THE RIGHT BOOKS

In Moscow Meets Main Street (The Media Institute, 3017 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007; $12.95), Ted J. Smith III offers an explanation for wide-spread popular resentment of our national purveyors of news and opinion. His book is a first-rate, elegantly written inquiry, centered on two case-studies reflecting the national television networks’ treatment of news stories concerning the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. In these examples, Smith thinks, the basis for the pervasive but inchoate belief that the media pose a threat to both American democracy and American defense is discoverable.

According to John Corry, a formidable television critic for the New York Times who contributes a stylish and tough-minded introduction to the book, “Perhaps the single most dramatic finding in this . . . work is that, from 1981 to 1985, there was a 550 per cent increase in the number of times Soviet citizens appeared on American network evening news broadcasts. Glasnost? Hardly. Cultural exchange? Not much. Most of the Soviet citizens were government officials. I am not sure I know all that this means . . . but obviously we are in a new age of information. Soviet apologists can speak to us over television with comparative ease; constant viewers may know the faces of Vladimir Posner, say, or Georgi Arbatov or Gennadi Gerasimov, as well as they know the faces of most of the President’s Cabinet.” These men —“trained propagandists” for the Soviet Union, in Pat Buchanan’s pungent phrase—for some years have been allowed by the three major networks something like equal opportunity (if not equal time) to present the Soviet side of major international disputes to tens of millions of Americans, under circumstances that suggest that their statements carry the same moral and intellectual authority as those of American officials.

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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In Moscow Meets Main Street (The Media Institute, 3017 M Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007; $12.95), Ted J. Smith III offers an explanation for wide-spread popular resentment of our national purveyors of news and opinion. His book is a first-rate, elegantly written inquiry, centered on two case-studies reflecting the national television networks’ treatment of news stories concerning the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. In these examples, Smith thinks, the basis for the pervasive but inchoate belief that the media pose a threat to both American democracy and American defense is discoverable.

According to John Corry, a formidable television critic for the New York Times who contributes a stylish and tough-minded introduction to the book, “Perhaps the single most dramatic finding in this . . . work is that, from 1981 to 1985, there was a 550 per cent increase in the number of times Soviet citizens appeared on American network evening news broadcasts. Glasnost? Hardly. Cultural exchange? Not much. Most of the Soviet citizens were government officials. I am not sure I know all that this means . . . but obviously we are in a new age of information. Soviet apologists can speak to us over television with comparative ease; constant viewers may know the faces of Vladimir Posner, say, or Georgi Arbatov or Gennadi Gerasimov, as well as they know the faces of most of the President’s Cabinet.” These men —“trained propagandists” for the Soviet Union, in Pat Buchanan’s pungent phrase—for some years have been allowed by the three major networks something like equal opportunity (if not equal time) to present the Soviet side of major international disputes to tens of millions of Americans, under circumstances that suggest that their statements carry the same moral and intellectual authority as those of American officials.