I had conflicting feelings after learning about Wednesday’s ruling by the High Court in London against All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting, or VGTRK, for libeling former Kremlin power broker Boris Berezovsky.
The court ordered VGTRK to pay £150,000 ($224,000) to Berezovsky as compensation for damaging his business reputation after its RTR Planeta television channel reported that Berezovsky organized the 2006 poisoning death in London of former security agent Alexander Litvinenko. The report also claimed that Berezovsky provided British authorities with false evidence to obtain asylum in 2003.
I had little doubt that the RTR Planeta story was an example of hatchet-job journalism, and unpatriotic as it might be I was even happy that Andrei Medvedev, the journalist who compiled the report, was held responsible for failing to substantiate his allegations.
At the same time, my joy at this triumph of British law runs counter to my Russian sense of justice. The problem is that the journalistic “television killers” of RTR are nothing but small potatoes compared with the television killers that Berezovsky employed when he effectively controlled the ORT television station — now Channel One — in the 1990s.
The most vivid example of Berezovsky’s hatchet journalism was during the State Duma election campaign of 1999. ORT anchor Sergei Dorenko conducted an unprecedented mudslinging campaign against Mayor Yury Luzhkov and former Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who led the Fatherland-All Russia bloc at the time. Dorenko used every dirty trick in the book against Luzhkov, even linking him to the murder of U.S. businessman Paul Tatum.
As a result, a Moscow court fined ORT 50,000 rubles ($1,850) and Dorenko 100,000 rubles for damaging Luzhkov’s reputation. As the £150,000 award is making its way into Berezovsky’s bank account, I am sure he is savoring how the tables have been turned after being one of the biggest media mudslingers of the 1990s.
My negative attitude toward Berezovsky was first formed in 1993, when I invested my privatization voucher in his All-Russia Automobile Alliance. Berezovsky promised to open an automobile factory in 2006 and produce 300,000 Russian-made cars every year. That factory never opened, and, of course, no dividends were ever paid. The very idea that RTR — financed by Russian taxpayers — will shell out money for the sake of defending Berezovsky’s business reputation is absurd.
But I think there must be some way to reach a compromise between the commitment to professional journalistic standards that the High Court in London is trying to uphold and the affront to common sense that the ruling represents. Perhaps the libel ruling should be split into two parts: one for damaging Berezovsky’s business reputation and the other for damaging the honor and integrity of the British judicial system when RTR claimed that Britain falsely granted Berezovsky political asylum.
Once this is done, it would be possible to reach a compromise: RTR Planeta could admit that its charges against Berezovsky were unproven, and the High Court of London could lower the libel damages awarded to Berezovsky to somewhere between £1,100 and £2,200 — the amount roughly equivalent to what Berezovsky’s television station had to pay when it libeled Luzhkov.
Alexei Pankin is editor of WAN-IFRA-GIPP Magazine for publishing business professionals.