06 October 2003 21:46
Back in the USSR: President Vladimir Putin may project an all-smiling image - witness his recent trip to America - but at home there are worrying signs of a return to Soviet-style control of the media. Nick Paton Walsh reports from Moscow
On all three major channels the news is the same: the president met another world leader today. They got along OK, as did their wives, and the president won the day. The following day most channels lead with a report of the president visiting a refurbished school complex in the regions. The president, dressed in a noticeably trendy white denim jacket, nods politely, as unexcited by his surroundings as the TV bulletin's viewers. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Middle East erupts, bombs go off in Chechnya, and Iran pursues a nuclear weapon, perhaps with a little technical help from Moscow. These sound like the sort of TV news headlines resorted to after the musty and harsh intervention of a Soviet censor. Yet it approximates the sad state of Russian television today. Few in Russia deny the increasingly authoritarian Mr Putin's 80%-plus approval rating is helped by the lack of criticism in the domestic media. The slow disappearance of freedom in Russia's once colourful - albeit wildly biased - media, who could fill the airwaves with satirical puppets of the former KGB spy or publish heavy and personal criticism of his conduct in the separatist repub lic of Chechnya, is now almost complete. And few think anyone other than the Kremlin head is to blame. To sum up quickly: since he rose to power in 2000, the majority of newspapers have become state owned, or controlled, or have been closed, as have all independent TV channels; political reporting is effectively outlawed during election campaigns; and journalists have been jailed for libel and espionage. Reporters without Borders puts Russia 121st out of 139 countries on its index of free press. As Dmitri Surnin, head of the media support programme at the Eurasia Foundation Moscow, explains: "I don't think that Putin is against freedom of speech as such, but he is instead trying to eliminate any possible threat to his grip on power - any TV station that could potentially threaten him in any way or undermine what they do. They effectively control all national stations." In June, Russia's last remaining independent TV station, TVS, closed. The government's press ministry intervened to say that its precarious financial situation meant it could no longer operate. The station was not the standard-bearer of critical, in-depth political coverage: this was not the Kremlin's gripe. They simply feared that the station could have been one. So it had to go. Like the hyper-critical NTV station before it, snapped up by the state gas company Gazprom in 2001. Across Russia's regions, the situation - bar a few exceptions - is much worse. Most newspapers function as extensions of the local administration, part of what Surnin explains is "the legacy of the historical role of a Soviet journalist, who saw himself as a messenger from the authorities. "In Russia this is particularly acute because of the newspapers' weak financial situation - there is little advertising, and much of their distribution and printing networks are inefficient and state-monopolised." As a result, the Russian media are often unbearably dull. Surnin says: "there is some kind of self-censorship; there is no place for independent thought. It looks like the journalists don't bother any more. The pressure from the government discourages managers who may want to do something more interesting. Products became of a low quality journalistically." >From now until the end of March, Russia is supposed to be gripped by parliamentary and presidential election campaigns. Yet a law passed in the summer threatens newspapers with closure if, during the election season, they express an opinion about a politician's policies, his campaign, or his personality. The law - defended as a move to end the dirty tricks campaigns of previous elections - effectively bans political reporting. One journalist, Konstantin Katanyan of the newspaper Vremya MN, has taken the government to court over the rule, arguing it is unconstitutional. To test its efficiency, he wrote an article about the election for a governor in the province of Mordoviya. "I violated everything I could in this article." His crimes may not seem that extreme. He said that the current governor might win as there was no alternative; he said the candidate liked football, and that he hired his own relatives as staff. The article theoretically broke the law three times, predicting results and referring to a candidate's background twice. Yet Katanyan has yet to be reprimanded for his outburst, compounding his fears that the law will - as is typical in Russia - only be applied selectively against particular irritants. Two weekly news magazines became the first victims of the law last Monday, warned for writing about the Moscow mayor. One reporter on the St Petersburg Times, Vladimir Kovalyev, said he was taken aside by a policeman, who warned that his newspaper would be stripped of its licence if it did not ask electoral candidates for permission each time it used their names. Genuine criticism of the government and investigative reporting is now the domain of a few internet websites, seen only by the 12% of Russians who are online. Sites newsru.com and gazeta.ru are unafraid to be negative about the war in Chechnya and the Kremlin's daily machinations, yet are in the silent minority. inopress.ru translates coverage of Russia by foreign newspapers into Russian. On the one hand, the Russian media need reining in. As Alexei Pankin, editor of Sreda magazine, says: "99.9% of what is said in the Russian media is funded by dirty money. The law is not strict enough. Putin knows enough about the Russian media to see that treating it like a free press is laughable." On the other, it should not be used just to maintain the status quo. "It cannot be a good thing to limit information to voters in a fledgling democracy," says Drusilla Menaker, director of the IREX independent media project in Moscow. "If this law was uniformly applied, voters would know virtually nothing about every candidate. But instead, it's more likely it will lead to only some candidates - particularly those already in power - being known about. It suggests a general government attitude here that they do not need to be accountable to the electorate." His master's voice . . . Vladimir Putin (right) and Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov
[UKIR [UK & Ireland Intelligence Wire]] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
