Putin Hires U.S. PR Firm to Improve Russia's Image
Today is the World Press Freedom Day, and the highly respected NGO Reporters Without Borders published their annual report on the state of media and freedom of speech in the world (you can read the full text of the report here).
Briefly, it’s been a bad year for journalists around the world who have faced kidnappings, killings and threats, especially in Iraq, the worst year recorded since 1995. As for freedom of speech – the list of countries with strong government censorship included the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. People were prosecuted for Internet posts and articles in China, Vietnam, the Maldives, Iran, Libya, Syria and Tunisia. The report did not include Russia on this list of Internet censors, but did criticize the Kremlin, stating "Violence against journalists in Russia was frequent and impunity prevailed in a country where news is still closely controlled by the government." The problem with this sentence is that it implies a connection between the first fact, and the second opinion. The two journalists killed last year were victims of organized crime, or perhaps the mullah's regime in Iran, not the Russian government.
The report goes on to mention the murder of Paul Klebnikov, the brave Forbes journalist whose last article, Millionaire Mullahs, talked about where Iran's rulers have stashed their oil money. The Russian government has maintained that a Chechen gangster, Kozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, ordered the killing. But given the trail of the Iranian regime's finances that Klebnikov was uncovering, who really knows?
The other problems listed, including the prosecution of two reporters for libel, are serious, but they do not place Russia anywhere close to the other regimes listed in the report. The report alludes to Russian censorship of reports about the Chechen conflict and the Kremlin's denial of credentials to ABC News, without also mentioning that the U.S. State Department condemned the interview with terrorist commander Shamil Baseyev.
Finally, the report accepts that the government controls all broadcast media in Russia almost as a given. We recently wrote an in-depth report on this topic here at Russia Blog, showing that some of the most popular Gazprom-owned media outlets like Echo Moscow Radio have frequently criticized the Kremlin, especially regarding the war in Chechnya. The information we presented also undercuts the report's claim that, "TV stations, now all controlled by the Kremlin or government associates, are also subject to very strict censorship." The largest TV network in Russia, REN-TV, is privately owned and consists of 406 commercial TV-stations in the CIS, reaching an audience of 113 million people (the CIA World Factbook pegs Russia’s population this year at 142 million).
Meanwhile, yesterday the Kremlin signed an unprecedented contract in an attempt to start improving its image in the West ahead of the G8 summit (the event Senator McCain recently urged the U.S. to boycott in protest of Moscow's human rights record). Putin has personally authorized hiring the American PR firm Ketchum to promote the image of Russia and its President worldwide. Ketchum has worked with the U.S. Congress and is a well known firm. The work will be based in New York and D.C. and funded by a multi-million dollar contract.
I would like to ask Mr. Illarionov if he’s ever heard of a Chinese president allowing anti-government demonstrations downtown in a major city during a federal holiday; or if he could give me a single example of a Russian citizen being imprisoned for stating their point of view. Maybe things aren’t as bad as many Westerners think in Russia?
