Russian Federation

[RU] Media Council on TV propaganda

IRIS 2015-5:1/34

Andrei Richter

Comenius University (Bratislava)

In the context of coverage on Russian TV of events in and around Ukraine, notable are two decisions by the Public Collegium on Media Complaints (PCMC), a national Media Council in Russia, adjudicated on complaints on biased TV fare.

In the first case, of the TV weekly newscast on Rossiya-1, the PCMC ruled on a complaint of its Ukrainian counterpart. In its decision of 13 February 2014, the PCMC refused to judge the programme in accordance with the standards of professional journalism, stating that it was beyond the scope of such standards. The PCMC instead found that it constituted a sheer piece of propaganda, satisfying all the criteria of this genre. It stopped short of calling the programme “hate speech”, as claimed by the complainant, as it found no calls to violence.

In the second case, the PCMC reviewed a complaint in relation to a public affairs programme by the national broadcaster NTV, which reported from Perm’s museum of the Gulag. The TV programme claimed, in particular, that the guides of the museum, sponsored by USAID money, promote Ukrainian fascist nationalists, “while in Donetsk People’s Republic followers of Stepan Bandera [the embodiment of Ukrainian nationalism and the main historical target of Russian narrative of the events in Ukraine] bomb hospitals and shoot peaceful civilians.” (In March 2015 the NGO which ran the museum filed for its closure as a result of mounting pressure to change museum’s profile or quit.).

On 22 January 2015, the PCMC found in the NTV reports elements of a “synthetic” genre: a mix of straightforward propaganda and of the so-called mockumentary with “pseudodocumentality” as its basic element. Although the decision clearly found a complete departure of the broadcaster from the Russian standards of professional journalism, it also touched upon a legal aspect of the programme. The PCMC said, in particular: “National airing of materials that openly contradict the fundamentals of civil society that are fixed in the Constitution of the Russian Federation as national values shall not be considered an interior matter of a federal TV channel.”