LAURA FLANDERS: Well, we’re going to shift gears now and move to media coverage of the situation in Russia, of the summit, of the situation of the economic collapse. We’ve heard an awful lot about Russia’s political and economic crisis in the last few days and weeks. President Clinton’s summit with embattled Russian President Boris Yeltsin is in the middle of all the chaos, attracting even more in the way of headlines and first story news coverage. But what exactly have media been reporting, and what have they been leaving out? Well, perhaps that’s another question we should be asking. It’s one asked by James Ledbetter, a media columnist in The Village Voice, a New York City newspaper.

In your column this week, Jim — welcome to Democracy Now!

JAMES LEDBETTER: Thank you.

LAURA FLANDERS: — you charge the media, really, with incredible mass amnesia. Amnesia about what?

JAMES LEDBETTER: Well, I think that there’s a large degree of denial when you talk about American coverage of Russia in the post-Soviet era. The American media, for a variety of reasons, sort of seized on Boris Yeltsin as the only man who could lead Russia out of the various problems that faced it when communism collapsed. And it’s almost as if, somehow, if we didn’t prop Yeltsin up, that nuclear weapons would rain down on us. And so, his election in '96 was covered, I think, like no other election. I went back and was looking at some clips from The New York Times in May of ’96, and there was an article about Yeltsin going around making campaign promises he can't keep. That crazy Boris, you know, going around telling people that they would — you know, their village would get the bridge they’d been waiting for, etc., and sort of laughing at the fact that they knew that he didn’t have the money to pull this off. And I think that any pundit in America in 1996 who said a Yeltsin victory means economic collapse in Russia would have been laughed off the op-ed pages. It was not an opinion that one was even allowed to hold. And so —

LAURA FLANDERS: It’s kind of been interesting in the last few days that I’ve only seen mentioned once the fact that Yeltsin is in such fragile state, psychologically and healthwise, apparently, that the summit meeting, so called, had to be scheduled early in the day, because he’s at his best in the first part of the day.

JAMES LEDBETTER: That’s the only time that he’s competent, yeah. And so, what I think has been vastly overlooked in coverage of the current Russian economic crisis after the de facto devaluation of the ruble is that the people who have primarily benefited from so-called economic reform in Russia have been a very small economic elite. We see coverage of the so-called seven oligarchs, the new capitalists in Russia who control, it is said, half the Russian economy. But the tremendous investigative reporting that’s been done about these oligarchs over the last several years, tying them to organized crime and to violence for hire and to just pure, pure corruption, what would be considered in the West pure corruption, has been nowhere. It’s as if somehow we’ve forgotten that these people all have links to organized crime.

LAURA FLANDERS: You mention one person in particular I’d like you to talk about —

JAMES LEDBETTER: Sure.

LAURA FLANDERS: — Boris Berezovsky.

JAMES LEDBETTER: Boris Berezovsky is a fascinating figure in modern Russia. He started out as a car salesman — he owns car dealerships — and sort of turned this into a vast empire that includes banking and now, primarily, media in Russia. Berezovsky is certainly the man who is trying to put Chernomyrdin, Viktor Chernomyrdin, back into power. He’s very close to Chernomyrdin, and he considers him essential to his, Berezovsky’s, economic future.

Berezovsky was linked to the Russian mafia in a painstakingly detailed Forbes magazine article in late 1996 called “Godfather of the Kremlin.” It lays out the case that Berezovsky was responsible for the assassination of a very well-known Russian broadcaster. There’s a close associate of Berezovsky’s who had a criminal conviction. He’s bad news, and he would be considered a gangster in any other context. But because of this hands-off treatment, and I think also because he employs an American public relations firm to handle his publicity, the press has treated him as if he’s a kind of a romantic robber baron. The New York Times actually compared him to Vanderbilt, which I think is a slur against the Vanderbilt family.

But this view of who has benefited from Yeltsin, and who will continue to benefit should Yeltsin stay in power, is simply absent from last week’s media coverage. And I think it’s appalling, the kind of distortions that we get in American coverage of what is obviously a very important crisis.

LAURA FLANDERS: And who is the U.S. PR firm working for this godfather of the Kremlin?

JAMES LEDBETTER: Edelman Associates, a very, very large public relations firm. And curiously, the person who handles the account is Mike Deaver, who was Ronald Reagan’s image maker. I mean, it’s kind of — there’s a kind of wonderful synergy here. Here you have an accused mobster being represented by a man who was a convicted liar. But the mobster, of course, was exposed most prominently in Forbes magazine, the publisher of which is Caspar Weinberger, who himself was convicted for lying to Congress. And so, there’s a kind of rogues’ gallery quality to the whole thing. But again, that angle of it is utterly absent.

