How is journalism practiced in Russia? Since the early 2000s, and even more so since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the Russian media have been reduced to the service of propaganda for the Vladimir Putin regime.
This is particularly the case of the public channel Rossiya-1 and its flagship program hosted by Vladimir Soloviev, one of the most zealous propagandists of the Kremlin, where the most bellicose speeches and justifications for conflicts occur daily.
tax issues
Invited this Tuesday on the BFMTV antenna, the journalist Zhanna Agalakova is a celebrity in Russia. A former employee of Channel One, a major state-controlled channel, she presented television news for many years before becoming a correspondent in France and the United States. She resigned from the media on February 24, the day the “special military operation” began.
In our antenna, the one who was awarded the Order medal “for merit to the fatherland” in 2006, describes the way in which the Russian media are forced by the Kremlin to spit out a pre-established speech, which cannot deviate from the Official version.
“Every Friday morning there is a meeting in the president’s administration where all the information is, the orders that must be given to the information chiefs of each Russian public channel,” he recalls, describing an “organized, planned and desired System in which journalists and presenters can voluntarily add self-censorship “to be more visible, doubled by the leader.”
A control taken to the extreme by the regime of Vladimir Putin. As a perfect illustration, this memory from 2005, when the Russian president had just been re-elected president a year earlier.
“I understood that something had changed. It was Putin’s second term, and we knew who the new president would be because we had to introduce him every day, no matter what he did. It was Medvedev, ”he underlines.
In the 2008 presidential elections, Dmitri Medvedev was thus elected with a comfortable score of 70% of the vote, while Vladimir Putin, who could not run three times in a row according to the Russian constitution, became prime minister. The latter would become president again in 2012 before signing several laws that now allow him to represent himself in his own succession almost infinitely.
Murder of opposition journalism
In this well-oiled system, there are very few places left for dissenting voices. Since the beginning of the invasion in Ukraine, during the programs, some guests have tried to warn about the misdeeds of this war. Roundly collected, they are no longer invited.
“There is always a list of people who can appear on the screen and who can’t. They no longer exist in the public eye,” says Zhanna Agalakova.
At the start of the conflict, the Russian journalist Marina Ovsiannikova, who rose to fame after appearing live on television with a poster criticizing the war, was arrested several times and sentenced.
In March, Vladimir Putin had personally signed a law punishable by prison terms of up to 15 years for “false information” about Moscow’s action abroad, an additional repressive weapon to control information.
Under these conditions, Zhanna Agalakova adds that people blacklisted the traditional media can resort to “independent media that are abroad, since the rest are destroyed, ruined, no longer exist.” Little by little, opposition journalism has dried up in Russia, due to repeated murders of its journalists and fear of reprisals for those still alive.
The most reputable opposition media, and still partially active, continue to Novaya Gazetawhose editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratev, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. A position for which the media pay a high price since, between 2000 and 2009, six of its journalists were murdered.
Another example that had a profound impact on public opinion on an international scale was the assassination on October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin’s birthday, of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in front of his house in Moscow. On several occasions she had denounced the excesses of Russian power as well as the situation in Chechnya. Her death has gone unpunished ever since.
According to Reporters Without Borders, Russia ranks 155 out of 180, between Afghanistan and Azerbaijan, in its world ranking for press freedom.
Source: BFM TV
