Against everyone

On July 22, at the age of 71, Alexander Kokburn, a great journalist, the bearer of the great tradition and my teacher in the profession of mediacritis, died of cancer.

In recent years, he lived in California, was the co -editor of the electronic magazine Counterpunch ("Return Blow"), who tirelessly exposed the American ruling class and generally accepted stereotypes about how the modern world works. He wrote columns for the liberal magazine National and the conservative newspaper Wall Street Journal.

I met him when he was a cult observer of the cult weekly Village Voice, "the organ of workers and peasants Manhattan," as he himself cut. It was in 1981-1982: I was on a three-month internship at the representative office of the Institute of the USA and Canada in New York. Then I wrote a dissertation about the role of the media in the formation of US foreign policy.

Village Voice, the famous Levoliberal publication, on the eve of Rupert Murdok, whose right -winging views were well known. First of all, in violation of the terms of purchase, he wanted to change the chief editor. Several observers, led by Alexander, put an ultimatum to him: either the editor remains, or we are leaving. Murdok retreated, because without them they would stop buying a newspaper. Since then, in every column under the motto Beat the Devil ("Through the Devil") dedicated to the press, Alexander Kokburn devoted several offensive words to the owner of his newspaper, and always in the case. He had a brilliant feather, he masterfully (censorship) was in his columns, but all his insults were based on facts.

Around the same time, New York Times Magazin published an essay on Cambodia. Then everyone wondered if the overthrown Pol was alive, and the author of the essay transparently hinted that even from afar, he could not make a mistake with his own eyes and could not make a mistake. That is, the sensational was material! However, Alexander in his Beat The Devil drew attention to the fact that entire passages in it almost literally repeat the book, it seems, Malro, written several decades ago. And so it turned out that the correspondent did not go anywhere, but wrote travel notes sitting at home. The scandal erupted unusual. I remember the pompous editorial editorial in the New York Times under the heading of The Lie in the Times, that is, the "lie in" New York Times ", which apologized to the readers. I also remember Alexander’s bullying over them: here, they say, what is the decline of classical education among the editors.

More recently, I came across an interview with him in Russia Today about the state of modern journalism. “It is good that the blogosphere is developing. Now people can independently choose the sources of information, without clogging their heads with the nonsense that the New York Times and other similar editions published. And if traditional newspapers die there, they were the meaning of his statements, as usual, slightly shocking.

He was a friend of the Soviet Union, although his love for our country was unrequited. With its own "such indomitably independent people, our propaganda was not able to admit.

He respected Fidel Castro. “Cuba has the largest life expectancy, the highest level of medical care and education throughout Latin America. There is nothing like this in the countries in the US orbit,” he told me more than once. I, like many Soviet intellectuals, who had been fooled by that time from the Brezhnev stagnation, of course, could not believe that there was at least something good in socialism. Today, complaints that it was we who lost, abandoning socialism, have become a common place not only for the Communist Party of the Communist Party.

In the last weeks of my internship in New York, professional communication has grown into friendship. Almost every weekend, I either visited his house, or he dragged me to all kinds of exotic clubs. And everywhere I paid for me, because my internship scholarship was not enough for such a way of life. Having relaxed from the free and hopeless life in America (thanks to Julia Mikhailovich Vorontsov in the USSR Permanent, to which I was formally seconded to, the situation was implausible for the council of those years), I invited him to Moscow, promising (sincerely believing his promises) to answer his hospitality at home. But when he still came in a brief business trip - either at the very end of stagnation, or at the very beginning of perestroika, I had to get permission to communicate with him from the US and Canada Institute and Canada, lead to the Prague restaurant - an officially reserved place to meet employees with foreigners - and then make a recording of the conversation. It was embarrassed for both of us, and then I was even painfully painful for me for a very long time.

Alexander was dying for a long time and painful, but, as his co-editor in Counterpunch Jeffrey St. Cler writes, in one of the last letters he said that he was proud that he had not only once presented a column on time.