersquotIn addition to this point Solzhenitsyn raised another important line of criticism against the ethos of the Western press when he asserted that quotnewspapers mostly develop stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend What is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in collegesquotAlthough the advent of the Internet may have done something to mitigate a few major news organizations determining the narrative of the day this reminder underscores the necessity of truly independent publications both then and now This includes the once tremendously influential IF Stone39s Weekly and other publications that carry forth his spirit of editorial independence today amp8212 from Max Blumenthal39s The Grayzone on the progressive left to the heterodox podcast Wrongspeak devoted to discussing quotthe things we believe to be true but cannot sayquotIf I had to choose just one section of Solzhenitsyn39s speech to share however it would be this quotA person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of informationquot Spoken well before the onset of quotroundtheclockquot cable news smartphone addictions and Twitter this is in essence what I was arguing in my critique of the Snapchat news feature the constant dripdrop of surfacelevel information some of which concerns matters that are anything but newsworthy is no substitute for less constant and more substantive engagements with news and thoughtful commentarySolzhenitsyn39s speech which is wellworth reading in its entirety provides a useful framework for engaging with the frequent and absolutely warranted adulations of the concept of an unfettered free press This is true even if one does not accept all of Solzhenitsyn39s conclusionsSolzhenitsyn also expresses a belief that some of the excesses in Western journalism were tied to the more systemic problems he saw in the American society that he had been closely observing for the two years before It39s why he controversially suggested that as much as he despised the Soviet Union he would not want the thendominant Western culture to be ascendant in a postSoviet Russia and Eastern EuropeClick the social buttons to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cautions on the Press

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Erich J. Prince

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Historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cautions on the Press

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