Scary bear

Matt Yglesias writes:

[C]ompare attitudes toward Putin's illiberalism to attitudes toward friendlier petro-states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, etc. It's totally understandable that the United States government would take a different attitude toward governments who try to challenge US international hegemony than the one it takes toward those governments who help re-enforce it.

But to a striking extent, the press just follows along on this path. Gulf states that are far less democratic than contemporary Russia are typically portrayed as "moderate" or "reforming" whereas Putin's Russia is painted as a dark totalitarian nightmare.

I usually think Yglesias' media criticism is spot-on, but I'm going to have to disagree with this one. First of all, Russia has tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and Saudi Arabia does not. So that means Russian autocracy is a little scarier than Saudi autocracy. Second of all, Russia has been getting less and less free in the past decade, while Saudi Arabia has been getting (slightly) more free. So Russian autocracy is more disappointing than Saudi autocracy.

And it's not like our press ignores the evils of Saudi, Pakistani, and Egyptian totalitarianism. I see just as many stories on abuses in those countries as abuses in Russia.

However, Yglesias gets it right when he says:

It's widely understood, for example, that insofar as Vladimir Putin backs unpopular undemocratic pro-Russian leaders in the "near abroad" this is likely to make Russia even less popular in Russia-skeptical elements of the population of those countries. The analog of this, that staunch American support for unpopular undemocratic pro-American leaders in the Gulf and in Egypt is a significant source of anti-American sentiment is, by contrast, completely absent from the national conversation.

I would be very happy to see more acknowledgment of "blowback" in our media coverage.