Tina Burrett April 2006
The End of Independent Television?
Reconstructing the Russian Television Landscape: March 2000 to June 2003
This paper postulates that the struggle between the Russia national television media and Putin administration between 2001 and 2003 is best analysed in terms of elite conflict rather than through the paradigm of democratic transition. It offers an analysis of relations between the media and the state through the prism of elite theory, and draws on the work of elite theorists John Higley, Michael Burton, Anton Sheen and Vladimir Gel’man. The paper argues that changes in ownership and management at NTV in April 2001, and the subsequent closure of TV6 and TVS, stem from differing elite interpretations of the role of the media in Russian society and incompatible visions concerning the future political and economic development of the country. The paper further argues that the autonomy of the non-state owned television media in Russia was undermined by four significant factors:
1. Pubic support for the actions of the state against the media;
2. Divisions among Russia’s journalists;
3. A lack of condemnation of the state from among Russia’s major opposition parties; and
4. The dependence of Russia’s business elites on good relations with the state, and in particular with the presidential administration.
Research in this paper is based on transcripts of Russian television news and political programming and fieldwork interviews, conducted over the course of two years, with approximately fifty senior politicians, journalists and media executives working in the Moscow based television sector.
Independent Television?
The state’s first move against the autonomy of the television media came just four days after President Putin’s inauguration in May 2000, when masked tax police officers raided the offices ofMedia-MOST—the parent company of NTV, Russia’s largest and most popular non-state television network—alleging that securityofficials employed by the company had been eavesdropping on prominent political andbusiness rivals of Media-MOST’s owner, Vladimir Gusinsky.[1] The following month, when it became obvious that the intimidation tactics being employed against NTV had produced no affect, the state authorities stepped up their campaign against the channel by jailing Gusinsky, ostensibly on fraud charges relating to a privatization deal in the nineteen-nineties.
Gusinsky’s arrest caused an international outcry, and as widely condemned as an attack on democracy and the freedom of the Russian media.[2] Some commentators went further, accusing Putin and his administration of building an authoritarian regime.[3] However, to term the state authorities’ attacks on Gusinsky and Media-MOST as evidence of authoritarian tendencies, is to assume that NTV functioned as an independent source of information. Yet, in Russia, as elsewhere, the state is not the only threat to the freedom of the press; private power has proved equally suffocating.[4] NTV’s support for candidates and parties opposed to Putin during the 1999-2000 election cycle, is just one example of how editorial policy at the channel, was far from neutral. Many journalists currently or formerly employed at NTV, ascribed news reports to political orders from Gusinsky.[5] After his release from jail, Gusinsky appeared on NTV to justify his position and condemn the actions of the authorities.[6] Yet, given the nature of the campaign against him and his channel, Gusinsky had little option but to use all available resources to defend his position. By harassing Gusinsky and Media-MOST, the Russian authorities forced NTV to become increasingly politicised, and in so doing, prove its case against them. Despite this, Gusinsky’s appearance on his own channel illustrates how coverage on NTV frequently served its own, rather than the public interests. Under the ownership of Gusinsky, NTV failed to live up to the traditional fourth estate watchdog role of the media, the essential ingredients of which includes ‘substantial journalistic autonomy, representation of the interests of the populace rather than those of dominant groups, and the independence to directly challenge those dominant groups.[7]
The fourth estate model of media conduct is crucial to the ideology of democracy, as it enshrines the idea of the populace as sovereign and entering into a social contract with a governing establishment that will serve popular interests.[8] Based on empirical evidence gathered in the United States, media scholars George Donohue, Phillip Tichenor and Clarice Olien, propose an alternative to the fourth estate concept of media function, which they term ‘the guard dog perspective’. The guard dog metaphor suggests that the media perform as a sentry, not for the community as a whole, but for groups having sufficient power and influence to create and control their own security systems.[9]
The guard dog metaphor provides a compelling analogy for the behaviour of Russian television companies, that from the mid nineteen-nineties, became increasingly beholden to their oligarchic financial benefactors.[10] The analogy can be extended to Gusinsky and his senior executives, who routinely unleashed NTV to defend their interests and values against, what they saw, as intrusion from the presidential administration. However, although NTV fell short of the fourth estate ideal, in opposing President Putin, it offered Russian audiences an alternative viewpoint to that available on state television, providing the country with a pluralist, if not independent, information field.
