Russia and freedom of the press: Putin plays at home in the media, but does not have the monopoly of the Fourth Estate
In the recurring debate on the nature of the Putin system (dictatorship, hybrid system, authoritarian democracy) one of the paradoxically less commented aspects is the relationship between power and the media. The Navalny case has recently shifted attention to the use of social media as a tactic to mobilize and report the misdeeds of political leaders, but the risk is that of overestimating its impact: Navalny is in prison and is destined to remain there at least for the next two years, the demonstrations against his detention have deflated within two weeks and Putin can stage a return to apparent "normality" in both Minsk and Moscow in a meeting with Lukashenko.
Margarita Simonyan, who heads the pro-Kremlin international broadcaster Russia Today (RT) , recently went so far as to demand total censorship of foreign social networks in the country. Putin is aware that this move would be counterproductive, also because the legislation on the web since 2014 is already particularly restrictive, allowing the closure without warning for reasons of national security and requiring the registration of the most popular sites, whose data are made available to the state. . Coinciding with the recent street protests, the Russian authorities have previously ordered non-aligned newspapers and the most popular online media to refrain from covering the demonstrations, under penalty of fines or the withdrawal of licenses. For the moment, therefore, the "threat" from the network seems under control.
Let us then analyze the perspective from the point of view of traditional media. While it may seem a provocative statement, given that Putin's Russia ranks 149th in the Reporters Without Borders ( RSF ) press freedom ranking, the rather complex media landscape is probably what distinguishes it most from a classical dictatorship. This obviously does not mean that the Russian environment is a favorable context for the journalistic profession (officially 26 reporters murdered during Putin's various mandates), but it does indicate that it is however possible to find a multiplicity of circumstances, even very different from each other.
First of all, consider the approximately 80,000 registered newspapers, including print media (two thirds of the total), television channels (around 10 percent), radio stations, online media and news agencies. To better understand the reference framework, it is enough to compare the Russian situation with the Chinese one. In China, whose state structure of repression and control represents the paradigm of modern dictatorial systems, the presence of independent means of information and communication or even only subtly critical of the party-state is not conceivable. In Russia, the situation is remarkably different , so much so that it is possible to identify three main types: the official media (those controlled by the state and the similar press organs or in any case compliant with the Putin system), the non-aligned ones (who try to work among the folds of power), and finally those clearly opposed to Putin and his politics, with a more pro-Western slant: among the first, the officers, are the majority of television channels, national news agencies and the main radio broadcasters, as well as newspapers such as Izvestia or Komsomolskaya Pravda ; among non-aligned newspapers such as Kommersant and Vedomosti , and in general private newspapers generally in the hands of businessmen more or less in the Kremlin share; among the critics we could cite the classic Novaya Gazeta (the Politkovskaya newspaper), Moscow Times ( online ), the news agency Interfax , the radio Eco of Moscow and the various opposition sites among which Meduza , based in Latvia, stands out.
These distinctions may surprise us if we consider the progressive authoritarian involution which, starting as early as 2006 – but above all and decisively since 2014 – has characterized the Putinian power apparatus. In reality, the scenario described, which, as we can see, retains a certain amount of pluralism, is a fairly faithful mirror of the stratification that has overlaid layers of authoritarianism with regular frequency on Russian civil society and, consequently, also on freedom of the press. The point is that if Putin today does not yet control the entire media structure, it is above all because the process of closing his system has developed within a reality in which most of the media present today already existed before him or started. to operate during the first decade of his tenure, which could be described as relatively benevolent.
In this regard, it is interesting to recover a 2004 report by the magazine Russia in Global Affairs which analyzed the state of the art four years after Putin's inauguration, concluding that the health of press freedom in Russia, albeit conditioned by the presence of the oligarchs, was however, it was quite satisfactory and no involutionary tendencies or invasive interventions by the state were foreseen in the short term. It is significant that the title of the report was: "Mass Media in Russia, are they really free?" : that is, we started from the perspective of media freedom, not from that of their subordination to the established power, as is the case today. If Putinian's twenty years began in a climate of information and open public debate, this is due to the fact that the 90s, the Yeltsinian era, if from the political point of view they were turbulent and from the economic one extremely difficult, from the point of view of freedom of expression they represented the most brilliant period not only of the last thirty years but of the entire Russian history.
This premise, or the pre-existence of a decidedly freer and more independent information offer than the current one, is necessary to understand why, in order to consolidate the Putinian system, it often had to resort to intimidation against journalists critical of the government, in an ascending climax. which went from the warning, to the threat, to the instrumental use of the courts of justice – the sensational case of Ivan Safronov di Vedomosti , sentenced last July on charges of having passed secret information to a NATO country – to the real and own physical elimination. The best known case is obviously that of Anna Politkovskaya, killed in 2006 due to her articles on the war in Chechnya, but the trail of blood leads to the recent case of Irina Slavina, who set herself on fire in front of the Nizhni police headquarters. Novgorod, explicitly accusing the Russian Federation security apparatuses of persecuting her for her journalistic activity. But over the years the political control over the media apparatus has progressively been extended also through tactics of co-optation, of removal of undesirables, of imposition from above of the political canons of reference to be followed. However, the current situation has arrived over time and, despite everything, it cannot be said that Putin today holds the monopoly of the fourth power, as is normally the case in classic authoritarian regimes.
Where the control is almost absolute is instead on the television channels, which are then those destined to forge the new Russian identity. The main ones ( Primo Canale , Rossiya , NTV ) are all directly or indirectly, through Gazprom , in the hands of the state. More than government censorship (formally prohibited by law) in these cases it is self-censorship, originating from selection processes aimed at guaranteeing the transmission belt from political power to the media, from a preventive control of the issues to be dealt with and the way to treat them , from explicit forms of consensus orientation (blatantly nationalistic and anti-Western programs, opinion polls orchestrated to influence public opinion), as well as evidently more or less brazen propaganda tactics: think of the Ukrainian affair after 2014, to the very topical question of historical memory and the constant manipulation of broadcasters such as the aforementioned Russia Today , a real tool of geopolitical penetration abroad. According to the latest poll by the Levada Institute , 65 percent of Russians get information through television: Navalny permitting, Putin is still playing at home in the audience match for now.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/russia-e-liberta-di-stampa-sui-media-putin-gioca-in-casa-ma-non-ha-il-monopolio-del-quarto-potere/ on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 05:04:00 +0000.