What is wrong with Russian state television news reporting on the Ukraine war
In Western mainstream media and in Western expert journals, we find the nearly universal characterization of Russian news reporting on the Ukraine war as “disinformation.”
The reader will not be surprised when I say this is all rubbish: what they are saying in the West is state sponsored propaganda and nothing more.
When these same Western journalists and experts speak about specific Russian television hosts and programs, they frequently attack the talk show host Vladimir Solovyov and the presenter of News on Sunday, Dmitry Kiselyov. Both present the most watched news programs in the country, and Western observers uniformly condemn them for supporting Vladimir Putin and his “war of aggression” in Ukraine. These condemnations cost Solovyov his villa in Italy, where authorities have sanctioned him and suspended his property rights. It is hard to think of any other case globally where a mere journalist in another country has been punished so severely for practicing freedom of speech and freedom of the press at home.
In what follows, I provide a different perspective on these opinion leaders in Russia and on the programs they produce. This is not to say that I give them and Russian state television news reporting on the war a clean bill of health. Not at all! But my line of criticism is entirely different from what my peers in the West are saying.
Attentive readers will have noted my sharp criticism of the President of Russia’s Union of Journalists for the way he conducts his political talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. Solovyov is rude, he is boorish, he is overbearing in his treatment of the expert panelists who regularly appear on his show. This trait has become all the worse ever since the Ministry of Defense has over the course of several weekends taken him down to the front lines in Donbas and allowed him to travel in tanks and armored personnel cars, to spend time chatting with both ordinary soldiers and officers. Each time he comes back still more puffed up with his self-importance and behaves still more obnoxiously with the academics and even with Duma members who appear as panelists. He interrupts them, he hectors them.
Yes, Solovyov deserves commendation for going to the front lines. But how is he any better or worthy of respect than Yevgeny Poddubny or the other Russian war correspondents who report from there every day of the year?
What is more to the point, Solovyov is only superficially a cheerleader for Vladimir Putin. His political beliefs going back more than a decade were always more stridently nationalistic than those of the Kremlin. The most favored guest on his show was always Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and leader for life of the Liberal Democrats, a party that never shared the enthusiasm for partnership with the West that characterized the ruling party, United Russia. And today Solovyov allows himself on air to make the kind of outrageous and inflammatory remarks about driving Russian tanks to Berlin and Paris that one could have heard from Zhirinovsky in the past.
My issue with Dmitry Kiselyov is only professional, not personal. He is a gentleman, a diplomat in everything he says and does on air. At the same time, I will agree with his Western critics that Kiselyov is a staunch supporter of Vladimir Putin and of the way the war is being conducted. The problem I have with Kiselyov is that the way he organizes the presentation of news on his show works against these very policies, not for them. And this is important, because Kiselyov is not just the presenter of a Sunday news wrap-up; he is the director of all news programming on Russian state television and the priorities of his own show are adopted by the regular Vesti news broadcasts 24 hours a day.
On this past Sunday, Kiselyov opened his show with what must have been a half hour of video coverage of the artillery and rocket attacks on Donetsk and nearby towns by Ukrainian forces. We saw the minibus which was struck by a missile, killing immediately the 7 riders, including a young girl. We saw the owners of apartments and small wooden houses beside their destroyed homes where some lost wives or other close relatives. And we saw the Investigative Unit soldiers photographing the destruction, making records of the bomb debris and size of artillery craters for Russia’s ongoing compilation of war crimes committed by the “Ukrainian Nazis.”
Yes, these events occurred and find no reflection whatsoever in Western news reporting on the war. Yes, the attacks were directed against the civilian population, not against any military targets which are absent from the neighborhoods that were attacked. However, the message of these reports to the broad Russian public is wrong-headed. Anyone with interest in following logic has to ask how it is possible that the Ukrainians are still inflicting such massive destruction on civilians in what is now part of the Russian Federation more than a year after the start of the Special Military Operation. Considering that Russians by nature very often indulge in conspiracy theories, these facts provide fertile ground for supposing that there is treason in high places to explain the failure to stop the Ukrainian attackers.
Then this very coverage contrasts sharply with the next news items which show Vladimir Putin speaking to legislators on how all social services and worthy employment must be ensured to citizens in the new RF regions, how they must be brought up to the level of living standards in the rest of Russia. What kind of equality can there be when elemental security from artillery and rocket attack is not being provided?
And the opening coverage is in direct contradiction with the further reporting from the front lines, where Russian soldiers manning artillery and rapid fire rocket launchers are interviewed and from where we are shown the massive firing of munitions against Ukrainian positions 20 or 30 kilometers away.
It all does not add up, and it is patently clear that Kiselyov and his team have not given sufficient thought to the consistency of their messaging to the broad Russian public.
There are some bright spots on the Russian state television scene. One of them also regularly comes in for harsh and unjustified criticism by Western commentators. I have in mind the Sixty Minutes news and analysis show hosted by Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva.
Allow me to state my personal biases with respect to these two. I have a debt of gratitude to Popov, since he was the journalist who first put me on live Russian domestic television seven years ago in a news show (From our own correspondent) that preceded the creation of Sixty Minutes. We had met in an auditorium of the European Parliament building where we were awaiting the screening of a film by the then Opposition film-maker Andrei Nekrasov about the scam Magnitsky case that was placed before Congress by Bill Browder. We found each other simpatico and I got on his show in Moscow. The nature of Russian television being what it is, that appearance led to invitations to appear on talk shows of other channels. I tip my hat to Popov, who is now not only a talk show co-host but also a member of the State Duma from the ruling party.
As regards, Olga Skabeyeva, my feelings are less warm. Somehow we did not hit it off and on a later show she cut off my microphone and sent me home. Nonetheless, I freely acknowledge that she and her husband, Popov, host a very well produced program, which provides to Russian audiences extensive video coverage of leading events of the day as shown on CNN, Fox News and a number of European state broadcasters. They treat their panelists with due respect, and the panelists themselves are circumspect professionals who help explain to the lay public what is going on in the Ukraine campaign. My only criticism is that they offset their coverage of the war with what is probably meant to be light entertainment – coverage of gender identity issues in the West, the scandals over drag shows for children there, and the like. Yes, the transgender campaigners in the USA are sufficiently mad to be self-parody. But it would be a serious mistake to judge American military might by how many queers there are in uniform.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023