Reading the News

Robin Wagner-Pacifici, currently a professor at Swathmore College, is an expert in conflict politics.

A reasonably deliberate reader of the New York Times might have been flummoxed by an article that appeared last month on the front page.  The article, titled, Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent, tells many moral tales simultaneously – none of them thoroughly, none of them systematically.

Beginning with the story of a raid by plainclothes Russian police on the environmental group, Baikal Environmental Wave’s headquarters (confiscating the group’s computers to search for pirated Microsoft software), the article presents no fewer than five topics and themes for the reader to consider.  Among these are political corruption and abuse of power in contemporary Russia, capitalism’s dilemmas dealing with piracy, Microsoft’s complicity with authoritarian governments in trumped-up “crackdowns” on software piracy, problems of unemployment in Siberia and the re-opening of a paper factory in Irkutsk, and the pollution of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake, by just such factories.

A long article, continuing on an inside page and including three photographs (one of dead fish on the banks of the lake) and one chart, the article promises an in-depth report of a significant story.  But what is the story?

Normally, newspapers neatly divide the world of news into pre-ordained categories of experience – International News, National News, Sports, Business, Health and Science, Home, Arts and Leisure.  These divisions give us readers an illusion of clarity and coherence when absorbing information about real-world events.  But events are complicated and don’t come in pre-packaged categories.  So on the one hand, kudos to the New York Times for short-circuiting the readers’ expectations.

But on the other hand, the story also short-circuits the reader’s ability to make critical connections among the issues inelegantly tumbled together (capitalism, authoritarianism, unemployment, and environmentalism), or the ability to move upward to a higher level of analysis, and to critique the assumptions of a world-view that, in spite of its acknowledgment of political dissent, is never troubled by the imperatives of capitalism itself.

Here, David Harvey’s book, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference is a useful interlocutor.  Harvey aims to do precisely what the article avoids – to ask questions that connect Siberian workers’ need for industrial jobs with the dangers of pollution of Lake Baikal, with the global dominance of Microsoft, with capitalism’s contingent complicity with political authoritarianism.  Through an analysis of the philosophical and political roots of both socialist thought and environmentalist thought, Harvey sets out to answer the question: “how did we arrive at this seeming impasse in which the struggle for emancipation from class oppressions appears so antagonistic to the struggle to emancipate human beings from a purely instrumental relation to nature?”

Of course, Harvey’s question allows us to make sense of the “Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent” article in one way only.  There are other angles of vision, to be sure, including that exploring ongoing challenges for “post-authoritarian” societies to be truly post-authoritarian.  The point is that deliberate readings of confusing media reports take effort and time and a willingness to engage in a reconfiguring reading.  They require, in other words, theoretically informed deliberation.