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From: "Alexei Pankin" <apankin@sreda-mag.ru>
Subject: Gessen discussion
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004

David,

Unfortunately, in the course of the lively discussion of Masha Gessen's interview with RFE/RL Media Matters, no one picked up on her remarks on the role of Western assistance in promoting free media in Russia. May I add a somewhat different angle to this discussion by contributing a piece that I wrote, which was carried in the same issue of RFE/RL Media Matters.

Best regards,

Alexei Pankin

RFE/RL Media Matter
COME BACK, WE'RE READY NOW: AN INSIDER'S VIEW OF MEDIA ASSISTANCE IN RUSSIA
By Aleksei Pankin
Copyright (c) 2004. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org

Looking back over more than a decade of Western governmental and nongovernmental efforts to establish free and independent media in Russia, it seems that paradoxically the scale of those efforts have been distinctly out of sync with the need for them. That is to say, the most assistance was offered in the first phase of Russian independence, when the press needs it least of all. Now, in the last three or four years, when the Russian media have matured to the point where they can absorb Western experience, Western interest in the problems of the Russian media has waned sharply.

From the perspective of Western democracies, Russian independence and the beginning of reforms looked like a "democratic revolution," like the transition from political and economic totalitarianism to a democratic, market-oriented system. This impression created a sincere desire to ease that transition and to help build such a system through the transfer of expertise. And the mass media -- as a key component of a democratic society -- was one of the primary beneficiaries of this desire.

Domestically, it was obvious that this transition was being undertaken by a people that was worn out from years of complete uncertainty and unpredictability going all the way back to the middle years of perestroika. The chaos and the pace of the elemental changes overwhelmed any normal human capacity for coping with them. Any conception of social good or the public interest was completely erased from the very top of society to the very bottom. Life -- both individual and institutional -- was reduced to mere survival.

And the media were no exception. Media workers, who during the years of central planning had no idea that media is a business, were overwhelmed with day-to-day problems of paying ever-increasing costs, doing whatever was necessary to keep their product coming out regularly, and retaining their workforce. At the same time, parties, commercial companies, the authorities, and others appeared, ready to pay cash for media outlets for their own purposes, not worrying about getting a reasonable return on their investment in the usual sense. In short, nobody in Russia was really interested in reforming the media sector. Not the media, which quickly grew accustomed to selling their propaganda services on the new market and not the political establishment, which was perfectly happy using the media as a weapon in the political struggle.

I remember attending one of the first conferences at which some Europeans offered assistance in helping create democratic media legislation in Russia. At the time, the summer of 1992, I was the director of the East-West program of the European Media Institute (EMI) in Dusseldorf, and I organized a seminar on public broadcasting in Russia. Later I published the conclusions of the seminar in a well-known journal, and the EMI still later published a book on this topic in Russian that was distributed to all interested parties.

Over the next 10 years, I participated in numerous conferences, seminars, and symposiums on the subject of public broadcasting in Russia, holding this book in my hand. And every time, I was struck by the thought that the participants were reinventing the wheel. And the reason for this was the disparity between the supply of these ideas and the demand for them. The well-intentioned Europeans naturally thought that Russians would be immediately interested in such an important concept as public broadcasting, while those in power in Russia couldn't even conceive of the idea that such an important informational weapon as television should be released and allowed to disseminate neutral, objective information.

I'm sure that practically all the media-law conferences held over the years suffered from the same problem. The Russian participants were thinking to themselves that they should listen politely to the Europeans, even though what they were saying had absolutely no relation to Russia. As a result, today we have a very strange media-law system. We have a general mass-media law, laws on state support for the media, and countless others on every possible topic, but we do not have the single basic law without which a democratic media system is impossible: a law on broadcasting that would regulate the distribution of a limited public resource -- broadcast frequencies.

