The final two days of the sixth annual Eurasian Media Forum were an ever-accelerating whirlwind of opinion, passion, analysis and emotion. After former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke stormed off stage on Day One in the face of vituperative anti-American attacks from British MP George Galloway, CNN International anchor Charles Hodson topped him on Day Two by shouting “Rubbish” from the audience in angry response to panelist Shiraz Paracha’s assertion that “We all know the Western media only reports on sex, sports and entertainment.”

The discussion, entitled “Nuclear Programme: Sovereign Right or Dangerous Ambition?” proved once again that any and all WMD-related matters remain hot button issues. Ably co-chaired by veteran broadcaster Jim Laurie, onetime NBC and ABC network correspondent, and CCTV anchor Yang Rui (aka the “Larry King” of China), the panel included the thoughtful, dispassionate Chung-in Moon of the Republic of Korea, non-proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick, Israel’s retired Major General Danny Rothschild (the first time an Israeli has participated in this forum) and onetime US Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, now of the American Enterprise Institute. Sparks flew not only during Hodson’s surprising outburst but throughout the entire session, as panelists and audience members alike engaged in what is euphemistically referred to in diplomatic circles as “a full and frank exchange of views.” Highlights included Perle’s assertion that “the Saudis feel as threatened as the Israelis” by Iranian nuclear development; a pointed challenge to Yang Rui by human rights advocate Antonio Stango concerning China’s “terrible human rights record;” and Rothschild’s inartful evasion of a direct question as to whether or not Israel actually possesses nuclear weapons.

But the EAMF is essentially a media forum, and the many sessions that dealt explicitly with media issues were even more elucidating. One panel on the fairly recondite question of “The role of the media in financial transactions” was as informative in its overall dissection of how to work with —or “work” – the media as it was in its detailed analysis of how the international financial media treats IPOs. How do “successful international companies effectively work with the media to maintain brand and consistency of message?” Not surprisingly, it’s largely similar to the ways anyone else attempts to control medium, message and messenger.

“Corporations speak to the media to influence their shareholders,” began panel chair Andrew Thomas. And as KK Yeung, CFO of Hong Kong’s Phoenix Satellite Television, explained, “You are trained to tell the facts – but that’s not what you do.”

Here’s what you do instead:
1. Be eye-catching
2. Tell a strong story with a clear message
3. Build your story over time and build multiple ties within leading media outlets.

Precisely how does one catch the media’s eye? “It helps to be big,” observed Byron Ousey of the Gavin Anderson financial firm. “Or to be in an interesting sector. Talk up the sector, not just the company, and try to be global and not just regional in scope. Be clear and succinct,” so journalists’ eyes don’t glaze over – “and if you’re from an exotic country like, say, Kazakhstan—build THAT story.” As the ubiquitous Charles Hodson then explained with tongue set in cheek, the financial media like all other media is most interested in “sexy, entertaining stories.”

“Sexy sectors” to the financial press, Hodson continued, include media (“Media loves to cover other media”); oil, luxury goods and airlines (“because they have great pictures”) followed by automotive and retail. “Then there’s a long drop to other areas,” Hodson concluded, with mining, manufacturing, and insurance ranking lower in sexiness and commercial real estate at the very bottom, for reasons that should be obvious, I suppose… Other helpful tips included a dictum to “start early, keep it simple, and sell a good, competitive story” to the press.

Then Assel Karaulova, President of the Kazakhstan Press Club, pointed out the need to differentiate between local and international press. “Here, you go pay some money and get a nice article about your company,” she said. “But that’s not the way it works in the West!” Executives and managers in the developing world, she said, need ‘special training to know how to face the international press, because they will be smart and sophisticated.”

All agreed the most important financial media include Reuters, Bloomberg, and Interfax. More money is spent wooing print and newswires than on such television outlets as CNBC. John Defterios, World Business anchor there, recommended that companies from emerging economies such as Kazakhstan’s try to tell a bigger story by engaging in a “county-branding exercise,” and advised that executives put their companies in a larger context of the regional economy. “Bring along your finance minister, or your president,” he recommended. “Kazakhstan is all the rage now.”

Corporations need to foster good relations with the media so as to influence the marketplace. “Reach out to select commentators,” said Byron Ousey. “Have relationships in place with the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the key broadcast media. Talk with them privately, meet with them socially, so they know you—it’s the best insurance you can have!” Defterios seconded that. “Position yourself as a thought leader and build trust relationships between the media and your executives,” he advised. “You will get in the Rolodex and they will call you again and again.”

Day Three commenced with an examination of “Media Law and Freedom in the Post-Soviet Republics.” How can new countries like Kazakhstan “balance the sometimes conflicting interests of the media, state, business and society?” Once again the specifics of the session yielded food for more general thoughts about the media ecology in older countries, like, say the United States of America.

Panel chair Alexander Arkhangelskiy, a popular Russian television host, began by explaining how it used to be in his country. In Soviet times, he once had the word “meat’ cut from a script he wanted to use in a children’s show because meat was in short supply and his editor didn’t want to offend the authorities. “There is an opinion,” he was told, as the editor pointed up to the heavens.

Later, Arkhangelskiy noted, censorship power passed from the withered Soviet state to the oligarchs who quickly came to control Russian media. “Freedom of speech was regulated by the oligarchs,” he explained. “There were as many opinions allowed as there were oligarchs.” Now under Putin the situation has changed again. “Journalists have the right to have a co-opinion today, but there is a strict and clear limit.” Moreover, “the less reach your media has, the more the journalist has a right to have a co-opinion.”

Sound familiar, anyone?

“Does economic independence now equal freedom of speech?” Arkhangelskiy asked rhetorically. “What is the state role? What is the journalist’s role?”

