CPJ is pleased to announce the Web publication of “Putin’s Media War: Independent Press Under Siege in Russia,” an analysis by CPJ Europe program coordinator Emma Gray. Writing in advance of the March 26 presidential elections, Gray argues that because of acting president Vladimir Putin’s successful use of mass media to deceive the Russian public […]
CPJ is pleased to announce the Web publication of “Putin’s Media War: Independent Press Under Siege in Russia,” an analysis by CPJ Europe program coordinator Emma Gray. Writing in advance of the March 26 presidential elections, Gray argues that because of acting president Vladimir Putin’s successful use of mass media to deceive the Russian public on events in Chechnya, independent journalists are in danger of losing the hard-won press freedoms of the post Soviet era.
You can read the full text of the article at http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/Russia_analysis_March00/Russia_analysis_march00.html
EXCERPT:
“During the 1996 Russian presidential campaign, many voters were swayed by TV footage of Boris Yeltsin jiving with a dancer at a youth rally. Pro-Yeltsin stations splashed the footage because they wished to project an image of Yeltsin as a dynamic, youthful reformer. The TV image likely to assure Vladimir Putin’s victory in the March 26 election, on the other hand, is that of Russian artillery blasting Grozny to rubble.
Both images demonstrate how the Russian government has used the media to deceive their audience. The real story in 1996 was that Yeltsin was on the brink of another heart attack, which sympathetic Russian journalists did not report. Today, the absence of objective reporting about the war in Chechnya, of which acting president Putin is the architect, has kept the former KGB
official’s popularity ratings high.
Throughout the conflict, virtually all Russian media have demonized Chechens and highlighted Russian military successes. At the same time they have downplayed the destruction of villages and cities, the plight of refugees, and allegations of brutality and torture by Russian troops.
Independent Russian journalists worry that with so many of their colleagues accepting the role of adjunct government flacks, the hard-won freedoms of the post-Soviet era could be in jeopardy. Meanwhile, there are ominous signs that independent journalism faces a bleak future under the Putin regime.”
