President Vladimir Putin worked hard to bring the 2018 FIFA World Cup to Russia, but now that the spectacle is heading toward a climax, his influence has waned. He is unable to control referees or the performance of Russia’s national team, the Sbornaya – the lowest-seeded team in the tournament. But he has far more control over how the tournament is covered, at least by Russian media.
In the World Press Freedom Index, compiled each year by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Russia is ranked 148th out of 180 countries. Rather than accepting the competition that comes with pluralism, the Kremlin is intent on rigging the rules of politics and to fix media “matches” in his favor.
From criminalizing defamation to barring news that offends the “religious feelings of believers,” Putin’s media laws are becoming increasingly restrictive. Their vague wording allows them to be applied in a selective and arbitrary manner, and press-freedom advocates that seek to challenge the status quo are coming under increased scrutiny.
Like a rigged player-transfer system, the leading Russian media are under the Kremlin’s thumb.
The government has managed television broadcasters – Russians’ main source of news – since the early 2000s, when ORT and NTV were seized from the moguls Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky respectively. After the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, these and other national broadcasters increased their output of pro-Kremlin propaganda.
For example, in 2015, a documentary that aired on state-owned Rossiya 1 accused human-rights activist Nadezhda Kutepova of “industrial espionage,” lies that eventually forced her into exile.
The following year, the same channel used forged documents to accuse leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny of being an agent for Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency. Putin’s grip on state media has been tightening since December 2013, when channels were regrouped in the Rossiya Segodnya consortium to improve the presentation of Russia’s “story.”
Television is not the only Kremlin-controlled medium; the Internet is being muzzled as well. Websites are blocked, bloggers are monitored, search engines and news aggregators are censored, and virtual private networks (VPNs) are banned.
This April, Russia cut off access to the encrypted messaging network Telegram, joining countries like China and Iran. Most worrying of all, more and more Internet users are being jailed for their comments on social media, or for simply endorsing content with a “like.”
In The Stranger, Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote that the little he had learned about life had been “on the football field,” and that, like adversity, a kicked soccer ball “never arrives from the direction you expected it.” Something similar could be said of the media playing field in Russia.
Since 1999, when Putin first became prime minister, 34 journalists have been killed while reporting in the country, including investigative reporter Nikolai Andrushchenko, who was beaten to death last year in St Petersburg. In the vast majority of these cases, the investigations stalled and the perpetrators have never been identified.
With the stakes so high, many media owners have chosen to leave the game entirely, selling their outlets to pro-Kremlin oligarchs, many of whom were, fittingly, previously asked by Putin to buy soccer clubs. Some media organizations continue to provide high-quality journalism, but they have nowhere near as many readers or viewers as the leading state-controlled media.
The only independent national broadcaster, Dozhd, was dropped by satellite and cable services in 2014. Galina Timchenko, the editor of Russia’s most widely read news website, Lenta.ru, was fired the same year, along with most of her staff. The editorial team of the RBC media group suffered a similar fate in 2016.
Nor have the closures spared leading regional outlets like Siberian broadcaster TV-2 or Kaliningrad’s top independent weekly newspaper, Novye Kolesa. Each of these outlets was distinguished by its coverage of sensitive stories – from the conflict in Ukraine to high-level corruption.
Russia today has less press freedom and more journalists, media workers, and bloggers behind bars than at any time since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. In Crimea and Chechnya, even the most basic media protections are non-existent. With the Kremlin’s blessing, these regions have been turned into news and information “black holes,” where the authorities are free to act without fear of consequences.
This may not be the Press Freedom World Cup, but with Russia under the global spotlight, the international community can push for the release of jailed journalists and human-rights defenders; the repeal of draconian laws; the relaxation of government control over the media; and an end to impunity. This opportunity is unlikely to come again any time soon.
Christophe Deloire is secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, known internationally as Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018.
www.project-syndicate.org
What bullocks is this?!
Tell me of a country that does not have control on media? BBC, CNN, France24, CGTN name it are there to save there national govts. All govts whether in the East or West exercise some degree of media control! What differs are ways in which that control is exercised! But then we have become acustommed to media specialised at creating demons.
Of course Russia has controls on media. Some are like the censorship we had in the West in the 1950s, aimed at maintaining public morals at a reasonable level. Some are for helping the rulers keep power and maintain order (the main thing any government absolutely must do, for selfish reasons, but also for the public good).
But now let’s look at US media: just how far to the left do mainstream media go? How many times do you see someone praise Russia in the mainstream media? Or China? China has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty, but of course we are supposed to think all they do must be bad.
Anyone with any kind of experience of the somehat wider range of opinion in some other countries’ media will know that US mainstream media is tightly constrained to the middle and right of the spectrum. Other opinions are accessible, if you know where to ferret them out, but they have little effect on wider public opinion. US media control is subtle, consisting of planted stories, available "experts," and a knowledge of how to use the news cycle to control the flow of stories. But it is almost as effective as the hard slogging of tight control used by more obviously authoritarian governments.
The news anywhere suits the people who control the media. In some places that is the government, but in most places it is wealthy men, who use people’s habits and desires to control their opinions so the power of capital will not be challenged.
I will not go into the fact that countries differ, and what is healthy debate in one country can lead to terrible disorder in another. Or the fact that debate in China seems to me nearly as wide-ranging as in North America: in China, people discuss government policy seriously and in depth, but never debate whether the Communist Party should continue to run the country. On current evidence, of course, the CPC is doing a fairly good job.
Last year Reporters without Borders tried to censor an event at the Swiss Press Club that was critical of the White Helmets. "Club president, Guy Mettan, has resisted this pressure, condemning it as ‘a grave attack on freedom of speech’. He notes that it is unprecedented for an organization defending press freedom to try to censor a conference."
https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/reporters-without-principles/
So I suppose this writer is trying to tell us that the New York Times, The Washington Post, The BBC , CNN and MSNBC are all free of government influence. These bastions of freedom of the press all in lockstep with every illegal war the US and UK have visited upon the world. Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin, WMD and thousands of other lies foisted upon their long suffering populations by their ministries of propaganda …………..er Departments of State. All falling in line with the US " Enemy Du Jour like the out right owned and dictated to robots they have become. There is not a single Western Country that can promote itself as a bastion of press freedom. The CIA, MI6, FBI and all of the alphabet soup of security agencies in the Western World decide what can be printed and what can`t and what should be labeled as "Fake News." This article is a f**king joke.
Oh and the World Cup has been a spactacular success. It is the best, and best attended, World Cup in history. The fans, love it, the arenas are filled to capacity in every single game. Russia has been one huge street party since the games started. So please, please go away with your sour grapes.
I won’t bother clilcking on any more articles by Mister Deloire.
All media is biased. The author is crying because the liberal democratic media is not the dominant media in Russia. They cannot propagade tbeir fake news and propaganda to destabilize it.????
Exactly my man!