Miklos Haraszti, OSCE representative on Freedom of the Media, spoke of what he termed “the slope of pluralism” as a typical problem in Russia and the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia. Media outlets with the most reach, such as television, allow the least freedom of expression; those least read or watched, such as newspapers and the Internet (which has low penetration in the region) allow the most. In other words, you can say more of what you want if no one can hear you. He called for the development of public broadcasting in the region to enhance pluralism in lieu of state-controlled television. “Public broadcasters are obliged by law to offer all opinions, not just those of the party and the state,” he noted.

PBS, are you listening?

He concluded by referring to the ‘infamous Borat, who led the Kazakh government” to suspend his www.borat.kz Internet site because of his humorous take on Kazakh culture.

Russia’s Oleg Poptsov, president of the Eurasian Academy of Television and Radio, backed up Haraszti’s comments about the slippery slope of pluralism, describing the current situation in his country thus: “You may have any opinion you want, but please express it after midnight when most people are sleeping.”

Many Kazakhs here privately express frustration with the still-largely centralized media situation in this country. Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Culture and Information, threw them a bone by saying the “state is ready to compromise and liberalize laws here,” but he also pulled it back a bit by saying that journalists need to compromise as well and rely on self-regulation and internal editorial controls. “The media should balance and share power if it wants to be the fourth estate,” he concluded. “We need a system of checks and balances, but the state stands ready for dialogue.”

Former New York Times foreign correspondent Serge Schmemann, now Editorial Page Editor of the International Herald Tribune, then spoke representing the Western media. He praised the courage of journalists under the past Soviet and current Russian regimes and said he is “still in awe” of the many who faced reprisals and even murder, citing the late Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politskaya as particular examples.

But Schmemann also rejected the very topic of the panel discussion, saying he was guided by the First Amendment, which states that there shall be no laws restricting the media, while allowing at the same time that there are still many restrictions on media practices in the US, such as in the cases of obscenity, pornography, hate speech, advertising and so on. He also mentioned his former colleague Judith Miller and her 85-day stint in the slammer thanks to government prosecution. In the end, Schmemann said, “Media responsibility cannot be mandated by the state – journalists, society and the media themselves must do it. The marketplace compels us to regulate ourselves.”

Following another heavy-hitting panel concerning “What has the Invasion of Afghanistan Achieved,” the forum wrapped up on a lighter note with one of the most heavily attended session of all, entitled “Glamorization of the Media.” (Who says all we’re interested in is sex and entertainment?) “Traditionalists argue that the degeneration of television in this way –‘glamorised’ television without political analysis – is a sad reflection and even an encouragement to a wider cultural dumbing down in society,” the program noted. “Why is this genre of programming so successful?”

Could it be because, like the panel, it often features fun, frivolity, sensationalism and beautiful blondes? Most of the people in the crowded ballroom seemed to be there owing to the presence of one Kseniya Sobchak, a Russian blonde bombshell TV host who was described to me by a conference organizer as “the Paris Hilton of Russia.” Along with a cadre of male journalists, Sobchak was joined on the panel by British actress/reality star Chantel Shafie, and “media ideologist” Marina Lesko, sporting full-on Jackie O shades.

Panel chair Vladimir Rerikh began by announcing the “full and complete victory of glamour in its attack on our media. Glamour is nothing but a form of art—whether high or low.” Lesko then chimed in that “it tells us how to live, and how to be loved.” Jim Laurie tried to bring things back down to earth by noting that there has always been a role for “sexiness and glamour” in Western media, as a lead-in to meatier stories and a means of paying for harder-hitting journalism.

Lesko, who came off more as a deliberate, bomb-throwing provocateuse than any kind of “ideologist,” then defined glamour as “something real plus an exaggeration or beautification of reality.” To her deliberately twisted way of thinking, disgraced Washington Post journalist Janet Cooke, who was forced to give up her Pulitzer Prize after it was revealed that she had fabricated the entire story, “didn’t sin, but just presented a beautified version of reality.” Journalists, she said, should forego featuring facts and reporting reality. “Facts are not informative,” she averred.

But it was Lesko’s sadly unoriginal description of the 9/11 terror attacks as “a global reality show” that really set things off. Kseniya Sobchak grabbed the microphone and objected vociferously – proving that she’s Paris Hilton with a brain and a heart! She then wrapped things up by defending “glamour” as an “anti-ideology, a global sub-culture that will lead us into the future.

“We have to learn how to see it, and hear it,” she concluded. Works for me, I guess!
It was left to Dr. Dariga Nazarbayeva, Member of Parliament, daughter of the President, and Chair of the Forum Organizing Committee, to have the final word with a closing address. She began with a nod to the extraordinary passion and emotion that had been prevalent throughout the three-day confab, as well as a reference to the heavy (if not surprising) tone of anti-Americanism that characterized many of the sessions.

“At least we know who to blame,” joked Nazarbayeva. “The Americans, of course… They’re the biggest and most powerful country in the world, so it’s easy to blame them…we can feel the anti-Americanism in this room! But knowing whom to blame hasn’t led us to any solutions.

“I have been criticized in some quarters even for inviting them. But it is important to give US citizens a chance to speak,” she concluded. “People criticize the US, yell at the US – but can’t live without the US. So I bow my head to all the Americans here, because they have faced us and tried to have a dialogue and explain their government and its policies to us.” She then called for and received a rousing round of applause for all her American guests.

Five hundred people from thirty-five countries, three days of conferring and three nights of parties and receptions replete with countless Kazakh knockoffs of Western pop entertainers later, the sixth annual EurAsian Media Forum came to a rousing end.

As they used to say in Brooklyn, “Wait until next year!”