MediaWatch: January 1990
Table of Contents:
"If Anyone Can Do It, Gorbachev Can"
NBC'S Gorby Love Letter. NBC Nightly News almost matched Time in a gushy year-end portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev. Viewers of Bob Abernethy's December 30 puff piece may have questioned the absence of chocolates under Abernethy's arm.
"Before Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was a police state, run on suspicion and fear," Abernethy began. "The world was divided, East vs. West, each provocatively armed, each obsessed with the other as the enemy. And then came Gorbachev, a loyal Party man, a survivor in the old system, but somehow able to think in new ways," from whence, "fear began to wither away."
Abernethy praised Gorbachev for holding "the first largely free elections here in 70 years, creating a new outspoken Congress of Peoples' Deputies." Yes, but they're free only so long as communists win a majority. In a November speech Abernethy seemed to have missed, Gorbachev declared the Soviet Union will remain a one-party state. Abernethy credited Gorbachev for almost everything. "This fall Eastern Europe responded to Gorbachev's policies," and "practicing what he preached, Gorbachev did not intervene."
Abernethy ended his portrait in high drama, dangling his hero over the abyss of a Soviet Union seething with domestic discord, and agitated at its inability to adapt to Gorbachev's modern vision. Abernethy hoped his hero will emerge unscathed: "Making this a truly modern country after years of tyranny is no easy task, but after all the other things he's done, here and throughout the world, one would have to conclude if anyone can do it, Gorbachev can."
