Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya

Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption, and Death in Putin's Russia by Anna Politkovskaya

Author:Anna Politkovskaya
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Russia, Journalists, Autobiography, Journalism, Writing, Politics, Memoir, History
ISBN: 9780307497635
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-12-31T13:00:00+00:00


September 1

Censorship and self-censorship in the mass media have reached new extremes and increased the probability that hundreds of adults and children in School No. 1 in Beslan, which has been seized by terrorists, will die.

Self-censorship is now the business of trying to guess what you need to say and what you should not mention in order to stay at the top. The purpose of self-censorship is to keep your hands on a large, very large, salary. The choice is not between having a job or being unemployed, but between earning a fortune or a pittance. Any journalist has the option of moving over to Internet publications, which are more or less free to say what they want, while there are still a couple of newspapers that enjoy relative freedom too. Where there is freedom, however, there is low pay, irregularly paid. The big time is the mass media that play ball with the Kremlin.

Television presenters who lie persistently, who keep off the airwaves anything that might upset the state authorities, do so for fear of losing a salary of several thousand dollars a month. They face a choice between continuing to dress in Gucci and Versace or putting on old, shabby clothes. There is no question of ideological commitment: their only commitment is to their own financial well-being. No journalists have any faith in Putin, nor have had for a long time.

The result is that what the NTV station broadcasts is roughly 70 percent lies. On the two official stations, RTR and Ostankino, the proportion is a good 90 percent. The same is true of state radio.

If during the Nord-Ost hostage taking television showed half the truth, during Beslan it broadcast nothing but official lies, chief of which was the assertion that there were only 354 hostages in the school. [The actual figure was closer to 1,200.] This so enraged the terrorists that they stopped letting the children go to the toilet or have anything to drink.

At NTV they knew perfectly well that figure was untrue. The directors of the company suppressed a report from their own correspondent at the scene, who was reliably informed about the real number of hostages. As Leonid Parfyonov, fired from NTV on June 1, said later, there was only one word of truth heard on NTV during the Beslan crisis. That was after the assault had begun, when dead and injured children were being brought out, and lumps of human flesh were seen all over the place; the reporter speaking on camera at that moment uttered a resounding Russian swear word, which accurately characterized what was happening.

Beslan was the nadir of this treacherous self-censorship, treacherous because it betrayed people who paid for the lies with their lives. Residents of Beslan attacked state television reporters because their lying, by now habitual in the Putin era, had started costing the lives of women and children they knew. Previously this had been experienced only by people living in Chechnya. Now it was time for others to understand.



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