On The Media

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone, reporting this week from Russia. Whenever reporters land in foreign capitals, they interview the cabdriver. Ours conveniently held the same views as the vast majority of Russians, according to recent polls. Here's what Alexei says.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think of President Putin?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXEI: He is a good president. He has done a lot in Russia. Ever since the program when Putin answered the people's questions on television, he immediately made a decision, and with a single call, he fixed everything.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it's not a problem that he doesn't really want a free press?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXEI: Why? We do have a free press. Everybody says whatever. Here there is no such thing as not being able to say something.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He doesn't want the opposition on the radio or television. Do you think that that's a good thing?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXEI: What do you mean by saying not letting the opposition on? You have everything on TV, everything that's possible. And what's forbidden is forbidden.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What do you think of Garry Kasparov?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXEI: You mean the chess player? I think Karpov is better.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Moscow may shelter a nest of elitist malcontents, but Alexei speaks for the general public.

YEVGENY KISELYOV: Well, what can I do about the public? I don't have other public.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yevgeny Kiselyov, big-time anchor under Yeltsin, turned smaller-time radio host under Putin.

YEVGENY KISELYOV: The policy of Glasnost started—it has a date—it started in late January 1987. There was a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that officially allowed Glasnost and abolished censorship, political censorship.

Let's say we have 20 years of democratic media history in this country. So what do you expect?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He says journalists have to sell more than their work. They have to sell the idea that their work matters.

YEVGENY KISELYOV: We have to face and accept it, that this is the public that we have. We have to stir them up somehow, and if we can, well, it's us to blame. Nobody else.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But journalists might be forgiven for laying some of the blame at Putin's door. Boris Yeltsin, for all his fecklessness, did communicate a genuine regard for independent media. Putin conveys contempt.

Russian broadcast personality Vladimir Posner was an unofficial Soviet spokesman during the Cold War as a frequent guest on Nightline. After Glasnost, he briefly co-hosted a show with Phil Donahue.

VLADIMIR POSNER: The way the media is treated here I think is very cynical, and basically it's that if your newspaper or magazine, whatever, reaches a small number of people and you don't really influence public opinion at all, then you're pretty free to write what you want, and the same applies to radio or to a local television station.

But as soon as your outlet reaches a lot of people, especially the so-called federal channels, which is the equivalent of network television in the United States, you only get that information which the powers-that-be want you to get.

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tell me how you want to be identified.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR IZUMSKAYA: It's a good question. My name is Anastasia Izumskaya and that's it. Unemployed journalist.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Her former employer is Russia News Service, which produces newscasts and some news shows syndicated to hundreds of radio stations. Recently the big oil company Lukoil became RNS' majority shareholder. Soon after that, the new management called for half of its news stories to be positive, to boost ratings.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR IZUMSKAYA: They told us that our listeners are successful people who own four shops and are about to buy a fifth, and they do not want to listen to tragic news. They need more positive news. They're interested in news about neckties and cufflinks, fashion trends.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the new management suggested that eliminating voices from opposition parties not approved by the Kremlin would also be a very positive move.

Izumskaya quit. Serious journalists across all media have quit or been fired or arrested or evicted, or killed. Let's started with evicted, because in a sense, they're all being evicted.

[ANIMAL SOUNDS]

The Russian Union of Journalists, with more than 100,000 members throughout Russia, is getting kicked out of its building.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR IGOR YAKOVENKO: The thing is that the people who spread all kinds of gossip of what is going on here, they mainly don't care to check their information. They claim that I had wild animals here, but they are all tamed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The head of the union, Igor Yakovenko, says the building was constructed back in 1980 with funds provided by journalists and that Yeltsin essentially gave it to them. The authorities claim the union is violating the Russian tax code by making improper commercial use of donated space.

There's also been some grumbling about the menagerie in Yakovenko's office—the raccoon, the mongoose, the fox, the bunny, a couple of mammals we could neither identify nor translate [LAUGHS], and the skunk.

BROOKE ON CLIP: Oh, my God!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yakovenko says he's going to fight the eviction with all the legal muscle he can muster, before the government has a chance to fill part of the building with a TV show called Russia Today. He says it's blatant propaganda, and then he observes, like all the other disgruntled reporters we spoke to, that propaganda and entertainment is all TV offers here.

