Moscow downtown – a car exploded after a bomb detonated under the vehicle, targeting its owner, Sergei Chelyaginov, age 35. Mr. Chelyaginov is a private business owner. Please see the Crime section of RussiaBlog for more news on assassination as a common tool of Russian business.
Russia Today – the new English language 24 hour channel – was launched on Saturday. It went off the air on Monday. The Russian government spent $30 million on new digital equipment, and more money on the salaries of young British “professionals” fresh out of college and their Russian peers. The new channel administration blames the failure on a hacker attack; however, there are more likely explanations for what happened.
Russia Today is the first channel in Russia to go 100% digital (without real tapes), and there are just not enough Russian technicians available who have extended experience working with such equipment. The channel is 100% owned and controlled by the Kremlin, and channell executives promised reporting just “as professional as Al Jazeera or BBC”. There’s a little problem though – Russian bureaucrats don’t really speak English, and therefore, they don’t have much control of what is done and said on the channel. Here’s the result: a bunch of young kids playing with expensive equipment to create the first in Russian history 24 hour channel ended up losing control of the situation, and literally shutting down their live programming for some period of time. The channel is still off the air, and no one really knows when it will be back.
Grozny, Chechnya – today the first session of the new Chechen parliament took place. Everything was peaceful, besides the roar of the jets, then helicopters flying overhead, and then Putin himself appearing out of nowhere. Russian news agencies are usually banned from delivering the information about Putin’s visit to Chechnya until the moment when the president’s plane takes off. However, Reuters doesn’t care for these restrictions, and broke the story at 2 pm Moscow time. Putin and Alu Alhanov (president of Chechnya) compared Grozny with Stalingrad, stressed the historic importance of the new Chechen parliament, and one hour later Putin took his leave, and said that he is expected to be in Malaysia. Safe travels to you, Putin-the-adventurer!
Comments
Russia Today starts from outage
Gazeta's Kuzina is 100% right when she points out that RT's road tio success is not going to be easy. She is also right to compare it with Aljazeera. But then Kuzina's logic stumbles. Aljazeera success has little to do with scandalous tapes of Bin Laden and other terrorist paraphernalia.
What happens is that they found ways to fight against huge hostile PR machine by superior journalistic and analytical quality. BTW, unlike RT, Aljazeera is not pure export, their main broadcasting is in Arabic.
Following this example, RT coverage should be both in Russian and in English - and start from the post-Soviet space. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
On recent RT outage, Gazeta is right. The most likely cause of it is technical problem. As for the hackers' attack, this version simply makes no technical sense.
1. M.Kuzina. Who needs Russia Today? http://gazeta.ru/column/kuzina/493984.shtml
2. A.Dorofeeva, S.Borozdina, P.Kanaev. Russia Today suspends broadcasting http://gazeta.ru/2005/12/12/oa_181281.shtml
Posted by: Henry James | December 13, 2005 10:40 PM
In the interests of fair and balanced journalism, let's hope that Russia Today has better standards than what one typically sees from the BBC.
The BBC's coverage of the former USSR and former Yugoslavia is very much skewed in a politcally censored direction.
I'm more than happy to substantiate on this further.
Posted by: Michael Averko | December 19, 2005 3:55 AM
Couple of notes regarding the RT going off air. I was on the shift as a News Editor that morning. I was on the shift next morning when we finally went back on air. The ‘black hole” lasted only for 15 hours.
There was nothing related to “young journalists playing with expensive equipment”, as it is described by Yuri Mamchur of Russiablog. There were problems with the second server responsible for inter-program broadcast elements and prerecorded parts (mainly promos and documentaries). This server is operated by two engineers having no connection with News Room and other news related parts of the complex. Also note please that CNN went off air several times when it launched. In my opinion, that is an initial problem for all new channels.
Yours,
Anton Verstakov
News Editor, RTTV
Posted by: Anton Verstakov | December 20, 2005 10:04 AM
Dear Mr. Verstakov:
Those are technical matters for sure.
Did you see the recent BBC critique of RT?
Pretty ironic considering that news service's less than truthful coverage on Russia.
It's better to be efficiently high tech over more outdated broadcasting equipment. However, the news and opinion content remains crucial.
A properly run media review show on how Russia is covered would substantiate my points in this message.
Posted by: Michael Averko | December 23, 2005 5:07 PM