#14 - JRL 8365 - JRL Home
From: "lyndon allin" <lyndon@mail.md>
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:38:35 +0000
Subject: Russian TV News Coverage of Putin's Speech

David,

Perhaps some of your readers will find the following thoughts to be of interest.

It's been quite some time since I sat down to a full evening of Russian news (Vesti on RTR at 8, Vremia on Channel 1 at 9, and Strana i Mir on NTV at 10pm). I used to watch one or another of the major nightly news shows with some regularity, but after awhile I found myself unable to laugh anymore at the uncut footage of staged "working meetings" of Putin with this or that minister which often occupy the first 5 minutes of the Channel 1 news. In recent months, I have found myself watching Strana i Mir exclusively, as it remains the only dynamic and interesting evening news program with a national reach. It is certainly the only one where the anchors succeed in not insulting one's intelligence and in creating a feeling of closeness to the viewers. I cannot imagine, for example, Ekaterina Andreeva being unable to contain her emotion and nearly sobbing on the air as happened to Aset Vatsuyeva on the night of the bombing at Rizhskaya; it's just as difficult to picture Vesti's Mikhail Antonov jokingly telling viewers that "the commercial break will pass quickly" (never mind that the main news blocks on Channel 1 and RTR run without ad breaks) as the anchors do on Strana i Mir. The style of the anchor teams on Strana i Mir -- Vatsuyeva (not so incidentally, she's the only Chechen woman regularly on the air nationally in Russia today -- her selection was a sharp move and a statement by Leonid Parfyonov) and Alexei Pivovarov work together some nights, other nights it's Iulia Bordovskikh and Anton Khrekov -- when contrasted with the on-air demeanor of Channel 1's Andreeva, define the difference between the idea of the news anchor as journalist and the Soviet concept of the newsreader. The latter used to be called diktory, now they are vedushchie; like other things in today's Russia, the name has changed but the concept remains the same: inoffensive (though less bland than 20 years ago) on-air personalities with a trustworthy demeanor who read the words put in front of them and provide a familiar face for the millions of viewers across Russia for whom they are the only daily source of news.

But I digress. Tonight (Sept 13), I wanted to see how the three primary evening news shows would cover Putin's meeting with the cabinet and governors. What I saw did not surprise me and will likely not surprise many of your readers, but it may be of interest to those who don't have the chance to watch Russian broadcast TV.

Vesti led with the President's remarks, uncut and uninterrupted by comment -- around 16 minutes in all. Given that none of this -- the speech, the new "security measures," the strengthening of the vertical of power -- would have taken place if not for the tragic events in Beslan, which are hard to see as not rooted in Chechnya, I found it interesting that Putin mentioned Chechnya exactly once in his remarks, in a list along with two other regions of the North Caucasus. The implication was that Chechnya's only problems are the ones it shares with Ingushetia and Dagestan: unemployment, low per capita income, and high child mortality. This might have been enough official "news" to make me turn off the TV in any event, but as it happened a mundane concern intervened -- I had to make a quick run to the grocery store as Vesti switched over to the Health Minister's remarks at the same meeting, so I don't know what else Vesti covered tonight. I can say with certainty that more than half of the broadcast was taken up with just the President's uncut speech.

Who knows what other stories the remainder of Vesti found time to cover -- I doubt it was substantially different from what I saw upon returning to my kitchen (where else?) to watch Vremia. Once again, after the introductory headlines, the President's remarks were aired in full. After showing a few remarks from other leaders at today's meeting, Vremia then showed Putin's remarks closing the meeting in full, for a total of roughly 20 minutes of VVP.

The program then showed some supportive soundbites from Igor Ivanov, Yuri Luzhkov, and Mintimer Shaimiev at a post-meeting news conference, which took roughly 3 minutes; and occupied another 3-4 minutes with similar comments from various governors (Sobyanin of Tyumen', Katanandov of Karelia, Matvienko of SPB, and Alkhanov of Chechnya).

This left 3-4 minutes (out of 30) for the rest of the day's news -- a story on the start of the school year in North Ossetia and a brief piece on the victims of Beslan.

More interesting than Zhanna Agalakova's abrupt sign-off was what followed Vremia with no commercial interruption (to be fair, I think it is the nightly practice on Channel 1 to segue straight into the next program after the news with no ad break): the premiere of the action series "Antikiller2," with a lengthy opening scene involving Russian special forces on a helicopter raid against the base of some terrorists who are first shown plotting and divvying up large piles of money. State TV was right on message -- the fictional heroes of the show were looking to "destroy the criminals in their own den," as Putin put it in his speech today.

