Why the Media is Negative about Russian Brides!

Advertisements in the Media . . . . such as newspapers, magazines and TV channels' most important goal is to sell space in their editions.

Why the Media is Negative about Russian Brides - Half of their audience are women! Imagine if they tell in their stories how wonderful are Russian mail order brides, how happy are their husbands and what great kids they have?

Put it simpler, you are not getting all the truth. You are getting the negative information, and seldom the positive.

Let me give the word of people who work in the Media industry themselves.

Alan, publisher and journalist:

"I met Aryna, my Ukrainian bride, through one of these big dating sites and asked the company to publish our story. However, while the site does carry 'true stories' and its service and profiles span the globe, the company's management views and perceptions appear to be parochially American. If the romance is not "N.Y., N.Y. meets Washington D.C." it isn't worthy of publication!"

Media journalist, Anthony Bochene, (also the author of Foreign Bride Guide):

"Lena and I are an example of just one more success story that you don't read about in the local newspapers. Added to the dozens of other happy couples I've come in contact with in the last few years who would not have met each other without the help of the international romance tour industry, means the general public is not getting the whole truth about this business."

When a negative report from the Media is about your own country fellows, you understand that the cases featured in a TV story or an article are extreme and you know very well what the real picture is.

When the report is about some other country, you have no idea about the real picture and often build your impression on incomplete facts.

The thing is, the Media journalists who write the stories are also only people, and most often, they do not possess the complete information themselves. Often they are affected by the same common misconceptions and myths.

The best and most objective stories from the Media are usually written by reporters that live in the country they write about. But even then, writing about something they are not professionally involved with, the reporters often follow the usual stereotypes: "mail order brides" mean something that is highly suspicious, and most likely a scam.

I can confirm it from my own experience with interviews to newspapers and magazines: very often they are not supplying you with all the facts. I do not mean that they purposefully mislead their readers; most likely, they just follow their stereotypes.

It is not easy to break a common stereotype, built through many years, in the short time allocated to an interview by the Media. The very questions journalists ask show how little most of them know about Russia and the situation between sexes in Russia. Some questions that seem to me crucial in the "Russian mail order brides phenomena", are never asked.

Often, Media reporters take some words out of context and it then looks like you said something completely different than what you in fact really said. For example, they would ask me why I did not want to marry a Russian guy, and I would say that I would be happy to marry a Russian guy; that I was actually looking for a Russian guy for a long time but could not find somebody suitable.

That because I had a very good career in Russia, good education, and was earning good money, and generally lived very well, I wanted to find somebody like me, who would also be educated and career orientated, and at the same time was unmarried, and willing to commit.

I did not look for somebody rich or famous, just a "normal guy". But to find such a guy in Russia for a woman over 25 is all but impossible. I was already 28, the age where all your family and friends had already written you off as an "old maid" who would never get married.

Being 28 year old woman and never married, in Russia that is a life sentence. This is why I decided to try to look abroad.

Then the Media editor would write in their article that I decided to look for a husband abroad because I wanted to marry a guy who had money and a good career, and lived well. Taken out of the context it would sound like I was a perfect "gold-digger"!

This is not unusual in compiling stories by the Media. On the TV, they ask you 100 questions, and show only 2-3 of them. So a two-hour interview turns into a few phrases that would sound very different in the light of the previous discussion.

Copyright 2004 Elena Petrova

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elena Petrova is the creator of Russian Brides Cyber Guide an informational source about Russia and Russian women. She holds master's degree in philosophy and authored several highly successful books about Internet dating.