Kremlin poised to control Izvestia

The Kremlin has been accused of trying to buy up Russia's print media in order to quell anti-government criticism after it was confirmed it would soon acquire Izvestia, one of the country's oldest and most influential newspapers.

Liberal commentators said yesterday it was a canny move on the Kremlin's part before the end of the year when serious campaigning for the 2008 presidential election is expected to begin.

Most of Russia's TV networks are already perceived to be government-controlled but parts of the print media, including Izvestia, have managed to remain fairly independent.

Izvestia, founded in 1917, has been one of only a handful of serious newspapers to provide liberal and sometimes critical coverage of Russian affairs in the past few years.

However, it is known to have incurred the Kremlin's wrath during last September's bloody Beslan school siege. The then editor Raf Shakirov was dismissed for apparently covering the tragedy "too graphically".

His dismissal would have been sanctioned by Vladimir Potanin, Russia's eighth richest man with a fortune of $US4.7 billion ($A6.2 billion) according to Forbes magazine, which owns a controlling stake in Izvestia .

It is that stake that he is preparing to sell to Gazprom media, a state-owned media conglomerate that already owns three TV stations, five radio stations, cinemas and movie studios and a publishing house.

Mr Potanin is said to be anxious to stay on the right side of the Kremlin for the sake of his sprawling nickel empire and not follow Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who fell out with the Government and was jailed for nine years on Tuesday.

Shakirov, Izvestia's ousted editor, said yesterday he feared his former newspaper would swiftly lose its independent voice. "It (Izvestia) is not an asset that it is vital to own from the point of view of profits," he told Ekho Moskvy radio.

"Therefore this acquisition has a political character: they (the Kremlin's occupants) want to bring the country's main newspaper under their control.

"In TV the 'cleansing' is already completely finished and now they're going after newspapers so that the job is complete."

With a circulation of 200,000, Izvestia is also one of the few newspapers that has a truly national reach.

Interview Given by Vladimir Putin to CBS anchor Mike Wallace

WALLACE: Have you ever wanted to be a journalist?

PUTIN: You know journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist's job is very interesting.

WALLACE: Do you have to bend and kneel to become a journalist in Russia?

PUTIN: You decided to address media issues, right?

I will give you some figures now, and you will decide for yourself if you have to kneel before the authorities to work in the media.

Russia has 3,200 registered and functioning television and radio companies.

WALLACE: What? How many?

PUTIN: 3,200 television and radio companies. And only 10 per cent of them are state-owned.

Russia has 46,000 registered and publishing newspapers and magazines. Even if the authorities wanted — at the federal or regional level — to control this vast number of media, and those who work in this area, it is practically impossible to do, as you and I see. So rumors of the Kremlin’s total control over the media in Russia, as Mark Twain spoke of his death, are greatly exaggerated.

WALLACE: Now, there are political views that can be aired on cable television and by radio... But the only mass media that really carry political weight is three national television channels, right? And they put out their own news.

PUTIN: I would say we have a minimum of five to six television companies functioning at the national level.

WALLACE: I hear there are three news channels and all are controlled by you. When you were installed in office, one channel was run by the state, another was half-state and half-private, and the third fully private. Now all the three are controlled by the state, which controls news flows. One channel even begins its television newscasts by telling its audience what Putin did today, whom he met, and so on and so forth.

It looks like the Soviet Union, China and many authoritarian countries. Your men control news flows on these channels, and the opposition has no access to the news media. Although it is hard to imagine an opposition to you.

PUTIN: With respect to me, there is an opposition and a big one, to begin with. Second, the opposition is able to voice its opinion openly, which it does.

WALLACE: Where is it doing this?

PUTIN: Everywhere. And in the streets — you should see our May Day celebrations. The opposition is able to do this on all the 3,200 radio and television channels I mentioned, and practically in all the 40,000 publications.

As regards the influence of the national channels, I would not play down the effect of the regional mass media. According to all public polls, people living in the regions primarily trust the regional mass media.

But speaking of the national channels, you were correct in noting that initially one channel was state-owned and remained state-owned. And the state, in my opinion, has the right to possess a mechanism for presenting its official position through official and state mass media. The second channel, which is called Channel One in this country, is a joint-stock company.

WALLACE: The second was half-state and half-private, and the third all private. And now all three?

PUTIN: No, this is not the case. I repeat once again. It is true that one is state-owned. The second, which is called Channel One here, is a joint stock company with a sufficiently noticeable proportion of state capital. Honestly, I do not remember how much, but the state does not hold the controlling stake.

The third channel (NTV) was set up by private individuals with the money provided by joint stock company Gazprom. And joint stock company Gazprom, after failing to recover the loans issued for the project, took its property back. This channel does not belong to the state, it actually belongs to joint stock company Gazprom, in which the state has a 38 per cent stake, with 10 per cent, I think, owned by foreign investors who have their representative on the board of directors. In effect, it is an international company.

So claims that all three channels are fully state-owned are not true. Besides, there are other national channels with no state ownership at all. Incidentally, another joint-stock company — Unified Energy Systems [of Russia] — has a considerable representation in one of them.

The state also has a considerable stake in UES, but nobody ever says this television and radio company is under state control. And the prime reason I think is that the head of UES, which is the de-facto owner of Ren-TV, is part, in the view of Western partners, of the pro-Western section of Russia's political spectrum. And everything is considered okay there.

But in such a channel as NTV, which is owned by another company, the state is believed to control something.

The state in effect is in a position to control whatever it likes. The question is the extent to which internal legislation allows the state to do so. And relations between society and the media are always somewhat strained. It is because mass media are designed to identify problems and issues and show them to society, while the bureaucratic structures are trying to soft-pedal and play them down.

Incidentally, in my view, this is typical not only of Russia, but also of many other countries. Just recall what happened with the American media when the Iraqi campaign was being prepared and conducted? Were there no problems with journalists?

You just told me there is a view that in order to be a journalist one must have contact with the Kremlin or nearly personally with the president.

WALLACE: Oh no. I did not say that.

PUTIN: Just about. I said that we see such sufficiently rigid relations between state and journalists not only in Russia, but also in other countries. Did we not see in the course of the Iraqi campaign American journalists being sacked from national media for their stand on the Iraqi problem?

WALLACE: Do you mean to say the journalists were fired because of that?

PUTIN: Do you not know that journalists were fired for their position on Iraq, and in a presidential election campaign?

WALLACE: Can you give me the specific names?

PUTIN: There were such cases. This is a fact. It is no problem to quote the names. I simply want to make a point that relations between the press and the government is not Russia’s unique problem. It exists in other countries as well. But I believe that if we want to see the media independent we should primarily make them economically self-sufficient so that they are independent both from the state and big groups that are called oligarch groups here. The latter are protecting their own group interests rather than national ones. We will be definitely working to create the conditions, above all economic and legal ones, in order to ensure the independence of the media

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