30 minutes later Strana i Mir (SiM) lived up to my expectations by spending only about 10 of its 40 minutes on the political headline of the day but still packing in more interpretation and information than the relatively commentary-free coverage on the "official" channels. Interspersed with soundbites from Putin's speech and commentary on its contents, SiM showed footage of the impressively identical black 7-series BMW's and other large, shiny, expensive vehicles with migalki arrayed outside the hall where the government meeting took place.

Where Vremia allowed the The focus to stay on the positive side of the changes proposed by Putin, NTV's focus was immediately on the key negative aspects of the President's new initiatives. They quickly summed up the idea that governors will now be "nominated" by the President and that the Duma will no longer have any deputies from single-mandate districts. On the shift of Yakovlev into the new Regional Development Minister's chair and of Kozak into the YuFO PolPred role, SiM's tagline was, "chinovniki meniaiut kresla" ("the bureaucrats are changing seats").

Instead of the amen corner displayed on Vremia, SiM brought out Boris Nemtsov, who viewed Putin's proposed changes as moving Russia "toward the 3rd world," and called the new system of appointing governors a "rejection of federalism."

NTV's in-house political commentator noted that the changes for many governors and for the Duma won't take effect until terms expire in a few years, so the change in that respect will not be immediate. He also noted that the US did not consider after September 11th revising its political structure on the scale which Putin has proposed, perhaps implying that a time of national crisis is not the best moment for such decisions.

SiM's second story was 3 minutes on the trial of the veterinarian accused of distributing ketamine; they then covered the interesting situation at the US consulate in Ekaterinburg, where a dispute with the consulate's landlord led to their front door being blockaded last Friday night. As a result of this, numerous attendees at a consulate function had to exit the building by climbing down from a second-story window using a stepladder.

There followed a rather tongue-in-cheek look at the latest book by Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev, which was used as an excuse to examine the history of post-Soviet presidential memoirs and other books - from Gorbachev, to Yeltsin, to Kuchma, to Karimov and Turkmenbashi.

After the ad break, there was a half-minute piece on the start of the school year in North Ossetia, which segued into a longer feature about how cameras are being used on Moscow streets to combat terrorism. Apparently there is a network of several thousand security cameras set up around the capital and such systems are also being set up in other cities.

The weather report followed, then a segment on the Pet Shop Boys' collaboration with the Dresden Symphony Orchestra's on a new soundtrack to Eisenstein's "Battleship Potyomkin," which was shown in an experimental concert on Trafalgar Square. After that, another story from the realm of art and (maybe) culture - it seems the boxing Klichko brothers are branching out by doing German-language voice-overs for cartoon characters in a soon-to-be-released Disney film. The sports portion of the broadcast was devoted to the Russian successes at the US Open and to the Olympians' Ball held recently in Moscow.

The anchors signed off after the sports report, and SiM was followed by "Sex and the City."

Somehow, even if NTV is no longer in its heyday as an opposition channel (I wasn't here to see it 4 or 5 years ago, although I have been here long enough to have grown to love the Namedni program before it was forced off the air), it still manages to provide a pleasant contrast to the "official" channels. This is achieved not by being particularly outspoken, but just by remaining intelligent and continuing to broadcast shows like Strana i Mir, which recognize that other things took place in Russia and the world on September 13th besides the promulgation of President Putin's "September theses" (as NTV's website headlines them).

The point of listing above all of the other items covered tonight by SiM is not to suggest that they are all of considerable import, but to show in detail the stark contrast between a well-rounded news show that has something of interest to just about all viewers and the propagandistic Vremia and Vesti, which seem sometimes to have been conceived without actual human viewers in mind.

The 12:30am version of Segodnia (also on NTV) had even more thoughtfully selected comments on Putin's plans. Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov commented that having essentially unelected governors will not stabilize Russia but might do more to tear it apart; Yavlinsky questioned the constitutionality of the new proposed method of selecting governors; and Zhirinovsky with his enthusiastic praise damned the idea that party lists will become the only way for people to get elected to the Duma.

Some websites which may be worth visiting for those who find this topic interesting:

You can read about Vesti and RTR's "Directorate of Informational Programming" at http://www.vesti.ru/about

http://www.ntv.ru/ allows you to select the program you're interested in from a drop-down menu. To my disappointment, they seem to have recently removed the Namedni archives from the site. The rather sparse Strana i Mir page is at http://www.ntv.ru/programs/news/strana/index.jsp

Channel 1's website, not that there is much of interest to see there, is http://www.1tv.ru/

Links to the full text of Putin's remarks in Russian can be found at http://president.kremlin.ru/sdocs/themes.shtml

An English translation of his "Speech at the enlarged Government meeting" can be found at http://president.kremlin.ru/eng/sdocs/themes.shtml

A decent place to start surveying the Russian TV scene is http://top100.rambler.ru/top100/TV/