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#1 - JRL 2007-100 - JRL Home Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 From: Nicolai Petro <kolya@uri.edu> Subject: New York Times errata [re: Protests, Russian Media] On April 22, 2007 Andrew E. Kramer reported the following in the New York Times (“50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio”): “Last weekend, the state channels mostly ignored the violent dispersal of opposition protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Rossiya TV, for example, led its newscast last Saturday with Mr. Putin attending a martial arts competition, with the Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme as his guest.” Mr. Kramer is mistaken. That evening, Saturday, April 14th, the evening news on Rossiya TV, hosted by Ernest Matskiavicius, led with a report of a bus crash in Turkey that cost the lives of 33 persons, mainly children. The second story was about the bombings in Karbala, Iraq, in which an estimated 72 persons died. The third story was about the marches in Moscow. There was no mention in the broadcast of either martial arts or Van Damme. By contrast, the segment on the opposition marches lasted for three minutes and 33 seconds, out of 16 minutes and 40 seconds, or over one fifth of the entire news broadcast that evening. Within the segment on the marches, 34.7% of the air time was devoted to the march by the “radicals,” as they were termed, as distinct from the rallies held by the nationalists and the United Russia youth group, Molodaya Gvardiya. These and other news broadcasts are available online, for a very modest fee, thanks to a Canadian internet television viewing service at http://www.etvnet.ca/ The martial arts championships attended by Putin, Van Damme (and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) were the lead story on Rossiya TV only on the mid-afternoon news at 2 PM the following day, a rather slow time for viewing the news. One might dismiss this as a trivial error, but for the fact that it served the author as an anecdotal example of how distorted Russian television coverage of politics is, and that is precisely how it was run by wire services throughout the world over the next several days. Unfortunately, for all involved, it didn’t happen that way. I hope that this will serve as a useful reminder to journalists to verify their sources independently, rather than rely on the conventional wisdom. Professor Nicolai N. Petro
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