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26 RICHARD SHAFER on to become an acclaimed screen writer but was executed in 1937 during the Stalinist purges (Mueller 1998, 11–13). Hopkins (1970) explains how American press theory holds that journalists are obliged to stand somewhere between citizens and their government—serving in the “watchdog” function. From that perspective, he says, it was hypocritical for Soviet journalists to speak of their commitment to the people while disseminating endless government statements and interpretations of events, with little or no candid critical analysis from the journalists themselves. Either the press was a publicist for government, or it was a voice of the people. The Soviet retort was that its press system harmonized with Marxist-Leninist ideology and that government and party were one—meaning the press drew its power from the people. If a state-owned press organ opposes the government, it must also, simultaneously, oppose the people, an obviously illogical position. In addition to the professional press, worker-peasant correspondents known as rabsel’kor were charged with facilitating communication from the masses to the central government. The Moscow Institute of Journalism set up a program to encourage the rabsel’kor; within two years it was reorganized into a college offering a three-year course. Still, it was far more ideological and political than practical or professional. Although students took courses in editing, publishing, and literary criticism, the objective was to produce partisan journalists. In 1930, small weekly or biweekly raion (county) newspapers were launched to use these worker-peasant correspondents who contributed essays and polemics; by 1924, forty thousand wall newspapers extended the central party’s influence into distant communities. With regard to one of the most radical approaches to directly using the press for national development, Hopkins (1970, 64–65) says: A series of party resolutions organized the rabsel’kor into an assault force against bureaucracy, inefficiency, and law violations. The “shock correspondent” . . . was born. Raids were organized, whereby huge teams of worker-peasant correspondents conducted minute investigations of a given factory or collective farm and reported whatever flaws they unearthed. As before, the mass local press played a dual role. From one view, it was in fact an independent check on party policies, on economic performance and management. Although Soviet news-gathering and -dissemination conventions were o en extreme from a Western perspective, they may have had value as an interventionist model along the lines of public journalism, an alternative model espoused today by some American journalists and news organizations in recent years. THE POST INDEPENDENCE PRESS 27 Community-level journalists were charged with leading and extolling campaigns to investigate corruption, reveal factory inefficiencies, and rally agricultural and industrial workers to raise production and meet centrally established quotas. If the subsequent economic development of the Soviet Union and its emergence as a world power are valid indicators, then such press policies arguably had merit. In critiquing the Soviet press system, Hopkins says that in the constant evolution and interaction of Soviet social institutions, the press tended to assume assorted political responsibilities and duties that constituted the primary journalistic values its journalists adhered to—just as American press theory describes the duties and performance of American journalists in the context of American political and economic conditions. Hopkins cites a common Soviet reference book for journalists as listing the following values or virtues that were an ideal for Soviet journalists: (1) party orientation (partiinost), interpreted as conscious acceptance that the press is a politically partisan institution and thus expresses party philosophy and goals; (2) high level of ideology (vysokaya ideinost), suggesting that the press should be spiritually reinforced with Marxism-Leninism ideology; (3) truthfulness (pravdinost), an obligation to transmit information truthfully; (4) popular orientation (narodnost), reminding journalists of their responsibilities to the masses and simultaneously about the people’s access to the state-owned press; (5) mass character (massovost), maintaining not only that the press serves the masses but also functions among them; and (6) criticism and self-criticism (kritika and samokritika), calling on the mass media to criticize faults and failures of the party, government, and their agencies, as well as to criticize its own shortcomings (1970, 34). Hopkins acknowledges some positive aspects of the Soviet press as a tool for national development, saying, “The press has been instrumental in altering public attitudes toward farming and manufacturing methods, industrial management, distribution, work, and economic planning, to name a few of the areas radically affected as the Soviet Union developed an industrial, urban, planned...

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