I don’t, but you don’t have any either to show they only watch state controlled news.
When reports get routinely killed for speaking out against the government, you can probably assume that means the government has some control over the still surviving reporters…
What Aaron said. Even in Russia’s media environment, authoritarian state, and low income level I have no idea how the hell someone on the streets of Moscow doesn’t know why the Chechens keep doing horrible things.
At least in the US we had the excuse that virtually no one knew about their grievances when they attacked.
Obligatory post-9/11 disclaimer: no, I don’t hate America. No, I don’t think they deserved it. No, I don’t support killing civilians.
Oh, Russia doesn’t have a free press by any measure, but it’s a far cry from Soviet times when the KGB knocked down your door at 2 AM because you wrote a poem, which is kind of what was implied earlier.
Reporters don’t get ‘routinely killed’. Anna Politkovskaya’s murder was horrible; it wasn’t routine. I think you confuse ‘reporters get killed for speaking the truth’ with ‘reporters get ignored when speaking the truth’. Russia doesn’t need to exert the stark fist of repression to keep the media in line, which may well be more horrible in some ways.
During the First Chechen War, for example, the NTV television network made a name for itself with hard hitting and personally dangerous coverage from the war zone that brought the horror of Chechnya into everyone’s living room. The Kremlin’s response, once Putin replaced Yeltsin, wasn’t to kill everyone at NTV, or even throw them in jail. They simply bought them. Once NTV was bought by Gazprom (the state-owned company that for some reason owns most mass media outlets in Russia in addition to, you know, pulling gas out of the ground), lo and behold, their coverage of the Second Chechen War was mysteriously very favorable to the state. Funny how that works. The former crusading reporters went to a new channel called TVS, which wasn’t able to pay the bills and was shut down after going bankrupt.
According to Wikipedia’s fairly decent coverage of Russian media freedom:
According to the organization, Russia remains the most dangerous European country for journalists, with four killed in 2009.
Which is pretty bad since four unjust killings is far worse than none, but is still a far cry from ‘reporters being routinely whacked’. It’s also worth noting that a lot of threats against journalists come from pseudo-state-affiliated organizations like Nashi (Putin’s Hitler Youth) and not-affiliated-at-all far right wing whacko nationalist groups. Russia’s a chaotic place in general, and Russians like Putin specifically because he keeps the chaos to a dull roar.
Russia’s press freedom and pressure is brought a bit more into context when you realize that the great majority of reporters killed weren’t killed because of classically political reasons, but because they were threatening to expose corruption. Paul Klebnikov’s murder, for example, falls under this category. Pretty much every major politician in Russia is on the take in some way, and threats to expose that are taken far more seriously than writing in support of an opposition that can’t muster more than 5% of the vote.
Ah. So you prefer to believe Russians just have no idea about events in Chechnya, because the state controls news so tightly? That they’re nationalistic simply because the wool has been pulled over their eyes?
Oh the irony, coming from someone in a country whose citizens (demographically speaking) are among the least informed of world events in the industrialized world. Yet the US population is largely nationalistic too… is this merely because we’ve had the the wool pulled over our eyes as well?
I don’t know what more to say to you than that you’re wrong. Russians know full well what goes on, especially in a region so close to home, they just have a different spin/viewpoint on events that makes Russia’s actions justifiable. Similar to how many in the US feel our military actions abroad are justified, even when most of the rest of the world disagrees.
I’ve watched the news, while in Russia, most recently last summer. Reporting of events in Chechnya or say, Georgia, are no more distorted than mainstream news reports about Afghanistan and Iraq in the US.
I was going to write a longer, more nuanced analysis but I was interrupted and had to go out. Glad to see everyone else has stepped into to add more meat to the bones.
I think it would be highly foolish to believe that the Russian media’s complete dominance by an authoritarian state for many many decades has had no impact on the nationalistic sentiment against Chechnya. The will of the people doesn’t happen in an inexplicable vaccum, just as Fox “News” is slowly warping the minds of its viewers in the US, the Russian media has been one arm of the state assisting in forming nationalistic dislike of Chechnya.
Check this page on wikipedia for some examples:
I don’t think I mentioned poisoning initially.
Of course these are only the extreme examples, any journalist who wants a peaceful life in Russia will self-censor reporting to exclude anything they think might upset the government agenda and that agenda includes formenting dislike of Chechnya and its citizens and not reporting on why they might be pissed off.
Georgian government officials are far from disinterested observers when it comes to commenting on Russian abuses (and vice versa). There have been hysterically false accusations of mistreatment by both sides.
