Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

Mikhail Gorbachev continues to gain on his credibility problem. So dedicated an anti-Communist as Margaret Thatcher came away from Moscow telling reporters, "I would implicitly accept his word." Distinguished American visitors, not wishing to bestow an accolade they might later have to retract, settle almost in a chorus on a more neutral descriptive word: they find him "impressive." Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who was willing to starve himself to death in defiance of the Soviet regime, now disturbs other dissidents by his guarded approval of Gorbachev.

This gradual shift of attitudes has been reported out of Moscow, accompanied by an escort of journalistic cautions. Life in Moscow is a postgraduate course in skepticism for correspondents. When Gorbachev telephoned Sakharov in December to free him from nearly seven years of internal exile in Gorky, most of the initial speculation saw it as primarily a propaganda stunt for foreign consumption. The press corps in Moscow reminded everybody that the Gulags are still full and dissidents who are Soviet Jews have a hard time emigrating. Then came the op-ed page experts, asserting that change in the Evil Empire is only a mirage and warning against gullibility, as if the Moscow press corps -- its movements constantly circumscribed by the KGB -- does not know there is a cold war on.

The difference between journalists and Evil Empire theorists is that journalists are in the business of reporting change. (Each day editors and anchormen wake up, look out over the world's landscape and ask suspiciously, "Who moved?") When more than 100 imprisoned dissidents had been set free, nearly two months after Sakharov's release, a story from Moscow Correspondent Philip Taubman made the front page of the New York Times: SOVIET TURNS A BIG CORNER -- RELEASE OF DISSIDENTS MORE THAN A GESTURE. Taubman found in Sakharov's release not only Gorbachev's desire to soften international opinion but also his need to win over the Soviet intellectuals, a view increasingly held by Kremlinologists. Now that the hitherto heavy-handed Soviets have become slicker at manipulating opinion, it takes a little time to recognize that a package so wrapped in public relations may still have a kernel of truth inside.

Communism, of course, has only itself to blame if its credibility is so low. The press is not alone in having missed, or initially discounted, many major changes in the world of Marxism-Leninism. America entered the Viet Nam War still believing in "monolithic Communism" directed from Moscow and took a while to believe the Sino-Soviet split. Deng Xiaoping's attempts to liberalize Chinese society met with as much suspicion from the Western press as it did from the Chinese intelligentsia, both of them remembering the disasters that followed Mao's Let 100 Flowers Bloom campaign. Deng's problem, like Gorbachev's, is that any push against the party's entrenched bureaucrats soon hits resistance. In Moscow, speculation thus turns not only on how much change Gorbachev wants to permit but also on how much change he will be permitted to make. In Warsaw, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, reviled as a Soviet stooge, seems to have convinced world opinion that he is a Polish nationalist doing as much as he can, or is allowed to, to safeguard his country's independence. That interpretation was possible to make at the outset, but not to a Western press whose heart, like Poland's, was with Solidarity's Lech Walesa.

The trouble with instant analysis of the news is that when an event really matters, its meaning comes clear only in what happens afterward. This useful precaution, which should be acknowledged about all major events, seems to be most scrupulously observed in coverage of the Communist world. There the prevailing attitude among journalists is: favorable interpretations of any action come later, if earned. Correspondents would rather be considered slow than wrong. Basic to all journalists is the professional dread of being taken in.