Reading Journal: Sources

Reading Journal:
Tuesday Dec. 6, 2011

In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, Miram Elder reports on the Russian response to a recent parliamentary election where Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, lost a significant amount of seats.

I found this story really tough to dissect because there’s so much going on in it (and so many sources cited). Elder provides quotes from 8 different sources that cut across the political spectrum.

There seemed to be three main things that constituted the news or the “what” of the article: firstly that Putin’s party is waning in power (this clearly carries the biggest impact), secondly that news of election results were followed by protests, and thirdly that the protest was met by a police crackdown ordered by the Kremlin.
The lede indicates that the immediate news we should be focusing on is that “The Kremlin mobilised thousands of police, interior troops and pro-government youth groups on Tuesday night to crack down on protests,” but clearly this is just a smaller piece of bigger news.
The police seem to be the news-maker of the immediate news, and on that score they are used as a source. But the bigger news-maker is probably the Russian parliament who voted Putin’s party down, and no one from the parliament is quoted.

I categorized the protestors as the people affected by the news, since they weren’t involved in the results, but will be voting in the upcoming election (which, by the time I post this blog entry, may have already happened)—their voices were the most represented in the article. But the only sense-making came from the author, in specific contextual examples like her inclusion that if Putin were to get reelected he would be in power until 2024. Similarly in the final paragraph she touches on the importance of LiveJournal in Russia as a mobilizing platform for youth. I think both of these areas could have used quotes from experts to further back up the author’s assertions, and also because the article feels uneven in its coverage of protestors vs. experts.

The NYT published an article on Thursday following up on comments made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that held the Russian election had not been conducted fairly, and the response that her comments elicited from Putin.
I thought that the New York Times piece was more insightful and had a more balanced spectrum of sources than the Guardian. The authors, Herszenhorn and Myers, set up the article first with a play-by-play of Clinton and Putin's (the two news-makers here) interchange.

First they bring in Putin's displeased remarks about Clinton“The first thing that the secretary of state did was say that [election results] were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet received the material from the observers").

Then the authors go on to analyze Putin's statement, concluding that his choice to "single out" Clinton was "strikingly personal","effectively thrust the United States on the side of the protesters in the streets challenging the Kremlin’s authority." They point to Clinton's previous "outspoken" criticism of the election as a motivating factor behind his strongly worded response.

The authors then segue back to the protests that broke out after the election, and bring in a new voice: Sergei A. Markov, a Russian political analyst. As a key sense-maker, Markov affirms that the opposition demonstrations are indicative of a widespread belief in Russia that there was fraud at play in the election, "especially", as he says, "in Moscow and Petersburg."

His predictions about what would eventually come out of the elections were especially helpful to understanding the broader implications of Putin's discrediting remarks toward Clinton—and to rising tensions between the US and Russia. "Mr. Markov said he expected the government to treat the public like a whining child. 'The authorities will attempt to conduct themselves with society as a parent would a child who is crying and demanding some kind of toy,' he said. 'In this case, it is not correct to go out and buy the child a toy, but rather distract him with something else.' Mr. Putin’s accusations of foreign meddling could provide that distraction.

I think that the core news of this article (Clinton's allegations that the election were unfair) most directly affects Putin and his representatives, and since he was quoted responding to Clinton (as was Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin) the news-affected perspective seems covered. I don't think they needed to include protestors, but it probably wouldn't have hurt.