The End of Democratic Transition
When President Putin assumed office in January 2000, the Russian media system was already developing along a trajectory wide of the democratic ideal.[11] The liberalising of the Russian media had failed to act as a catalyst for democratisation. Yet, relations between the Putin administration and the mass media have been analysed almost exclusively in terms of democratic consolidation. Students of the Russian media have all but universally embraced an analytical model of democratic transition.[12] The transition model assumes that any country moving away from dictatorial rule is in transition towards democracy. The model has remained remarkably constant despite variations in patterns of political change. The transition paradigm has been somewhat useful during a time of momentous and often surprising political upheaval in the world. But it is increasingly clear that reality no longer conforms to the model. Many countries that policy makers and aid practitioners persist in calling ‘transitional’ are not in transition to democracy, and of the democratic transitions that are under way, more than a few are not following the model.[13]
Since being thrown into the conceptual pot of the transition paradigm, political life in Russia has been automatically analysed in term of movement towards or away from democracy. In recent years, transition scholars have recognised that it is not inevitable that transitional countries will move steadily along the assumed path from authoritarian to democratic rule.[14] They acknowledge that countries can go back as well as forward along the path. Yet even deviations from the assumed sequence of transition are defined in terms of the path itself. As it has become apparent that the political system under President Putin falls between outright authoritarianism and well-established liberal democracy, political analysts have proffered an array of qualified democracy terms to characterise the Russian situation, including managed democracy, guided democracy and electoral democracy.[15] Options for political development are rarely cast in terms that do not lead along the transitional path at all. The continued use of the transition paradigm constitutes a dangerous habit of trying to impose a simplistic and often incorrect conceptual order on an empirical tableau of considerable complexity.[16]
Russia under Putin no longer conforms to the transition model of political development. Reliance on the transition model leads to optimistic assumptions that often shunt analysis down a blind alley. The seeming disappointment that analysts continually express over the democratic short fall in the Russian media system, should be replaced with realistic expectations about the patterns of political behaviour in contemporary Russia. To present Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky and their holding companies as a group of political dissidents fighting for freedom of speech against an authoritarianstate, is simply unrealistic and lacking in complexity. Likewise, the position of the Russian authorities is far from straight forward: consolidating a democratic polity has not been the aim of the Putin administration, but neither has the reintroduction of an authoritarian state.[17]
Russian Television and Elite Struggle
The struggle between the Putin administration and the Russian media is not a story of repression by an authoritarian power against a group ofjournalists opposing that power exclusively through the exercise of free speech. Rather, it is the story of a struggle between opposing political elites with conflicting interests, and incompatible views on the future development of the Russian polity.[18] Media elites began to dispute the very right to power with the presidential administration. Using the power of television, Russia’s media barons tried to impose their own rules of the political game on a resistant Putin. The media elites disagreed with the presidential administration, not only on matters concerning the direction of Russia’s political development, but also on what constituted acceptable codes of behaviour in the political arena. Agreed rules for restrained political competitions are a hallmark of united elites that have managed to ‘tame’ politics.[19] Without consensus on the rules of political conduct, politics remains a costly, unpredictable and warlike affair for all involved. Elite theorists John Higley and Michael Burton, contend that politics is tamed ‘through sudden, deliberate and lasting compromises of core disputes among political elites’, what they term ‘elite settlements’.[20] After settlements, elite persons and groups continue to be affiliated with conflicting parties and movements, but an operational code of tacit accommodation, eschews mutually destructive struggles.[21]
