Russian Presidential Campaign Coverage

In today's Russia, a society where illegal behavior is assumed--and sometimes even required for survival--the lines between capitalist tycoons, democratic politicians, and criminal syndicates have been blurred to the point of being indistinguishable. Since the fall of communism, unholy partnerships have been formed to acquire and protect power and wealth, and those partnerships have come to include the country's leading media outlets.

An old Russian proverb says, "Whoever pays the fiddler, orders the music." At the ownership level, the major media have become organized according to the political affiliation of the oligarch who controls their shares. Journalists aren't toting guns instead of pens, but editorial and advertising content has become a weapon in the supposedly democratic political wars.

The Absence of Western Traditions

Joseph Stalin once said, "It doesn't matter how they vote, just how we count." Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia's crash course on democracy has included two presidential elections, which were only approximations of the "free and fair" standard, but not because of the way they counted the votes. The Russian people are being led today, for better or for worse, by the men they chose. There is, however, some question as to whether they were able to make a well-informed choice.

The influence of the media barons was already apparent during the 1996 presidential elections when Boris N. Yeltsin couldn't get out of his sickbed to campaign. The media united to rally behind the heavily medicated incumbent, flying his capitalist flag on every front page and broadcast, lambasting the communists, not mentioning his other opponents, and sometimes not even accepting their advertisements.

Had the media remained nonpartisan in the best tradition of an independent media, or had they reported the truth about Yeltsin's health problems in the best tradition of investigative journalism, the communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, would have had a fairly good chance of winning. A communist president might certainly have meant an end to an independent media anyway, not to mention jeopardizing all the unrelated business interests of the media barons. But the fact is that the very same tactics that were used under communism to keep the communists in power--propaganda--were used to keep the anticommunist Yeltsin, and his business tycoon comrades, in power.

The current situation is different from the 1996 presidential elections with respect to two key points. The choice is no longer between democrats and the return of communists, and it looks as though there will be no united media front backing one candidate--although this may yet change.

In capitalist Russia, owning a media outlet has become a political strategy as much as a commercial investment, and all the candidates use the media in ways that would be considered highly unethical in America. As Aleksei Pankin, a Russian media specialist, observed,

A peculiarity of the Russian media scene is that it has been to a large extent shaped by a force that has nothing to do with the media, namely the financial-industrial groups, primarily banks or raw materials companies. Since the dawn of the market economy in Russia, the country's financial and political arenas have been dominated by oil, gas, metals exporters, and financial speculators. They built their empires on privileged uses and abuses of state budgetary resources, as well as tax and tariff privileges. Such companies have invested liberally in the media for their own use as lobbying tools, for supporting their candidates for the top political posts in the country, and as a weapon against competitors and other enemies. They also have been suspected of using their media outlets to plant information that would trigger calculated effects in the markets. ¹

In the United States, candidates buy time slots and page space. In Russia, their rich supporters buy the TV stations and the newspapers. And Russian journalists have become tools of their employers' political or financial ambitions, anything but the nonpartisan reporters they thought...