Georgian displays his media savvy

NEW YORK — He is the leader of a small country that was, until recently, not on the radar of most Americans. But it's been hard to turn on a news channel this month without encountering the angry, brooding glare of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, railing against the Russian troops pouring across his country's borders, doing his best to turn a military disaster into a media victory.

There he is on CNN -- again. On the CBS morning program "The Early Show" and on the evening news talking to Katie Couric. Then over to Neil Cavuto of Fox News.

Struggling to survive Russia's declared intention to chase him from power, Saakashvili has reached for the Western media like a life jacket. Even as Russian troops were driving his soldiers into retreat, Saakashvili was sending an opinion column to the Wall Street Journal, insisting that "Moscow sought war."

Everywhere, his media message was the same.

"Georgia is a very modern, normal country with very interesting people like Americans that are being battered and butchered," he told CBS' Howard Smith. "This is a cold-blooded murder of a small, free independent country by a ruthless big neighbor."

The U.S.-educated Saakashvili's media savvy, along with his English-language skills and apparently insatiable appetite for interviews, have helped ensure that his version of this month's events has become the dominant narrative in Western media coverage.

"At least in the American media Georgia has won the message war, and he's influenced that for sure," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. While the Russian press depicted the fighting as the result of Georgian aggression, "what we saw portrayed were the Russians attacking Georgia," Rosenstiel said.

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, complained to CNN's Larry King last week that the coverage has been lopsided.

"Western television didn't show what happened in Tskhinvali," he said, referring to the Georgian strike on that city. "Only now, they're beginning to show some pictures of the destruction."

But Western media did not show the aftermath of fighting in Tskhinvali because the Russian authorities refused to let them into the city. Russia's media strategy during this confrontation has been aimed at its domestic audience, not the West, observers say. Its military controlled access to the war zone, allowing foreign media to enter only under escort, trying to limit what they could see.