Talk:Pravda

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Contents

1 Finding some sources 2 Question about date of origin 3 needs a mention of Iskra (spark) 4 Reading between the lines in Pravda

Finding some sources

If someone could track down ISBN 0820450081 or ISBN 0807611867 it could be useful. Matthewmayer 23:02, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Question about date of origin

This sentence is confusing (and ungrammatical): "Pravda was founded as a newspaper for workers in 1912, the Bolsheviks started legal publication of the newspaper in St. Petersburg on April 22, 1913."

Was Pravda started in 1912 or 1913? - Maybe what was meant was that it was unofficially published in 1912, then first officially published in 1913?—Mateo SA 05:27, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC) Talk

needs a mention of Iskra (spark)

The article needs a mention of the 1st Russian communist/socialist newspaper — Iskra (spark, Russian: Искра). It's a strange thing that the referenced article "The spark that lit the revolution" doesn't contain any references to Iskra as well. BACbKA 08:40, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Reading between the lines in Pravda

Although Pravda's content was tightly controlled by its editors, it was not impossible to discern truth from the newspaper. Many readers became sophisticated in guessing at the truth. The phrasing of a news item was often an important clue when guessing about the real meaning. The most newsworthy items were usually mentioned briefly and placed in obscure sections of the paper; oftentimes, the back pages of the paper contained more real news than the front pages. Bad news that happened inside the Soviet Union was usually not mentioned directly; instead, the paper would fabricate a series of similiar disasters occurring in other nations.

Any specific examples of this? Ambi 03:12, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The most known one would be the ecology issue. Instead of talking about the Soviet cities contamination, Pravda would address the ecology in Tokio and New York, saying that the policemen in these cities must wear gas masks in order not to faint (I remember reading this myself, and I don't know to date how close to truth this report by Pravda was!) On subtler covert channel reading of Pravda news, a well-known St. Petersburg mathematician and dissident, late Revolt Pimenov, (prosecuted by the Soviet regime during the Brezhnev times; later (during Gorbachev times) became an elected into the people deputy counsil), suggested to his friends giving a special course as to how to determine the next swing in the course of the communist "party line" by interpreting the mere order of the Politbureau members as printed in the daily Pravda issue. (When falling out of favor, they were demoted down the list, and hence the ministries/ideas they were associated got lower priorities). BACbKA 08:25, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

How is this different than say US reporting on ecology? Anyone who compares US corporate coverage of say global warming versus news coverage in the rest of the industrialized world, as well as polls showing that the US population believes what the US media is often reporting, which is different than coverage in the rest of the world, could say the same thing. Most people in the US do not know how much antipathy has built up in other industrialized countries against the US for not signing Kyoto, despite that being lightly covered. [1] (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,168701,00.html) Ruy Lopez 01:20, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm sorry...I just don't see the relevance of the analogy. There's a big leap between what BACbKA reported and your average, Murdoch press, biased reporting, which appears to be what you're talking about. Ambi 02:34, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

There is a big leap between what BACbKA claims and your average American corporate press. I have never seen anything as far-off as saying policemen in New York and Tokyo must wear gas masks in order not to faint. Actually, it would have been true to have said cities like Los Angeles were massively polluted decades ago (they even had smog forecasts during the evening news weather reports), but I can't imagine Pravda reporting that as news. If it did appear it was probably a joke in an editorial or something ("If they don't clear up pollution in LA soon they'll have to wear gas masks, haha").