Also, Russia hasn’t even existed for “many many decades”. The Russian media reinvented itself completely (literally no Soviet-era media source survived without radical transformation) in the early 90s.
Russian chauvinism and racism has existed for centuries (as any third world student unlucky enough to study in Moscow during the cold war quickly discovered). This isn’t exactly the result of a Russian Rupert Murdoch. A large part of Russian brutality towards the Caucasus is simply because they’re not Slavs. The semi-official media isn’t helpful about this but it’s far from the worst offender in race baiting.
Sure, but I’m not sure I see as much of a break between the Soviet Union and Russia in terms of media control as you appear to do though, the attitude to media; seeing it as a tool of the state to shape public opinion with, seems to have survived the fall.
I’d also suggest that state media control might be a significant reason why racist attitudes in Russia haven’t softened. The US was pretty openly racist in parts a few decades ago, if the government had stopped anyone reporting on civil rights demonstrations and also firmly pressed a segregationist line in the media would we have a black president right now?
Wow, if you seriously believe that, you might want to look into what Soviet media was actually like. This book is a good start. Suffice to say that the current Russian authoritarian/financial incentive to slant the news (which is virtually indistinguishable from Fox News during the Bush administration) is a far cry from the Soviet press’ ritual surrealism which literally had no relation at all to reality.
There’s also the minor fact that alternate views are easily found in Russian media if any cared to look. (Echo Moscow radio, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta, not to mention pretty much the entire Internet, which has 30% market penetration) The fact that Russians don’t choose to patronize them doesn’t mean that the state has control of the media. The state has control of the popular media. It’s a crucial difference. Understanding it is important, not only to avoid the popular misconception (that you apparently share) that Russia of 2010 and the USSR of 1980 are the same, but to spot and combat identical trends in US mass media.
From the linked article above, a trenchant summary of what is and isn’t possible in today’s Russian media:
Under Venediktov’s canny direction, the main presenters for Echo have developed an ear for what is permissible and what is not. “You can call Putin or Medvedev a fool, which, of course, was totally impossible in Soviet times, but you might get into trouble if you look into their pockets,” Albats said. “You cannot say you’ve heard that So-and-So has sent x trillion dollars to this or that offshore account. These people are total conformists, total pragmatists, they have no interest at all in ideology. They care about their power and their assets.”
Opinion is unfettered, in other words, but Echo falls short in the area of reporting, particularly of the investigative variety. In our conversations, Venediktov insisted, rather unconvincingly, that investigative reporting requires the ability to publish documents, “and how can you do that over the radio?” But Echo’s Web site would seem to be an available tool for just that. One of the station’s commentators, Yulia Latynina, admitted that investigative work is nearly “impossible,” but the reasons have to do with the nature of post-Soviet Russia. “The basic problem is that you cannot really expect, in a regime like that of Marcos or Duvalier, to get solid information into your hands on bank accounts,” she said. “Everyone looks the other way. This is not a dictatorship—no one should exaggerate and compare it to the Soviet Union—but in an authoritarian regime you can’t conduct an effective investigation the way you can in a democratic regime. You are not discovering aberrations. In Russia today, corruption on a gigantic scale is merely a matter of economic policy. It is what it is. So all you can do is make reasonable suppositions. For example, look at the takeover of Yukos.” Latynina was referring to the energy conglomerate led by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, before he was arrested, in 2003 (presumably at Putin’s command), given a transparently bogus trial, and sent off to prison in Siberia. “When Yukos was taken over, it was suddenly co-owned by Putin’s old friend Gennady Timchenko, of Gunvor”—an energy-trading conglomerate—“which is registered in Switzerland. Gunvor made seventy billion in revenues this year exporting for the state. So you can’t really know what Putin’s cut is, but you can make a supposition. I mean, either Putin is just purely generous to his friend or he has an expectation. And I doubt that Putin is that generous!"
I turned down an opportunity to run a team in Moscow because of this. I never had anything too blatant happen on business trips, but my industry is very cosmopolitan. I know it would be a different matter if I lived there.
“Pravda” today is a joke tabloid that isn’t even based in Russia, I believe. It has no relation to the Soviet-era paper save the name. It is a good demonstration of ultra-nationalist opinion though.
I was surprised how strong this sentiment ran when I was in Russia. Russian support for Serbia under Milosevic for example. It was pretty shocking, really.
This bears repeating. I’d more easily believe that political censorship ruled Russia if I hadn’t seen otherwise. Instead what I saw was in practice no different than what the US gets under its mega-corp run media; the rich and the government get their views shouted most loudly, but you can nonetheless readily find other sources. The primary difference is that the control is more subtle in the US.