Updated Dec. 9, 2013 4:04 p.m. ETMOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin liquidated the state news agency RIA Novosti and tapped a television journalist known for anti-Western and antigay remarks to build a new outlet that will focus on promoting Russia abroad.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed a controversial news anchor known for his ultraconservative views to head a newly restructured state news agency. Dr. William Pomeranz of the Woodrow Wilson Center joins the News Hub to discuss the implications. Photo: AP.
The move steps up the Kremlin’s effort to present an alternative narrative to what Mr. Putin says is biased coverage of Russia by the Western media. It simultaneously dismantles what in recent years has become the most professional state media outlet in the country.
The result is likely to be a more-targeted information arsenal for the Kremlin in its bid to crack what Mr. Putin has described as an “Anglo-Saxon monopoly on information flows.”
Dmitry Kiselyov posed for a photo in October 2011 after receiving a medal of Friendship. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The decree issued Monday by Mr. Putin hands RIA Novosti’s assets to a new organization to be called Rossiya Segodnya, or Russia Today. The agency, which is separate from a similarly named, state-controlled television network, now branded RT, will be run by Dmitry Kiselyov, a fiery pro-Kremlin news anchor and manager from the state-controlled channel Rossiya-1.
“Restoring a fair attitude toward Russia as an important country in the world with good intentions—that is the mission of the new structure that I will lead,” Mr. Kiselyov said in a brief televised interview.
Sergei Ivanov, head of Russia’s Presidential Administration, said the new organization would be smaller than RIA Novosti because the Kremlin wants to cut expenditures on information resources, which amounted to roughly 2.9 billion rubles ($88.6 million) a year for RIA Novosti alone.
“Russia is carrying out independent policy, firmly protecting its national interests. To explain that to the world isn’t simple, but it’s possible and necessary,” Mr. Ivanov said in a statement explaining the new agency’s mission.
The move came as a surprise to much of the staff at RIA Novosti and marks a blow in particular for editor in chief Svetlana Mironyuk, who since taking charge a decade ago has transformed RIA Novosti and expanded it to serve a large audience, with general-news, business, law and sports wires in Russian and other languages.
The agency, which put out the most objective state news, sometimes seemed to push the envelope of what was acceptable to the Kremlin. It published infographics to estimate the number of people who turned out for anti-Putin protests, and its law agency RAPSI conducted blow-by-blow live coverage of the trials of opposition figures.
Ms. Mironyuk told staff in a meeting Monday that the organization would be shut within three months, a decision she said was taken without her prior knowledge. She expressed astonishment at the move to liquidate the “best media organization in the country,” which cost the government nearly $1 billion to build, all in the name of supposed cost-cutting.
“It really hurts me,” Ms. Mironyuk said through tears, according to a video of the meeting leaked to Russian websites.
A Russian official said Ms. Mironyuk has been under pressure ever since the Kremlin became dissatisfied with the way RIA Novosti covered mass demonstrations against Mr. Putin that erupted in Moscow in late 2011.
It was unclear how much of RIA Novosti’s roughly 2,300-person staff would be hired by the new entity.
Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, is a partner of RIA-Novosti’s business-news subsidiary Prime, which distributes financial news in Russian. Dow Jones declined comment on the change.
RIA Novosti is the host news and photo agency for the 2014 Winter Olympics, which kick off in Sochi, Russia on Feb. 7. How the liquidation will impact the agency’s official duties remains unclear. The Olympic organizing committee did not respond to a request for comment.
The decision marks a surprise rise for Mr. Kiselyov, who is best known these days for on-air sessions that defend the Kremlin’s position in at times over-the-top rhetoric.
In one recent appearance, he described the current protests in Ukraine—which erupted after Russia pressured the government there to turn down a trade pact with the European Union—as the result of a provocation by Sweden, Lithuania and Poland, designed to exact revenge for their defeat at the hands of the Russian Empire during the 1709 Battle of Poltava.
The 59-year-old made waves earlier this year when he said in another segment that Russia’s new “gay propaganda” law—which prohibits people from condoning same-sex lifestyles in front of minors—hadn’t gone far enough.
He said the hearts of gay organ donors harvested from fatal car crashes should be “buried or incinerated as unsuitable to prolong someone’s life.”
He later told Lenta.ru, a Russian online news outlet, that his comment about organ donors was meant as a “healthy provocation.” He said the U.S. bans gay men from donating blood, a decision dating back to the initial days of the AIDS epidemic, and suggested he wants Russia to adopt similar measures.
According to his official biography, he worked on television programs in Russia throughout the 1990s, as well as documentaries, and later worked for Ukrainian television from 2000 to 2006. He joined Rossiya-1 as an anchor in 2005 and since 2008 has served as deputy general director of the state holding company that oversees the channel.
Mr. Kiselyov was asked in the September interview with Lenta.ru about an appearance he made many years earlier, where he argued that journalists shouldn’t be “agitators” and instead should show the “right proportions of the world” and the full picture of a story.
“I have since changed positions,” Mr. Kiselyov told Lenta.ru. He said he has realized that “aloof, distilled journalism absolutely isn’t in demand,” and that he now believes journalism “should absolutely be with a position.”
“There’s a place for agitation,” Mr. Kiselyov added.
The media landscape in Russia has changed dramatically since Mr. Putin first assumed the country’s presidency in 2000. National television channels once controlled by tycoons have come under tight state control. A swath of the country’s Moscow-based print press, however, has remained independent and at times critical of the Kremlin, despite tight regulations.
RIA Novosti is separate from Itar-Tass, the other main state news agency, which was largely unaffected.
Natalya Loseva, former deputy editor in chief at RIA Novosti, credited Ms. Mironyuk with attaining a high and relatively objective standard of news reporting while other state news outlets were being used more like propaganda.
“Destroying such a big and massive media unit in the industry, and I’m not talking about politics right now, will definitely impact the market,” Ms. Loseva, who now works at the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty, said in an interview with TV Rain.
Many RIA Novosti employees said they have been noticing budget cuts for at least a year and understood that the tempo of expansion and change had halted.
The Kremlin in 2005 launched the English-language television news network Russia Today to compete with the likes of the BBC, CNN and Deutsche Welle. It was rebranded RT a few years later.
While the network initially focused on events within Russia, it has since migrated to providing an “alternative viewpoint” on international events in places such as the U.K., the U.S. and the Middle East, and has launched additional channels in Spanish and Arabic.
The newly formed Rossiya Segodnya, however, will be more focused on Russia itself.
—Olga Razumovskaya and Andrey Ostroukh contributed to this article.
Write to Paul Sonne at paul.sonne@wsj.com
Originally posted here: Putin Disrupts Russian News Landscape
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