Unreality Television
How Putin has remade the media to suit his needs
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state's new 24-hour English-language channel Russia Today, agrees. "The state channels show the president of Russia. That is because state television should tell the people what the state is doing," she says. "I look at CNN and they constantly show [President George W.] Bush. And not only CNN. Why should Russia's president be less interesting?"
Simonyan and other Kremlin loyalists argue that Putin's breaking of private media empires since 2000 merely stopped businessmen from using television and newspapers to impose their own views. The perception that there was freedom of the press in the 1990s before Putin "is a cliche that does not correspond to reality," says Kremlin-connected political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky.
"Managed democracy." History shows that Pavlovsky is partly right. The media barons of the 1990s were key in President Boris Yeltsin's uphill re-election of 1996. Their outlets covered up stories about Yeltsin's ill health and fueled scaremongering about his Communist challenger. But where Yeltsin struck bargains with the media, Putin has simply taken control, extending his hallmark strategy of "managed democracy" from the ballot box to the TV set and printing press.
There has not been outright nationalization. Rather, media ownership has passed into the hands of Kremlin-friendly businesses like Gazprom, which also owns the formerly heavyweight, now increasingly bland newspaper Izvestia. Other well-known newspapers owned by or linked to Kremlin-connected businessmen include Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Argumenty i Fakti, and Vremya Novostei.
There are notable exceptions, including Kommersant and Vedomosti, a business newspaper partly owned by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. With its hard-hitting interviews and balanced news coverage, Gazprom-owned Echo Moskvy radio is considered the standard-bearer for freedom in the electronic media. But Sergei Parkhomenko, a star of the post-Soviet media scene who was forced from his job as editor of the independent Itogi magazine in 2001, warns that outlets like Echo Moskvy or Kommersant are just window dressing. "If anything in Russia is not under government control, that's because the government has decided that it doesn't need to control that yet," he says. "The moment they want to close Vedomosti or Kommersant, they will."
And at the heart of this taming of the Fourth Estate, argues Parkhomenko, is a phenomenon running much deeper than Putin's urge to control. "The most important thing is that society doesn't support the journalists," he says. "Society doesn't demand information. We got freedom of speech as a gift in the 1990s. It just fell from the sky. But people quietly let it go, and now they struggle to remember they ever needed it."
It's a view ratified by Nikolai Svanidze, a leading anchor on Rossiya, who said in June that viewers were "tired of pluralism." "Our guests from the United States and European countries may not understand what I'm talking about," Svanidze said, "but the classic Soviet viewer is not used to alternatives. It's tiring to have a choice because you have to think."
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