Concern's Journal: The Russian News

Ghosts of Soviet propaganda machine haunt Russian media

MOSCOW (AFP) - Dead bodies, striptease quiz shows, gala concerts for the secret services: nothing is off limits on Russian television -- except objective news coverage, say critics of media freedom under President Vladimir Putin.

Russian television today is light years from its drab Soviet incarnation, full of brash, sometimes stomach-churning programmes, as well as slick dramas.

But the ghosts of Soviet propaganda haunt the hourly state news broadcasts, dominated by dreary footage of Putin and his ministers at work, patriotic features on army life, or alarming reports about the pro-Western governments in Georgia and Ukraine.

Putin, who hosts the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg later this week, is accused of destroying media freedoms won in the 1990s by monopolising television and marginalising the few remaining independent newspaper journalists.

Russia ranks below countries like Egypt and Haiti in terms of journalists' freedom, the US-based organisation Freedom House says.

A study released in April by the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, which defends journalists' rights in Russia, found that 91 percent of political news on the national television channel ORT was devoted to Putin and his "ruling powers."

Almost three quarters of that coverage was positive and the rest neutral, while opposition voices barely got a look in, the study found.

"There's not censorship as there was in the Soviet Union," said the centre's director Oleg Panfilov, "but there is self-censorship, there's internal editorial censorship, when editors are too scared to give information, and there's censorship by owners."

The Kremlin has also come under fire in Washington and other Western capitals, but insists there is nothing to apologise for.

Putin told a gathering of world media executives in June that Russia's media law "is recognised as one of the most liberal in the world." And last week, his close advisor Vladislav Surkov dismissed allegations of anti-opposition bias on state-run television as "a matter of taste." [I think they stole this line from Rupert Murdoch]

Nikolai Svanidze, a presenter on state-owned Rossiya channel, even suggests that Russians actually demand one-sided news.

"Our guests from the United States and European countries may not understand what I'm talking about, but the classic Soviet viewer is not used to alternatives," he said. "It's tiring to have a choice because you have to think."

The Kremlin's defenders also point to the lively Internet scene in Russia and several high-quality newspapers which frequently publish criticism of the authorities.

But experts said newspapers and Internet sites have a puny impact compared to the three national television channels, which reach almost all this vast country's 143 million people. Serious newspapers rarely have circulations of much more than 100,000.

"There are still media outlets that are not controlled, but those voices are almost totally irrelevant in Russian politics and with the Russian people," said Maria Lipman, an expert on Russian politics with the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.

"Free voices are for all practical purposes dissident voices."

A free media was seen by many as one of the biggest achievements of former president Boris Yeltsin's rule, reversing abruptly from 2000 when Putin took over.

Putin accused media barons of trying to undermine the state and in 2001, state-run gas company Gazprom took over the trailblazing television channel NTV. Several leading publications were shut down.

Gazprom has since gone on to buy Ekho Moskvy radio and the once highly authoritative daily Izvestia, while other Kremlin-linked businesses have also moved into the media sector.

But Margarita Simonyan, head of the new English-language 24-hour channel Russia Today and a rising media star, says that press freedom under Yeltsin is a myth.

"Television was as much an instrument for corporate aims as any other," she said. "The idea that television was free in the 1990s is hilarious."

Simonyan also defended the blanket coverage given to the Kremlin on the main channels.

"The state channels show the president of Russia," she said. "State television should tell the people what the state is doing."

Sergei Parkhomenko, who lost his job as editor of the Itogi news magazine under Putin, blamed Russian society.

"Freedom of speech came as a gift. It fell from the sky. But people quietly let it go. Now they struggle to remember why it is they need it," he said.