Dr. David Fogleson is Rutgers' University Historian, specializing in U.S.-Russia history.

This is an excerpt from a research paper that appeared at Russia: Other Points of View

In the first decade of the 21st century many good things happened in Russia -- for example, rapid economic growth, expansion of a middle class, reduction of the number of people living in poverty, and recovery of the birth rate. Yet American journalists depicted Russia even more negatively than they had in the 1990s and late 1980s.

As journalism professor Hans Ibold demonstrated in a quantitative analysis, the percentage of negative articles in The New York Times was much higher in 2005 than it had been in 1989.

Instead of adding another quantitative study, I would like to offer a qualitative illustration from a specific phase.

In the first five months after the Georgian-Russian war of 2008, The New York Times reported that a shaky economy made Russia look “distinctly volatile”; that a stock market slump made Russia seem like “just another bumbling backwater”; that the financial crisis was “just the latest in a long string of post-Soviet bank failures, financial swindles and economic collapses”; and that “slumping energy prices threaten[ed] the fiscal health and political stability that have underpinned [Putin’s] popularity at home.”

(Like The New York Times, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times suggested that the financial crisis “raised questions about the viability of the Putin formula,” that the economic turmoil would lead to discontent, and that Putin appeared “politically vulnerable, with social unrest on the rise.”)

While Russia did face some serious economic and financial challenges, the articles cumulatively painted a picture of Russia that was darker than warranted at a time when the United States itself faced severe problems, including a mortgage crisis, falling real estate values, and bankruptcies of major corporations that helped to plunge America into a deep recession.

It seems possible that exaggerations of the troubles in Russia served to deflect some unease about the diminished attractiveness of the American economic model.

In the first months of 2009 New York Times correspondents continued to look for signs of a revolt against Putin. In January, when riots broke out in the Baltic states over economic problems there, The Times publicized Swedish economist Anders Aslund’s expectation of “massive blowups” in Russia (as well as Ukraine).

In February, while acknowledging that “for now, the streets are calm in Ulyanovsk,” The Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Clifford Levy, anticipated that broad economic distress “could confront the Kremlin with the first major challenge to its authority” since Putin came to power. Two weeks later Levy reported that protests in Vladivostok had “unnerved the Kremlin” and declared that “events in the Far East suggest broader rumblings.”

This line of reporting was misleading. Having followed a conservative fiscal policy and built up large financial reserves, the Putin-Medvedev government had the resources to manage the economic turbulence and did not face a serious prospect of a political revolt.

By the end of March 2009, Levy recognized that “even with the global financial crisis, Russia is more stable and prosperous than at any other time in its history.”

Two and a half years later, when tens of thousands of mostly affluent Muscovites took to the streets to protest corruption and Putin’s exchange of positions with Dmitry Medvedev, The New York Times again highlighted possibilities for a popular rebellion against Putin.

One correspondent reported on “new gurgles of discontent that seem to be rippling across Russia” and speculated that “a sharp decline in public support could send a signal that Mr. Putin’s hold on power is not as tight as he insists.”

A second correspondent breathlessly reported that older Moscow protesters remembered “the oceans of demonstrators who marched on the Kremlin in the early 1990s, heralding the collapse of the Soviet Union.” A veteran journalist who had been in Moscow in 1991 reported that “the unfinished, nonviolent revolution that ended Communism … seems to be resuming its unpredictable course” and concluded:

“What seems certain now is that history’s clock is ticking for the ‘managed democracy’ of Vladimir Putin, as it once did for the Communist order of Vladimir Lenin.”

The Times’ correspondents would be disappointed. But disappointments have not led The Times’ editors to reign in prophets of Putin’s demise in the last year. Last February The Times gave exiled Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili space to venture that “Mr. Putin’s fate might well be decided in the cold streets of Kiev.”

Two weeks later, normally sober columnist David Brooks imagined himself as Putin and declared:

“Suddenly, I find myself in a moment of extreme vulnerability.”

In mid-March The Times published Republican Senator John McCain’s prediction that “eventually, Russians will come for Mr. Putin in the same way and for the same reasons that Ukrainians came for Viktor F. Yanukovych.”

Giving equal time to a Democrat, The Times then printed an op-ed piece by ex-Ambassador Michael McFaul, who could not say “how long the current autocratic government in Russia will endure,” but was supremely confident that the United States and its Russian allies would win the conflict with Putinism and bring democracy to Russia.

One could go on citing examples of how wishful thinking on The Times’ editorial pages ran counter to the rising Russian patriotic support for Putin, whose approval rating climbed to over 80% according to public opinion surveys. Instead, I would like to conclude this paper by addressing how we should explain the persistent predictions of the overthrow of Putin and the exaggeratedly negative depictions of Russia.

Full paper here.