How Channel One Keeps the News Safe for Putin

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joshua Yaffa recently profiled a Russian media mogul named Konstantin Ernst. Ernst is the C.E.O. of Russia’s largest state-controlled media network, Channel One, and his personal evolution from idealistic independent journalist to cynical mogul is a cautionary tale for the free press of any nation. Channel One effectively dominates Russia’s news cycle and subtly controls what its viewers believe. Ernst, Yaffa explains, has dispensed with the straight propaganda that was broadcast in Soviet times, in favor of a much slicker approach that’s more like a disinformation campaign. Rather than denying any specific facts or allegations against the regime, its news shows air conspiracy theories, contradictory interpretations of facts, and doctored footage to sow confusion. So, even though Russians have independent media outlets and access to the Internet, Channel One perpetuates a feeling that that the truth can never be known, one interpretation is as good as another, and there is no objective basis to critique what Russia gets from its leaders.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a bonus episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.7	Josh Jaffa is a Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker, and he's written a piece about a man called Constantine Ernst, a television producer who is really at the center of Russian politics and at the center of Putinism, and he has been for the last 20 years.
0:33.4	Josh, Constantine Ernst is currently the CEO of Channel One Russia.
0:44.0	Can you start by describing what Channel One is, what its importance is in politics and in Russian life today?
0:56.0	Channel One is a bit like NBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and Walt Disney all rolled into one.
1:03.0	It was, as its name suggests, the chief television broadcast station in the Soviet era and continued to play that role in post-Soviet Russia.
1:08.7	It's the channel whose tone, visual tone, cultural and political tone,
1:14.8	translates outward and broader into the culture.
1:18.8	It's the channel under Ernst's direction.
1:21.7	So how is Channel 1 today in 2019, going into 2020,
1:26.0	how is that different than what we think of as Soviet television,
1:29.8	which was kind of wall-to-wall propaganda even into the 70s and 80s?
1:34.0	How is this different?
1:35.5	I think there's a few key distinctions between Soviet-era propaganda
1:39.9	and the much slicker, more postmodern propaganda of Putin's Russia.
1:45.4	Soviet propaganda was essentially about convincing the viewer of a single truth,
1:52.1	at the expense of some other truth,
1:54.5	and that in the later days of the Soviet Union reached a real state of absurdity.
2:00.4	Propaganda like that could really only work for so long
2:03.5	and would certainly never survive into the kind of information and media age we have today.
2:09.3	And I would say what Channel One does and other Russian state media outlets is, first and foremost, they appeal to a kind of truth that viewers
2:20.9	are already inclined to believe. You know, as one of your predecessors as Russia correspondent for
	...

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