冬奧黑洞：政治之手伸入媒體
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2014/2/28
2014-02-17 Web
only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/atosorigin/ |
索契冬奧在2月7日的開幕式中演出了「俄羅斯之夢」，但整場表演還是有個瑕疪：五個雪花之中，有一個並沒有開展成奧運環。國家電視台立刻將現場影像換成排演時的錄影，也讓俄羅斯媒體浮現一絲歐威爾《1984》的氣息。
正如「鋼鐵之環」保護索契冬奧免於恐怖攻擊，圍繞著媒體的虛擬「鋼鐵之環」也保護著總統普丁。奧運批評者全都被列為敵人，編輯亦收到警告，任何吹毛求疪的報導都會威脅刊物的生存。
冬奧之前，國家主導的媒體亦遭清算。整併之潮以國有媒體RIA Novosti為始；RIA Novosti對克林姆林十分忠誠，但作法低調又聰明。米羅紐科（Svetlana
Mironyuk）花了十年振興RIA Novosti，將它轉為現代化的多語言服務，卻在12月被基斯列夫（Dmitry Kiselev）取代；基斯列夫反美又恐同，就算是在蘇聯時代也會是極端派。RIA Novosti則與外語政治宣傳頻道Russia Today合併。
而在冬奧前夕，基斯列夫的上司亦向Dozhd發動攻勢。Dozhd的年輕記者反對一切基斯列夫支持的事物，吸引了許多年輕又有創意的莫斯科人。克林姆林近期不但向Dozhd發動宣傳攻擊，亦要求有線電視供應商將Dozhd從頻道方案中移除，使其廣告收益大為減少。Dozhd的高官華麗莊園報導或許觸發了此次打壓，但Dozhd創立者辛蒂依瓦（Natalia Sindeeva）表示，最讓克林姆林不滿的，就是Dozhd的獨立性。
俄羅斯政府名目上僅掌有兩間主要播送商，但許多私人播送商皆處於普丁之友克瓦恰克（Yury Kovalchuk）的直接或間接掌控之中。此外，與克瓦恰克有關係的企業，亦控有大部分的電視廣告支出。
俄羅斯也強化了對網路的控制。V Kontakte為俄羅斯最熱門的社群網路之一，最近被親克林姆林的大亨烏斯門諾夫（Alisher Usmanov）收購；國會亦快速通過新法，讓官方有權以定義模糊的「極端主義」為由，在沒有法院命令的情況下阻擋網站。
媒體可以在國內外創造並獵取敵人，將俄羅斯的問題歸咎於叛國者和幸災樂禍之人。索契冬奧本來的目標應該是鼓動俄羅斯人奮起，但要是沒有更自由的媒體，開幕儀式所揭露的文明先進社會將如其標題所言，只是一個夢。（黃維德譯）
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
The Economist
Putin and the media
Dreams about
Russia
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published:
February 17, 2014
Feb 15th 2014 |
MOSCOW AND SOCHI | From the print edition
Beyond the
spectacle of the Sochi Olympics is a crackdown on Russia's media.
THE opening
ceremony of the Sochi Olympics on February 7th had panache. A troika of light
floated above the stage, colourful domes of St Basil's lifted into the air and
a magical dance from "War and Peace" gave way to a study of the
Bolshevik revolution drowned in red light. The "Dream about Russia"
show, produced by Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia's Channel One, with the
help of American technicians, conjured up a modern, sophisticated European
country proud of its culture and its history: "the country I want to live
in," tweeted Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite and journalist.
But there was a
glitch: one of the five snowflakes did not unfold into an Olympic ring. The
response of state television was immediate and telling: instead of letting the
mishap pass, the live feed was instantly replaced with a recording from a
rehearsal. This substitution of reality is just one measure that gives the
Russian media a whiff of Orwell's "1984".
Just as Vladimir
Putin's greatest project has been protected from terrorist attack by a
"ring of steel", so the president himself is protected from political
subversion by a virtual "ring of steel" surrounding the media.
Channel One has rebranded itself as "First Olympic" and dressed its
presenters in Russian sports uniforms. Any critic of the Olympics has been
branded an enemy. Editors have been warned that carping reports would threaten
their publication's survival.
In the run-up to
the Olympics the state-dominated media have been purged. A wave of
consolidation began with RIA Novosti, the state news agency, which was always
loyal to the Kremlin but in a subtly intelligent way. Svetlana Mironyuk spent
ten years reviving the RIA Novosti brand and turning it into a modern
multi-language service that tried to project an image of Russia similar to the
one in the Sochi opening ceremony. But in December she was replaced by Dmitry
Kiselev, a television presenter whose venomous anti-American and homophobic
rants would have been extreme even in Soviet times. RIA Novosti itself has been
lumped with Russia Today, a foreign-language propaganda channel. The consolidation
of media assets coincides with the vaunting of traditional values and the
penalising of free speech.
