The Instrumentalisation of Mass Media in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Russia's Presidential Election Campaigns of 2000 and 2008 (Soviet ... Post-Soviet Politics and Society Book 164) by Akhrarkhodjaeva Nozima

Author:Akhrarkhodjaeva, Nozima [Akhrarkhodjaeva, Nozima]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ibidem
Published: 2017-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Source: Levada Center, 2014

After winning the 2000 presidential election, Putin not only established control over the oligarchs but also set out to crack down on the media. Nationwide TV channels were his first and primary target. Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his shares of Channel One to Roman Abromovich, who claimed his loyalty to Vladimir Putin, while Vladimir Gusinsky’s media company Media-Most was bought by the Gazprom-Media. However, while exercising full control over television, the Kremlin allowed some diversity of information in the print media and on the Internet. Most print-media outlets were still privately owned. Nevertheless, the most popular of those media outlets supported the Kremlin’s policies; several influential dailies had been purchased by companies that had close connections to the government (BBC: Russia country profile, 2012). For example, the weekly newspaper “Kommersant,” founded in 1989 by a group of journalists, was bought in 1996 by Alisher Usmanov, a co-owner of a large steel company, “Metalloinvest”; that company had connections to Gazprom. Indeed, Usmanov was a founder of “Gazprom-Invest,” a company that managed Gazprom’s investment projects. As of 2008, most Russian TV stations were either directly state-run or owned by companies that had close connections to the government. The state controlled the three most popular TV channels with the highest coverage rates. That same year, Gazprom acquired the radio station Ekho Moskvy, shut down the newspaper Segodnia, and fired the staff of the weekly journal Itogi. Journalists who had previously worked at NTV moved to independent television channel TV-6, which was later shut down. Gazprom has also acquired the majority of shares in the newspaper Izvestia.

To sum up, ownership is one of the levers that the ruling elite can use to influence the media. There are several types of ownership through which the ruling elite can shape media-reporting practices: 1) direct ownership of media outlets, for example, Rossiia; 2) partial ownership , for example, Channel One; 3) ownership via state companies , for example, “Gazprom-Media”; and 4) crony ownership or ownership of media organisations by those close to the ruling elite. The ways in which ownership can shape reporting is presented in subsection 4.6.4. Reporting; how reporting changed over time and the result of my news-content analysis are discussed in Chapter 5.

As seen in the summary in Table 4.2, in 2000, two of three most-viewed federal channels (Channel One, Russiya, and NTV) were either owned or sponsored by business groups that were not dominated by the state or the ruling elite. This changed by 2008, when the majority of popular media outlets (both print and broadcast) were under state’s influence via either direct or indirect ownership. Since 2008, the popularity of online media has increased. In 2008, the most viewed online sources were “ gazeta.ru ” and “ lenta.ru .” gazeta.ru belonged to Alexander Mamut, its ownership structure has not changed since; however, lenta.ru was recently acquired by Mamut and Vladimir Potanin’s company “Rambler-Afisha.”

Table 4.2. Owners and financiers of large media organizations, 2000 and 2008

Owner

Key industry and company

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