COLUMN LEFT : Today’s Terms of Confusion : How can the citizenry be informed if journalists can’t describe the world properly?

Maybe the reason why the nation’s young people are profoundly indifferent to, and ignorant about, world affairs--a finding announced in a recent Times Mirror poll--is because they can’t figure out what on Earth anyone’s talking about. I can’t say I blame them.

Take one of the big issues in the world today, namely the future direction of the Soviet Union and its Communist Party. Now figure the confusion of the aforementioned young people as they furrow their brows over the news reports.

They’ll come across the word “radicals” somewhere in the first few paragraphs of any story datelined Moscow. Now, in this country the word radical usually denotes someone or something on the left, unless carefully glossed with the qualifier “right-wing.”

But the people this word radical is applied to in the Soviet Union wouldn’t look out of place on the Republican National Committee. They believe profoundly in the teachings of Milton Friedman, laureate of tooth-and-claw capitalism. They believe that the market will fix anything. When you tell them that there are anywhere from 75,000 to 100,000 homeless in the streets of New York, they refuse to believe you.

Not so long ago Bill Keller of the New York Times quoted Pyotr S. Filipov of “the boisterously reformist Leningrad City Council.” Filipov announced that he agreed “with those who say we must hurry quickly away from Marxism-Leninism, through socialism, to Reaganism.” Call this sort of posture “conservative” or call it “neo-liberal.” But don’t call it “radical” or “reformist” because it isn’t. Would Keller have called the Reagan gang, when it took over at the start of the ‘80s, “boisterously reformist?”

In those news dispatches from Moscow you also find people called “conservatives.” On closer inspection, these “conservatives,” turn out to favor common ownership of the means of production, proletarian internationalism abroad and egalitarianism at home. Such characteristics used to belong to people known as “socialists” or “revolutionaries.” People in the United States calling for a planned economy, revolution in the Third World and a lift in the top marginal income tax bracket to 80% are not called “conservative.”

Moving on through our typical report from Moscow, we usually find the description “pro-democracy.” This is applied to the privileged elite of Friedmanites around Mikhail S. Gorbachev who want capitalism to be imposed on the Soviet Union by administrative fiat. They want authoritarian capitalism or what Russian socialists (see description of “conservatives” above) called “market Stalinism.” Call it the South Korean model. Don’t call it “pro-democracy.”

Small wonder that the younger crowd throws the newspaper aside and punches up “Entertainment Tonight” on the channel changer. How can you hope for an informed citizenry if journalists can’t describe the world properly?

Sometimes the journalists themselves get confused, which is not surprising when they describe policies designed to throw millions of people out of work (the Polish “solution”) as “market freedoms.” In more sensible times, this “freedom” was called “market discipline,” which is how capitalism thrives, since capitalists use the discipline of unemployment or the threat of a runaway shop to lower wages and hence raise profits. And of course the Russians themselves are absolutely confused since they have adopted the descriptive terminology of Western journalists. The other day Pravda, now the house organ of Soviet Friedmanite would-be capitalists, hopefully described the country as “moving to the left.”

Journalists like simple models. The basic battle in reports from the Soviet Union is between “radicals” or “reformers” and “Stalinists.” As we’ve seen, the former aren’t radical and no one in the Soviet Union wants to go back to Stalin. In fact almost all the Soviet bureaucratic elite want to inject a measure of capitalist relations into the economy. What this elite fears is not some mythical “conservative-Stalinist opposition” but Soviet workers who don’t relish the prospect of a Polish solution. They want full employment. So far as I can recall, the authors of the Hawkins-Humphrey bill in this country, seeking to legislate full employment as national policy, were not called “conservative” or Stalinist.

In this country the journalistic model is of “pragmatists” against “ideologues.” Pragmatists are people who swear not to raise taxes and then do so. Such people used to be called “liars,” but that’s another story . . . .