Russian TV journalists may feel a little confined, I said, but at least they don't suffer untimely evictions, do they?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR IGOR YAKOVENKO: This is true. People are better able to tolerate cages. They get used to them more quickly than animals. Most animal are freedom-loving. They're less ready to endure captivity. It's true. Maybe that's why I love animals so much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A couple of flights down, the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, started seven years ago by journalist and historian Oleg Panfilov.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR OLEG PANFILOV: We invented this name because we wanted to help journalists who were planning to work in Chechnya or other wars. But very soon we realized that all Russian journalists are in extreme situations.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Russia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter, after Iraq. Thirteen journalists have been murdered in contract-style killings since Putin took office. No one I spoke to would seriously accuse Putin of these murders, but no one has been brought to justice for these crimes, so he is charged with criminal indifference.

When Anna Politkovskaya died, Putin told a German newspaper that despite her fame in the West, she was, quote, "a person of little influence in Russia." Panfilov remembers the day she was buried on the outskirts of the city, far from public transportation.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR OLEG PANFILOV: It was raining. If you could only see how those hundreds of people walked in the rain many kilometers, only to say goodbye to Anna.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But was she seen as a victim or a martyr? He said he saw her as both.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR OLEG PANFILOV: Victim because she was killed cruelly, then martyr because she managed to prove that they were afraid of her. It means that what she was doing was right and what she was doing was very important.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Politkovskaya worked at Novaya Gazeta, the third reporter at that paper killed under suspicious circumstances related to their work since Putin took office. Igor Domnikov was killed by a fatal blow to the head in 2000. Yuri Shchekochikhin died of a supposed allergy in 2003. The authorities wouldn't release his medical records, not even to his family, declaring them a medical secret.

Novaya Gazeta deputy editor Sergei Sokolov is investigating all their deaths. He has suspects but he doesn't really believe those responsible will ever be brought to justice. He looks exhausted.

Why go on?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR SERGEI SOKOLOV: We need the truth not for the court or the prosecutor's office. We need it for ourselves and for the people who love us and whom we love. Given the general state of modern journalism, I can say only one thing. What is the difference between our official journalists and prostitutes? The women who sell themselves in the streets know who they are and admit it. Journalists also know who they are, but they deny it and call themselves the free press.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: If he could change anything about Russia, I asked him what would it be? The courts, he said. Justice is served only to those with money or power.

Andrei Richter is the director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Center.

ANDREI RICHTER: It's almost everywhere in this country that you can hire someone to kill your bad husband or bad wife, and people view it almost like street crime, like something which can happen every day. So when we'll speak about the murder of journalists, we should put it into this wider context.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're making, you know, Russia, a land of laws, sound like some banana republic.

ANDREI RICHTER: It is like a South American banana republic with only condition we don't have bananas. We have oil. But all the rest is about the same.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Russia has a range of legal remedies to settle a dyspeptic press. To oust the Union of Journalists, it's using alleged tax code violations.

In a more notorious case, a U.S.-funded NGO that provides training to journalists here, called the Educated Media Foundation, or, formerly, Internews, was recently closed down. The reason? The director passed through Russian customs last January with a couple of thousand dollars in cash she should have declared. She called it a stupid oversight. The Russia authorities responded by seizing the group's computers and freezing its funds, effectively closing it down.

But there are other laws specifically designed to chill the media, especially one passed in 2002 called the Law Against Extremism. Andrei Richter.

ANDREI RICHTER: So the law on extremism makes for the government possible to shut down media organizations if the government, the courts, the prosecutor's office believes that they disseminate political extremism materials. Political extremism materials more and more become a euphemism for political opposition materials.

VLADIMIR POSNER: I always say that freedom of speech is like a corridor.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Again, Vladimir Posner.

VLADIMIR POSNER: They can be a wide one, a narrow one, but there are walls. And if you try to break down those walls, you're going to have a problem. In this case, in Russia today it's much narrower. It's not censorship in the classic sense of the word—say you don't go a censor who reads your piece and then puts a stamp on it the way it was in the Soviet Union, but clearly there are people and subjects that at this time you cannot touch.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Smaller outlets, like Novaya Gazeta or the maverick radio station Echo Moskvy—we'll get to that in a minute—don't much worry the Kremlin, but no media outlet of real influence and reach, especially TV, can touch the unofficial opposition.

In Putin's managed democracy there is an official opposition, members of which hold seats in the Duma and even appear fleetingly on TV. But unofficials, like Garry Kasparov, are designated extremists. Posner says he'd like to invite Kasparov on his popular national TV show but he can't. He can, however, invite the ultranationalist newspaper editor Alexander Prokhanov, who was regarded as extremist under Yeltsin.

Prokhanov recently called for Russians not to send their biological material abroad, not even for medical tests, because Russia's enemies could use it to create a biological weapon. I had a brief talk with Prokhanov about press freedom.

