MediaWatch: June 1990
Table of Contents:
Reporters Mourn Collapse of Communism
CASTIGATING CAPITALISM
The Marxist economic system which crippled Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is crumbling, but that has not made network correspondents optimistic about the future. Several think capitalism is even worse.
"Communism is being swept away, but so too is the social safety net it provided," CBS reporter Bert Quint warned from Poland on the May 9 CBS This Morning. "Factories, previously kept alive only by edicts from Warsaw, are closing their doors, while institutions new to the East, soup kitchens and unemployment centers are opening theirs," he charged. Who will profit from Poland's new freedom? "A few slick locals, but mostly Americans, Japanese, and other foreigners out to cash in on a new source of cheap labor. And for the Poles, where are they for this first springtime of freedom? Somewhere, it seems, at the start of a long, hard road to nobody really knows where."
Steve Hurst, CNN's Moscow reporter, doubted whether Soviets with "no collective memory of capitalism" can ever adapt: "Can the people here deal with free markets at all, gradual approach or no? "Two days later, on the May 24 PrimeNews, Hurst contrasted the benefits of communism with the looming threat from capitalism: "Soviet people have become accustomed to security if nothing else. Life isn't good here, but people don't go hungry, homeless; a job has always been guaranteed. Now all socialist bets are off. A market economy looms, and the social contract that has held Soviet society together for 72 years no longer applies. The people seem baffled, disappointed, let down. Many don't like the prospect of their nation becoming just another capitalist machine."
CBS' Barry Petersen saw no appeal in Soviet capitalism May 14, since "people don't want to give up their cheap prices in a land where a loaf of bread costs about three cents, where a street car ride is less than a penny, and a phone call costs even less than that." To change all this he concluded, "means abolishing state subsidies, and accepting higher prices, unemployment and uncertainty in a country which has always guaranteed cradle to grave security for its people."
Assertions that communism prevents hunger and homelessness were shattered by the May 20 installment of Washington Post reporter David Remnick's "Vast Landscape of Want" series. "To describe the Soviet Union in terms of overwhelming poverty is no longer the work of fire-breathing ideologues from abroad. Now even the press organs of the Soviet Communist Party ruthlessly survey the wreckage of everyday life. Nothing, it seems, poisons ideological purity more thoroughly than an empty shelf."
