TV Passes Pravda--And Heeere’s Mikhail

On my spring visit, even before I picked up my copy of Pravda from the floor of the entryway, I knew it was an important edition. Looking up at me from the front page was a large photograph of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, speaking into twin microphones.

A Moscow correspondent--even when on temporary duty, as I am--reads Pravda every morning, seven days a week. Pravda becomes a habit. For decades, Pravda sold for two kopecks, leading people to joke that the truth was cheap in Russia. That’s what Pravda means--truth. The price has gone up to four kopecks, but that’s still cheap, so the joke still holds .

However, something far more fundamental no longer holds. That is what Mikhail Sergeyevich’s Sunday photograph was telling me. Pravda is no longer the king of the hill in Soviet journalism. Television is.

From the moment of the Bolshevik victory in the 1917 Revolution, Pravda was the one, the only organ for dissemination of news. Everyone else in press, radio or television (when it came along) reported what Pravda had already published. Until Pravda published it, it hadn’t really happened.

This was not because Pravda’s editors and reporters were more enterprising, more aggressive journalists than others but because Pravda’s publisher was the Central Committee of the Communist Party. A major function of the Central Committee is to decide what should be published and what should not.

I can remember, back in the days of full censorship in the Soviet Union, American correspondents would gather every night in the seedy, but warm, anteroom at the central telegraph on Gorky Street. All dispatches had to be filed from there, and all radio broadcasts made from there, because that is where the censors were.

We would sit around, trading stories, sometimes playing cards, until Pravda was delivered to the nearest newsstand, usually around 2 a.m. Everybody would read Pravda, write their stories based on what Pravda said about major developments in the news and submit them through a sort of bank-teller window to the censor. In due course, the copy would reappear, often with sentences, paragraphs or whole pages blacked out with heavy pencil. This exclusive power of the so-called “central organ” of the press also was the law in the Soviet Union’s client countries of Eastern Europe. It was only eight or 10 years ago that the change began. Several things happened. Television in the Soviet Union was reaching a significant number of people, and was enormously popular. The state of communications in the rest of the world was galvanizing the news business. News from almost anywhere was becoming available to the public within hours, even minutes of an event, instead of days later. The Central Committee ordered a study of its basic policies on dissemination of information, and in 1978 promulgated a rather murky statement of revised policies that called for speeding up the process.

As a television reporter, I began to track the changes, and I began to see what looked like the signs of a contest. Little by little, television news began to usurp the prerogatives of Pravda. An important event, or announcement, would be reported on the television news before Pravda mentioned it. In the old days, this would have brought swift, punitive response from Pravda and the Central Committee. Yet the people of television news seemed to get away with it.

There were other little changes. Some kinds of news stories always have been slighted in the Soviet Union--bad news such as accidents or disasters. In the early 1980s, such a story would occasionally appear on the television news. A flood in Leningrad. Forest fires in Siberia. Ships trapped by early ice in the Arctic seas. In the contest with Pravda to be first with major policy announcements, the human beings in the news apparatus seemed to be tasting the old-fashioned challenge of the journalistic scoop. Some of my friends in the business accused me of reading shadows for reality, but the examples proliferated.

More and more frequently, major announcements would be made first on the Soviet evening television news program, “Vremya.” The Soviet telegraph agency, Tass, began to send important announcements on a “hold for release” basis--embargoed for publication until 9 p.m., Moscow time. The reason was that Vremya began at 9. The deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko were first announced by Vremya. A basic change also appeared in the interviews of party leaders by the editors of Pravda, the time-honored technique for making heavy policy statements on domestic or foreign issues. In the last few years, Pravda editors still asked their questions and Pravda still published the answers on its front page, but the whole interview would already have been broadcast the night before, on Vremya. The absolute authority of Pravda was not only being eroded, it was being transferred from the page to the screen.

The final step came with Gorbachev’s March 29 statement on nuclear testing. No interview with the editors of Pravda this time. Instead, he went directly to Vremya. He could have set up a special broadcast to the people, at any hour he pleased, but he didn’t. When Vremya time came, we saw the standard logo, heard the standard music, watched the same opening that appears every night at 9 p.m. However, instead of the two “anchors,” who read reports and introduce stories, we saw a simple screen announcement that M.S. Gorbachev would make a statement, and on he came. When he was done, the regular anchor man and woman appeared and Vremya went right on with the rest of its news reports, stories about a railroad, a coal mine and a motor works in Tula that was ahead of the plan.

Gorbachev had been just an element of Vremya. People would watch Vremya because Gorbachev was on; people would watch Gorbachev because Vremya was on. Vremya appears on all Soviet TV channels simultaneously at 9 p.m. How would President Reagan like to be on NBC, CBS and ABC evening news shows simultaneously?

The ultimate, definitive proof that Pravda is out and Vremya is in came with Sunday morning’s Pravda. There was the three-column photo of Comrade Gorbachev before the microphones and there was the six-column headline: “Statement by Comrade M.S. Gorbachev on Soviet television.” The words “on Soviet television” were in large type and Pravda’s typesetters must have winced with every letter. Of course, Gorbachev’s television appearance was noteworthy for several reasons. It was, at last, a use of this powerful medium by a charismatic Soviet leader in the style long since perfected by the likes of Ronald Reagan. The temptation to do more will be irresistible, especially since there’s no “equal time” rule here.

For me, the struggle for supremacy in the Soviet information machine is even more fascinating. The Sunday headline says to this longtime reader, “Pravda is permitted to bring you this story today because Soviet television has already broadcast it, yesterday.” And that’s the truth.