LAURA FLANDERS: We’re talking with James Ledbetter, who writes a media column in The Village Voice, which is a New York City paper. The current edition, the paper that’s out today, bears his column on the coverage of Russia, which is what we’re talking about. You mentioned that perhaps one reason that Berezovsky is getting the light coverage that he’s getting is because of his role as a global media player. Explain that to us.

JAMES LEDBETTER: Well, Berezovsky began diversifying a couple of years ago and now owns broadcast properties and some print properties in Russia and has begun to branch out into global media. In April of this year, Rupert Murdoch, the global media king, bought 38% of a large telecommunications firm in Russia called [PLD] Telekom for about $80 million to $90 million, and half of his share was then sold to Berezovsky. So Berezovsky got to go to the big media summit that Murdoch has every year in Sun Valley, Idaho, with John Malone and Bill Gates and the CEOs of the large American and Western media companies. So, Berezovsky has become sort of one of the clan. And I think that’s one of the reasons that his associates, his ties to the Russian mafia, are not closely examined by U.S. media. And I think that’s shameful.

LAURA FLANDERS: Now, you mentioned Rupert Murdoch’s role in all of this. Are you suggesting there’s a direct relationship between those kinds of commercial relations and coverage?

JAMES LEDBETTER: Oh, I think there is. I think —

LAURA FLANDERS: Can you illustrate such a thing? I mean, is it?

JAMES LEDBETTER: Well, I mean, I think you can try and find coverage of Boris Berezovsky in the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and you won’t find any. His name has never been mentioned in the New York Post, to the best of my knowledge. I did a database search, and I can’t guarantee that it’s problem-free, but you don’t see the spotlight trained on the people who are Murdoch’s associates. I mean, another perfect example that’s been pointed out in the current edition of Mother Jones is that Murdoch sits on the board of Philip Morris, the tobacco firm, and the coverage in Murdoch news outlets of what tobacco companies do is virtually nonexistent or celebratory, you know, the sort of attacks on anti-smoking laws or on the proposed settlement of the state tobacco suits. I think there’s no question that Murdoch is probably among the chief offenders in this area, but there’s no question that the business ties of large media companies, to a large extent, determine the way those media companies cover business.

LAURA FLANDERS: And to go back to the Russia situation, we heard on this program yesterday, in an interesting discussion, that the U.S. administration has, really, the potential to lay its support behind two different options. You have the kind of the, heaven forbid, Communist Party-dominated Duma, and you have the banker oligarchs who are backing Yeltsin. And the ramifications of picking the less democratic of those two were put out quite clearly on the show yesterday by the people that we had on. We’re not just talking media imbalance here. We’re talking policy that could have ramifications for people’s real lives. When it comes to the bankers, you talk a little bit about some of the corruption in the sort of histories of some of those banks. It is extraordinary that you’re drawing on documentation that has come from mainstream media.

JAMES LEDBETTER: Absolutely.

LAURA FLANDERS: It’s not like you’ve gone to Moscow and dug up stuff that nobody knows.

JAMES LEDBETTER: No, no, absolutely. It’s simple research.

LAURA FLANDERS: But it’s dropped out of the coverage.

JAMES LEDBETTER: Exactly. And that’s — I think you raise a good point. I think at this point the State Department is vastly controlling the media coverage of Russia, that the media has forgotten the material that they themselves once dug up. And they haven’t really forgotten it; they just chose not to use it, because at this point they’re listening to what the State Department is telling them. And the picture is being drawn so starkly that they’re almost afraid to sort of rock the boat in terms of talking about the reality of the situation. Now, you know the Communists — Gennady Zyuganov is no picnic, either. I don’t mean to portray it as a very simple black-and-white equation. But I really think that we can’t have any serious policy discussion of what U.S. policy toward Russia should be, unless the full impact of so-called economic reform is represented in our media.

LAURA FLANDERS: Very quickly, do you ever get response from any of the reporters that you criticize? The example, if you bring this to their attention and say, “Why — you reported on this months ago. Why are you forgetting it now?”

JAMES LEDBETTER: There is no thinner-skinned group than newspaper reporters or television reporters. I hear from them all the time, and most of what they have to say is unprintable.

LAURA FLANDERS: All right. We’re talking with James Ledbetter, who writes a media column in The Village Voice, a New York City newspaper. Look out for him as he moves to many different venues, including the web and elsewhere. James Ledbetter, thank you so much for being with us here on Democracy Now!

JAMES LEDBETTER: Thanks for having me.

LAURA FLANDERS: You’re listening to Democracy Now! We’ll be back with you in 60 seconds.