Russian Elections and TV News: Comparison of Campaign News on State-Controlled and Commercial Television Channels

Recent parliamentary and presidential election campaigns in the Russian Federation offer a chance to study the political role of television in a post-Soviet state. Television has many roles to play during an election in a developing democracy: It should inform voters about choices, report on the events of the campaign, and educate voters about the electoral process itself. This article examines how the news coverage of parliamentary and presidential elections on Russia's primary state television channel and on its largest private television station fulfilled these goals. The results of coding television news during the campaign periods for the 1995 Duma campaign and the 1996 presidential race show that these channels generally failed to contribute fully to the legitimization of the electoral process. During the parliamentary campaign, state-controlled Russian Public Television (ORT) focused on pro-government parties and neglected coverage of the competition. Although the elections coverage on the private NTV station was more balanced, the elections were relatively ignored in favor of aggressive coverage of the war in Chechnya. By the 1996 presidential election, the two stations both abandoned the pretense of neutrality to promote the incumbent presidential candidate, Boris Yeltsin. What emerges from this study is evidence of a missed opportunity to consolidate the growth of an independent media in Russia--and the failure of voters to obtain disinterested information from primary television outlets in a fragile democracy.