More specifically, settlements tame politics by establishing elite cartels. Elites become connected to one another through a web of relatively inclusive power and influence networks that facilitate power sharing between opposing groups.[22] After settlements, the structure and character of elites’ internal relations are often discussed in terms of their ‘integration’ or ‘unity’.[23] Most observers of Russian politics since 1991 agree that no elite integration has so far emerged.[24] The vast power conferred on the Russian president by the 1993 constitution, leaves elite groups outside the Kremlin with few institutional incentives to support the existing political order.[25] Putin’s victory in the 2000 election left elite groups opposed to the president with little incentive to accommodate the new administration. As the Putin administration began to formulate new policies, it was opposed on almost every point by Gusinsky, Media-MOST and later, Boris Berezovsky. The media elites demanded that the presidential administration: restrict the influx of security service personnel to the power structures; avoid hard line rhetoric with regard to the West; expose corruption in the Kremlin; and stop the war in Chechnya.[26] These demands were seen by the Putin administration, as anti-state and dangerously at odds with Russia’s national interests.[27]
The political values espoused by Putin and his administration, differed fundamentally from the values held by Gusinsky and many of the senior journalists at NTV.[28] When Putin came to power, long-standing elite divisions became increasingly pronounced, a situation journalist Marianna Maximovskaya described as ‘the Reds becoming redder and the Whites becoming whiter.[29]
Under Putin, the elite composition of the Russian executive has been fundamentally changed. When composing his government and administration, President Putin recruited heavily, although not exclusively, from the elites groups that had dominated the Soviet Union.[30] A survey conducted by the Elite Studies Department at the Moscow Sociological Institute, found that among ministers appointed to the Russian government between 2000 and 2003, 35 percent had a background in the military.[31] Appointees drawn from the security services are imbued with many of the attitudes and value of the Soviet elite. Although these elements within the Putin administration do not oppose the basic principles of democracy or the market economy, they are strongly nationalistic, and orientated towards state regulation as the major solution to economic and societal issues.[32]
In comparison, the media elites, especially those associated with Media-MOST, embraced a more liberal and internationalist worldview. The journalists at NTV under Gusinsky’s ownership were mostly people who believed in the protection of human rights and liberty. They were liberals with liberal values and believed in independent journalism.[33] When NTV was established in October 1993, president Yeltsin hoped that its example would foster a liberal democratic and entrepreneurial spirit among Russia’s embryonic middle class.[34] While its main state competitors were channels for everyone, NTV immediately positioned itself as the channel for the intelligentsia.[35] From the start, NTV focused on building a news service second to none. NTV’s original head of news, Oleg Dobrodeyev, recruited a team of young correspondents, ‘unspoiled by Soviet propagandist journalism’, who were ‘educated, professionally skilful and committed to the ideals of liberal democracy’.[36] Former head of news at NTV, Vladimir Kulistikov, observed: ‘The uniqueness of NTV was that we all held the same opinions. What was good for NTV was good for Russia—this is the way we thought’.[37]
Without an agreed code of political conduct, the fundamental differences of opinions between the Putin administration and the media elites set the scene for a deadly struggle, which only side would survive. The professional role of journalists in Russian society became a major point of contention between the two groups. Many Russian journalists see themselves as guides of public morals and opinions. As television presenter Dmitry Kiselev states:
The main difference between post-soviet journalism and journalism in the West is that in the latter, the main aim of journalism is the reproduction of values, whereas in Russia, the main aim of journalism is the production of values. In Russia there is a contradiction between two value systems: the Soviet value system and the post-Soviet value system. We need to create a common modern value system. Russian people look to the people on television to guide them. Journalists are more important as moral leaders than politicians. Presidents come and go, but journalists and journalism lasts. I was here before Yeltsin and I am here after him. I was here before Putin and I will be here after him too.[38]
Many Russian journalists see it as their historical mission, not only to inform the public, but also to enlighten and organise the masses in the name of true values and ideals.[39] In the perestroika period ‘journalists became more than journalists, they were opinion makers and political actors’.[40] In recent years, the ineffectiveness of political parties opposed to President Putin has further fuelled journalists’ readiness to adopt a role on the political stage.[41] Where opposition politicians have failed to provide an alternative voice to that of the presidential administration, Russia’s journalists have stepped up to filled the vacuum.