Channel Six
Another disgraced Russian oligarch has lost his television channel: after Vladimir Gusinsky, former owner of NTV, Boris Berezovsky no longer controls TV- 6. Few may remember now that Berezovsky became owner of the channel when Gusinsky’s media empire was beginning to fall apart and Boris Yeltsin was preparing, to recall his phrase in a conversation with Vladimir Putin, to hunt Gusinsky down. At the time, Berezovsky’s success was viewed as part of the executive’s large-scale onslaught on the freedom of the press. Now, his defeat is viewed in much the same light.
Meanwhile, according to an ironic twist of fate, the freedom of expression in Russia has become hostage to games among and within the clans. In a weird confluence of circumstances, Yeltsin expressed his support for TV-6 in an interview with Russian television and the Moscow Arbitration Court invalidated earlier court rulings to liquidate the company. What happened in the weeks to follow is hard to say, but, after the Supreme Arbitration Court decision to liquidate TV-6, Berezovsky failed to strike a deal with his former buddies in the family of Russia’s first president. Apparently, something simply did not work.
What next? The state, represented by the Minister of the Press Mikhail Lesin, believes that now the television company employees should compete in a tender for a license to broadcast, with the liquidated company transferring its functions to its employees. On the surface, the state, ever ready to muzzle the media, has suddenly (perhaps taken aback by the US State Department warnings) become its protector.
In fact, everything is quite simple. In today’s Russia, the freedom of the press is beneficial to the interests of one of the clans, and conflicts involving journalists have little to do with it. Are the political views of former journalists and leaders of NTV who presently work for TV-6 that different from those of the former journalists and leaders of NTV currently working for the Russian television or those who remained with NTV? The fact is that TV-6, VDTRK, and NTV are headed by leaders belonging to the same old team, the Gusinsky-period NTV, so loyal to the Kremlin that this same company was granted licenses to broadcast in the meter frequency range after the 1996 election.
It was the same company that unfailingly exposed Berezovsky after his every squabble with Gusinsky, explaining that the holder of the first button [the giant Gazprom Gas Company] is trying to manipulate public opinion to suit its own ends. Having got away with such lashing of Gazprom, many allegedly unbiased and critical NTV journalists switched employers, beginning to work for Gazprom protection, not even pay, after the latter acquired the channel. What will journalists of Russia’s last free channel do when such an operator is no longer around? The answer to this question, crucial as it is, is not difficult: the absence of one’s own political stand requires the presence of someone else pulling the strings behind the scene, someone who is closer now to those in power in Russia than Boris Berezovsky. This, in a nutshell, is the whole story about journalists.