I believe I heard you say just now that you were a Stalinist and you felt that the Soviet period was the best period for Russia.

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXANDER PROKHANOV: You are not mistaken.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I am here—I'm an American journalist here to report on the state of freedom of speech in Russia today. What do you have to say to somebody like me?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXANDER PROKHANOV: In the Soviet period I felt I was totally free. KGB did not follow me. I was a very successful writer. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the era of real freedom started, when freedom of speech occurred where liberals came to power and when press was called the Fourth Estate, we lost our freedom of speech.

Great writers and journalists who were very close to me were deprived of their right to appear on TV screens. We felt like we lived under a plastic cap.

Now the situation has begun to change in the Putin era. Liberals who once had great access to the media are being pushed into the background, and people of my views, who believe in a strong Russian state and centralized control over the economy and culture, have more and more opportunities.

My new newspaper, which I started after my old paper, Day, was shut down, is called Tomorrow. It has no difficulties, either legal or financial. All the TV channels constantly invite me—me, the Stalinist and Russian State supporter. So how can I claim after all that that in Putin's Russia there is no freedom of speech?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You are a welcome guest on the First Channel. Does it bother you that, for instance, Garry Kasparov is not?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXANDER PROKHANOV: No, it does not bother me, because there was a time when Garry Kasparov was a welcome visitor at all the channels and my absence did not bother him. It doesn't even bother me that during the dissenters' march the police clubbed Garry Kasparov's allies. It doesn't bother me at all, because at other times my friends were beaten nearly to death during our rallies. They shot at us from tanks and machine guns, and people like Garry Kasparov never bothered to stand up for us.

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is this then a matter of more speech now or simply different speech?

[RUSSIAN]

INTERPRETER FOR ALEXANDER PROKHANOV: Of course it's a different freedom of speech. Russia is a country where freedom of speech first belongs to some and they shut the others' mouths, and then freedom of speech passes to the others and the first ones have to keep their mouths shut. Such is the Russian peculiarity.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

[RUSSIAN]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Prokhanov appears once a week on Echo Moskvy, a radio station he admires even though he says it's his ideological enemy. One of the most popular stations in Moscow, Echo Moskvy slams Putin with stunning regularity, breaking the law on extremism practically on the hour.

It's a puzzle no Russian media watcher can solve. How can it do what it does, owned as it is by the solidly pro-Kremlin Gazprom, the oil company that broke the back of the once freewheeling NTV channel, the very emblem of vibrant Yeltsin-era media? Now with NTV firmly under the thumb of the Kremlin, its old journalists are running for cover at—you guessed it—Echo Moskvy.

Why is it still on the air? Few even venture a guess, except Echo Moskvy talk show host Yevgeny Kiselyov.

YEVGENY KISELYOV: The biggest reason is that in the eyes of the Kremlin we are not a leverage of political influence. That's number one. Number two, we do not represent any kind of major threat to what is now euphemistically called stability.

Number three, they can always shut us down and they know that. And number four, they need a showcase. They need a window decoration, so to say. When you American guys come here, your politicians, your public figures come here to start talking about, well, violations of the freedom of the speech, they say, well, well, well, wait, wait. We have Echo Moskvy. And they're allowed to criticize everyone, to ask most difficult questions. And all the opposition figures are there day and night, so what are you talking about?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Journalists tend to be a cynical lot, none more so than Russian journalists. Still, some place a measure of hope on the next election, even if it is Putin's handpicked successor, because things change in Russia and it could go either way. Even now, alternative voices get through.

A new independent political magazine has emerged, called New Times. The Internet is developing. A TV channel based in New York with bureaus in Germany, Israel and Moscow has some limited reach in Russia. It's called RTVI, paid for in part by the same oligarch who created NTV.

Recently, one of its anchors, Andrei Norkin, who also works at Echo Moskvy, won Russian Broadcasting's award for Best News Presenter for a program few can even watch. It was a protest of sorts from within the ranks.

I asked Kiselyov if he thinks he'll ever get out of his gilded cage at Echo Moskvy.

YEVGENY KISELYOV: I am quite sure of that, because sooner or later the situation in the country will change. It cannot last forever. Of course, we don't know who are the next leaders, and probably in four years from now or in eight years from now we'll be nostalgically reminiscing about the gold days of Vladimir Putin's liberal presidentship.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Nostalgia of all sorts is a frequent theme here, even nostalgia for the good old bad old days of fighting to be heard. Actually, that may be, in Prokhanov's phrase, the real Russian peculiarity.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

More on that, and words and music, coming up. This is NPR's On the Media.