As far as wacky American reporting, why limit it to media owned by Murdoch and the like? Let's look at an example from Time Magazine from two years ago.[2] (http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501020513-235504,00.html) The title -"Nepal: Return to Year Zero - Nepal's Maoist rebels are murdering, beating, bombing and looting—all in the name of 'protecting the people'". The first sentence of the article "Even with knives as sharp as razors, it takes time to skin a man." The last sentence - "As I climbed into my car, the man held onto my arm, eyes wide with fear, and hissed in my ear, 'Terror. Terror,' before running back to his house." The middle of the article is more of the same. Pravda almost always took a pro-USSR line (just as the US corporate media almost always takes a pro-US line), but I never saw the type of stuff you can read in Time like this or other "mainstream" US corporate media. I mean, this just looks like the kind of copy you'd find attached to US WWI propaganda ("Beat back the Hun"). With the point being that the idea that papers beyond Murdoch's being straight news is incorrect. And Pravda was always a lot more newsy and less propaganda than the type of thing I could have read in Time two years ago Ruy Lopez 16:59, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Reading between the lines in any newspaper is the job of whole sections in intelligence services all over the world. Pravda is not an exception. There was no intentional "hide and seek" or I Spy game here. Information could be recovered from occasional word slips, basing on a knack in Party phraseology and standard propaganda tricks, such as "Letters of workers to the editorial board". Mikkalai 03:04, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean by "There was no intentional "hide and seek" or I Spy game here.". I agree about what you say on the intelligence-type reading between the lines, but this probably alludes to the story about Pimenov that had I mentioned in the talk above. As for the article text you have cut away for some strange reason, it was mentioning one specific technique out of the Pravda's propaganda bag of tricks, along with my ecology example. When something nasty happened, people would sometimes hear the rumours seep through despite all the efforts to suppress the facts; to soften the blow to the socialist well-being image, they did try to report on similar problems in the "capitalist enemy's camp", and when they didn't have enough facts to support themselves, they blew existing facts out of proportion or fabricated news out of complete lies. BACbKA 16:35, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'll give you an example from the American media. Suppose one was of the mind that since the Cold War end, the US has wanted a permanent military base somewhere in the Middle East, like it has in say the Phillipines or Panama. With good candidates being places like Saudi Arabia or Iraq. And that it was decided pre-Iraq invasion that it might be less trouble to have that base in Iraq than Saudi Arabia (although perhaps the people might be reassessing that view now). Well, if one was of this mind, as I am, where in the news can I find such a statement? Well, you can't, nowhere in the American news does it say "America simply wants a military base in some centrally located large Persian Gulf country". It always says the US is defending freedom or something like that. In fact, I myself was unable to find a statement like this, but Noam Chomsky in Hegemony or Survival points to a paragraph in a Wolfowitz interview in Vanity Fair[3] (http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html) where he says "There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things." Well, that gives us some meat for our thesis, but you have to search high and low to find that paragraph at the end of one interview with one official, and then try to read between the lines to see what it means. I have to read between the lines all of the time - the Wall Street Journal is a pretty honest paper, one of the most honest, but they beat around the bush on certain issues, especially regarding consequences of actions they endore. Ruy Lopez 17:14, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

This is a good example of manipulative propaganda moves from some media, but it is a bit different direction, isn't it? We were talking about Pravda deliberately masking some particular piece of news, that it would like to go unnoticed or at least cloaked. When it came to justifying intervention elsewhere (Afghanistan and the Eastern Europe invasions earlier), there surely was brainwashing like you describe above... Funny thing, the motives were different a bit: in the U.S. people during voting have always been able to select candidates based on their platforms (OK, slogans all right and brainwashing too and you have to read between the lines to understand what they really might be meaning and never be sure until they're in the office for quite some time) – yet in the Soviet times the elections usually had only one candidate and whoever tried to vote against or, penguin forbid, write some anti-government slogan on the paper bulletin, he'd be in for KGB hot pursuit, whereas the electoral platform was all the same "advancing the cause of Lenin's/the Party teachings and the proletariat well-being etc..." I'm so happy I have forgotten the rest!BACbKA 19:11, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In reply to: As for the article text you have cut away for some strange reason,. The reason is simple: irrelevance to the subsection. Your "bad news" example is related to propaganda mechanisms, not to the way how to extract info "between the lines". How from the report about smog in Los Angeles you may guess a blow-out in Chelyabinsk? As for front pages vs. back pages, you seem no forget the layout of the paper (or have never seen them) Their content is absolutely incomparable in terms what information domain was covered. The mentioned phrases deserve a separate article, kind of Propaganda mechanisms in the Soviet Union, since they are not restricted to Pravda. (...This anecdote with the punch lines: "Pravda?" -- "Net, Vechernij Tbilisi!", remember? :-)(off-topic, but reflects the attitude) Mikkalai 21:54, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

My "bad news" example was given as an answer to Ambi's question, as an example of news fabrication. The Politbureau members order one was about the reading between the lines. Ambi seemed to be satisfied with the examples. I didn't address the front vs. back issue at all, it was in the original text; now that I think about it, I agree with you on this point. I still think, nevertheless, that, at least until the propaganda mechanisms article you call for is written, something on the "similar bad news" fabrication technique should be present. BACbKA 10:49, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

As long as a source is found, I agree with BACbKA. Ambi 11:00, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes, but it still goes under the title "propaganda", rather than "reading between lines", be it an article or subsection. Mikkalai 02:31, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)