Dmitry Lovetsky/AP - Police officers detain an opposition activist during a banned anti-Kremlin protest in St. Petersburg on Dec. 31, 2011. December protests brought straightforward reporting to mainstream Russian TV; it didn’t last.
If anyone needed a signal from Putin, the prime minister gave it on Jan. 18 when, in a meeting with a group of editors, he turned on Alexei Venediktov, the chief of the freewheeling Echo Moskvy radio station. Your station, Putin said, pours excrement “over me day and night.”
Then Putin said he wasn’t offended. But what critics call the Party of Television understood that there were orders to be carried out.
The Kremlin has never seen Echo Moskvy, a mere radio station, as a big threat, but TV also has the Internet to worry about. And Putin’s circle was slow to take the Web seriously.
That left an opening for Internet television, and now an afraid-of-nothing Web station called TV Dozhd, which means TV Rain, is making a name for itself. It uses the English slogan “Optimistic Channel,” and in December it became a household television staple for families that, as its editor Mikhail Zygar puts it, are fed up with TV.
Mainstream TV people dismiss it as too hip for words, but the station recently landed Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, on a talk show.
Zygar said he has come under no pressure to tone down his political coverage, even when Dozhd was alone in covering the first post-election protests.Every day the privately owned station broadcasts its regular planning meeting. Viewers send in suggestions on who should be interviewed for particular stories.
“Our viewers need to know we’re not bribed to invite guests; we’re not forced by the authorities or owners,” Zygar said.
TV Dozhd isn’t a heavy hitter, directly. “But we shouldn’t underestimate it,” Kachkayeva said. The mainstream TV bosses are watching it, for one thing. Its young and obviously unpolished personalities speak to the emotional and intellectual character of the political protest movement.
‘Tired’ of Putin
In Putin’s Russia, where few things are clear-cut, Kremlin strategists don’t, as a rule, dictate stories. They have “discussions” with media managers, said Maxim Kovalsky, who in December was fired as the editor of Kommersant Vlast magazine. The prevailing mode is self-censorship.
When he ran a cover showing Putin and a ballot with an obscenity on it, he said, “I fully understood what I was doing.” Though he may have hoped to keep his job in December’s uncertain atmosphere, his firing was hardly a surprise. The order wouldn’t have come from the Kremlin, he said; it was the oligarch owner of the magazine, Alisher Usmanov, anticipating the Kremlin’s desires.
Every night for a decade, millions of TV viewers have watched Putin in action — riding a horse bare-chested, diving at an archaeological site, or, as on most evenings, having meetings with aides where he spells out his orders while they earnestly take notes.
But his critics suggest that television is no longer sufficient in the Russia of 2012. Putin, said Kovalsky, effectively used the screen during his early years in power to craft an image, but now “people are tired of him.”
And Kachkayeva wonders whether the gusto with which the TV channels are attacking the opposition will last. Despite the current harshness, what happens with the Feb. 4 demonstration could change their thinking entirely — but in which direction?
“They must have a strategy, but sometimes I think they don’t,” she said. “But they have a strong sense of smell, and they can smell that something’s up.”
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