When Margarita Simonyan was appointed Russia Today’s editor in the summer of 2005, she was just 25. An ethnic Armenian, she had already worked for four years as a correspondent for state-owned Rossia television from her native Krasnodar and the adjoining North Caucasus.
Simonyan won a medal of honor from the Defense Ministry for a September 2004 report on the Beslan hostage crisis and another from the South Ossetian government for Russia Today’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia in August 2008.
She spent a year as a student in Bristol, New Hampshire, in the late 1990s.
Simonyan readily criticizes the Soviet media for offering only one opinion. She agrees that public debate is underdeveloped in Russia. But she gets quite emotional when asked whether national television is an example of a rollback of media freedom.
“Yes, but only if we exclude the Internet, newspapers, magazines, radio, regional and private television,” she says. “How can national television eclipse thousands of other media outlets?”
The fact that state-controlled television has by far the biggest audience is proof for her that Russian viewers have little appetite for sharp political debate. “If people thought they were being deceived … they would switch to other media. But they don’t. Surely they are not watching because [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin forces them to watch only the first and second channel,” Simonyan quipped, referring to state-owned Channel One and Rossia.
Apart from overseeing a staff of 2,000, Simonyan is also a member of the Public Chamber, where she works on interethnic issues. Last month she published “To Moscow,” an autobiographical novel about a young female journalist working in the regions.
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