On the eve of the
Olympics, Mr Kiselev's masters launched a campaign against Dozhd, a private
cable and internet TV channel. The brainchild of Natalia Sindeeva, a
42-year-old media entrepreneur, it is financed by her husband, Alexander
Vinokurov. "I wanted to create a channel for people like us," says Ms
Sindeeva. Its young journalists rejected everything Mr Kiselev stands for. It
came on air in 2010, during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev (now prime
minister), who endorsed it by his own appearances. Marginal in size, it
captured the spirit of the young, creative Moscow types who protested against
the Kremlin in December 2011. But its reach grew fast to 18m homes, including
many outside Moscow.
Recently Kremlin
propagandists have unleashed a hate-campaign against Dozhd. Cable-TV operators
have been instructed to drop it from their packages, depriving the channel of
advertising revenues. The trigger for the crackdown was probably Dozhd's
reports of a luxury country estate belonging to Vyacheslav Volodin, deputy head
of the Kremlin administration, as well as of protests in Ukraine. But, as Ms
Sindeeva says, what irritated the Kremlin most was Dozhd's independence.
Although the state
formally controls only two main broadcasters, many private ones come directly
or indirectly under a media empire of Yury Kovalchuk, a friend of Mr Putin.
Besides National Media Group, which has stakes in three TV channels, including
25% of Channel One, Mr Kovalchuk also has a large indirect stake in Gazprom
Media, Russia's largest media group, which owns five television channels,
several radio stations and a publishing company. Gazprom Media's structure is
complex: it is 100%-owned by Gazprom bank, almost half of which belongs to
Gazprom's pension fund. Most of this is managed by a firm linked to Mr
Kovalchuk.
Companies linked
to Mr Kovalchuk also control most television advertising. In 2010 he bought
Video International, Russia's largest advertising agency. Gazprom Media and
Video International account for two-thirds of the country's
television-advertising market. Until recently Mr Kovalchuk played almost no
role in Gazprom Media, but he has recently been more active, say insiders. He
was involved in the appointment of Mikhail Lesin, a founder of Video
International, as head of Gazprom Media.
Mr Lesin is no
stranger to Gazprom Media assets. Most of them, including NTV, were seized from
Vladimir Gusinsky, a media tycoon who created them and then fled the country
after Mr Putin's arrival in the Kremlin in 2000. Mr Lesin, then minister for
press and mass communications, endorsed a secret agreement under which Mr
Gusinsky was made to sell his assets to Gazprom in exchange for his own freedom
and safety. The agreement served as evidence in the European Court of Human
Rights that the attacks on Mr Gusinsky were politically motivated and in breach
of the European convention. As head of Gazprom Media, Mr Lesin last autumn negotiated
the purchase of media assets from Vladimir Potanin, another Yeltsin-era
oligarch.
One radio station,
Echo Moskvy, which is two-thirds owned by Gazprom Media and one-third by Mr
Gusinsky's American firm, has kept its independence, largely thanks to the
personal relationship of its editor, Alexei Venediktov, with Mr Putin. But this
may soon come to an end. Next week Gazprom Media will hold an extraordinary
shareholder meeting that could replace Echo's long-serving chief executive with
one of Mr Lesin's protégés. Tellingly, Echo Moskvy has come under fire for a
blog on its website comparing the Sochi Olympics to the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Using classic Soviet language, deputies from the ruling United Russia party
have denounced this as part of an "anti-Sochi campaign unleashed in the
Western media".
The state is also
strengthening its grip on the internet. One of the country's most popular
social networks, V Kontakte, has been taken over by a Kremlin-friendly
oligarch, Alisher Usmanov. A new law, hastily pushed through the Duma, allows
Russian authorities to block internet sites without a court order on the
grounds of vaguely defined "extremism".
As somebody who
lived through the end of the Soviet Union, Mr Putin is well aware of the
dangers of a free media. The Soviet Union was supported by repression and
ideology. Once these twin pillars were removed it came tumbling down. Mr
Putin's main instrument of governance has been money that bought loyalty. But
with the economy slowing and the currency wobbling, Mr Putin is now trying to
reinforce his position.
The media can
create and hunt enemies both in the country and abroad, blaming Russia's
troubles on traitors and ill-wishers. Meeting a public council in Sochi, Mr
Putin likened Western criticism of Russia to the "deterrence theory aimed
at hindering the development of the Soviet Union. Now we are seeing the same
thing." The Sochi Olympics were meant to mobilise the Russian people for a
new struggle. But, without a freer media, the sophisticated and civilised
country unveiled in the opening ceremony will remain as its title suggests: a
dream.
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
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