The subject of media and elections is another example. Westerners naturally expected that the press, having thrown off the shackles of totalitarianism, would embrace the vital function of helping the people to choose consciously and responsibly among parties and candidates. They didn't stop to consider that, together with those shackles, the media lost state financing as well. They saw election season as a time of plenty, the harvest from which could keep them afloat all the way until the next election cycle. No one was interested in "buying" the goods of objectivity and professional journalism that Westerners brought to innumerable seminars and roundtables.

Unfortunately, the truth is that Western aid played almost no role in the restructuring of the Russian media that took place in the years immediately after 1991. This isn't meant as criticism of Western governments and NGOs. The fact is that no one in Russia was interested in their help, no matter how hard they tried to give it.

This conclusion also does not mean that nothing positive was done during this period for specific media companies, even if there was no overall positive effect. A lot of new, ambitious print and broadcast media companies were created in the early and mid-1990s, even though their enthusiasm exceeded their professional capabilities. In this context, the training that was offered in those years by organizations like Internews, the National Press Institute (later, the Press Development Institute), the BBC, and others really helped to improve the professional effectiveness of the regional press, particularly in technical areas such as print design and camera operation. These skills did much to give many regional media products a contemporary appearance.

A three-year USAID-funded program initially called Russian-American Media Partnerships (RAMP) and later renamed the Media Development Program (MDP) and ultimately worth more than $10 million was something of a watershed between the romanticism of the early years of Russian independence and the hard realities of the new market. In the final phase of this project, I served as its director. By then, I must confess, its concept and its priorities were already determined and my role was largely bureaucratic. So I think that I can praise it without people thinking that I am merely congratulating myself.

RAMP/MDP was the first attempt in my mind to supplement traditional media assistance to specific media companies with help in forming an overall media-market infrastructure. For instance, the project led to the creation of the National Association of Telebroadcasters, which over the years has united the country's leading regional broadcasters and done a creditable job representing their interests. It has played a leading role, for instance, in long-running efforts to develop a single television-ratings system, which is a key infrastructural issue for broadcasters. RAMP/MDP also led to the creation of a business-development program for regional newspapers that was the first management school for many Russian media managers.

I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this project marked the real beginning of the infusion into the Russian media of the idea that the media business isn't so much about self-expression as it is about the ability to intelligently sell a product to an audience that is counting every ruble. In the wake of this project, other organizations began replacing their grants for specific media projects like election coverage with development grants and, eventually, loans. In order to receive these grants and loans, regional media companies had to be able to withstand a thorough due-diligence process and commit to an intense program of Western management consulting. These programs, in turn, led to the emergence of a group of leading regional media companies that were truly market-oriented and financially solid enough to withstand considerable blows from a fickle economy and hostile politicians.

When President Vladimir Putin came into power, the demand among regional media managers for such assistance grew markedly. Under Putin, economic liberalization has made real progress while, at the same time, political pressure on the mass media has increased markedly. And that pressure has usually not come in the form of direct censorship, but through the exploitation of ownership conflicts and other real, fundamental problems with the media outlets themselves. Media outlets, especially regional media outlets, have come to realize that the best security for survival is an intelligently structured business.

Russian media managers have stopped asking their Western colleagues, "what does your advice have to do with my life?" and have started asking, "how would you handle this problem in the West?" They have stopped complaining that if aid organizations gave Russian media outlets half the amount they pay consultants in cash, that would solve all their problems, and have finally realized that professional consulting is worth far more than money.

In short, literally over the last two or three years, the balance of supply and demand in the area of Western media assistance has shifted dramatically. In that short period, the conditions have emerged for achieving the goal -- the establishment of an independent, market-oriented media sector -- for which so many Western assistance organizations strove for so many years under hostile conditions. Therefore it is particularly discouraging that, at this particular moment, Western donors have suddenly lost virtually all interest in Russia and funding for such efforts has been slashed.

Aleksei Pankin is the founder and editor of "Sreda," a professional journal for media managers.