Moscow Orientation – Day 10 – Press and Circumstance

Today we met with Vladimir Posner, the host of a popular Sunday talkshow and president of the Russian Academy of Television. We had attended a live broadcast of his show on Sunday, but got to sit down with him today and discuss press, journalism, and politics in Russia today.

Vladimir Posner is a fascinating guy. He was born in Paris and raised in New York by his communist- sympathizer parents. The family fled the United States during the McCarthy era and was offered citizenship by the USSR. It seems that the father was not only a card-carrying communist, but quite literally on the payroll of the USSR. Vladimir became a journalist and lived in the US for many years. During Glasnost, he hosted a live satellite show with Phil Donahue and audiences in Leningrad and New York. Later, he and Donahue had a show together for 6 years on CNBC.

He was very open with us, and answered our questions directly and frankly. He outlined press relations with the government. Print media is very free in Russia, but television is tightly controlled, and he gave a short history of the 1990’s explaining why. But state control of media has its problems, and one is that people stop listening. So, he expects the government to get out of the media business soon. But certainly not before the next presidential election in 2008.

He gave practical experience based examples of the rules that a journalist has to live with – and Posner is unique in that he’s had widely varying experience in the US and USSR/Russia. He noted that the controls are definitely in place in the US; it’s just that there, the mechanisms are quiet, efficient and largely market-based. Here, there made up of angry phone calls from the Kremlin to his boss. He knows full well what’s fair game and what’s not. He admitted fully that Chechnya is simply out of bounds. It is not a topic for discussion by the independent media. End of subject.

He was interested to hear about us, too, and gave us his cellphone number; in case any type of problem arises, he said, he could use whatever influence he has to help out. Very generous of him, I thought.

In the evening, I attended the 15th Anniversary celebrations of the Democratic Russia Movement. Movers and shakers from the early days got together to reminisce about yesterday and lament their absence in the power structures today. A lot of the speeches amounted to angry ranting by old people quite disaffected with the way the past 15 years have turned out. But there was plenty of analysis of what may have happened had these people not stood up in 1990 during the Soviet Coup. A very interesting evening; just don’t ever underestimate the ability of Russians to sit through an evening of speeches. I left after 2 and half hours and the program wasn’t even halfway done.