More than a Russian military disaster, the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine last month was all the nation could talk about for 10 horrible days. An angry and anguished nation spoke out, blasting its government and military brass, while the media raced to record often conflicting reports of the tragic events. Ana Uzelac examined the 10 extraordinary days of the Kursk media coverage, from the moment the sinking of the sub was first made public, to the president?€™s meeting with the grieving relatives of the 118 sailors lost at sea.
It is a picture Russia will remember for a long time to come. After days of unsuccessful rescue efforts, the hand of a Norwegian deep-sea diver opened the emergency hatch on the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine, discovering nothing but water.
Minutes later, a familiar face filled screens all over the country. After days of hourly reports from the disaster zone, RTR?€™s Arkady Mamontov broke the bad news to a nation glued to their television sets: The path to the sub?€™s escape hatch was flooded and so, more than likely, was the rest of the submarine. All hope that any of the lives of the 118 men aboard could be saved was gone.
It seemed only natural that the news should come from Mamontov. He, after all, had been the one standing on the deck of the navy?€™s Peter the Great all week, offering television viewers unprecedented live coverage from the Barents Sea of the biggest Russian military disaster in the last decade.
It was an amazing picture: a television crew on board a military cruiser, its cameras pointed toward the ships of the Northern Fleet, its correspondent reporting live. For a few moments it seemed as if freedom of the press had reached Russian waters ?€” if not its shores.
But on dry land, everything was different. For hundreds of Mamontov?€™s colleagues, covering the Kursk tragedy boiled down to evading hostile military checkpoints and dragging out bits and pieces of information from the Northern Fleet?€™s reticent press service. The only thing that united Mamontov and his less-privileged colleagues was the mishmash of lies, evasions and half-truths issued by officials who were overwhelmed by a crisis beyond their control.
Click here to read our Special Report on the Kursk Tragedy. The list of falsehoods grew longer with every passing day. It started on Monday, Aug. 14, when the navy reported the disaster occurred a day later than it really had. Officials said at first they had been in radio contact with the crew and then changed the story to say the crew had been heard tapping on the submarine?€™s hull. Later still, they admitted contact had been lost from the very start. Even President Vladimir Putin tried to convince the sailors?€™ distraught relatives that Russia had accepted foreign offers to help rescue the ship at least 24 hours earlier than it actually had.
"They [state officials] were lying, deceiving and hushing-up just like they did in Soviet times," said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Moscow-based media watchdog the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations. "What made it absurd is the fact that everything around them has changed. The country is different and so is its media."
Indeed, the central newspapers that are so bitterly divided over many political and economic issues suddenly found a united voice. They all demanded answers from the military and political leadership to the same questions: Why weren?€™t offers of foreign help accepted immediately? Why was the navy unequipped to conduct the rescue operation? And why did the president choose to stay on vacation in Sochi instead of taking charge of the rescue mission?
In a banner headline above a picture of Putin in a navy cap, the usually pro-Kremlin Izvestia daily wrote: "False information about the tragedy of the Kursk is Sinking the Military?€™s Reputation," and that story warned that "The Admiral?€™s Helplessness is Suffocating the Kursk Crew."
The twice-weekly Novaya Gazeta published the same photo with another bitter headline: "Putin, it turns out, was overboard on the days of our national tragedy." And Moskovsky Komsomolets published three photos, one of a tanned Putin in Sochi, another of Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev playing billiards and one of Vladimir Korayedov with the caption: "They don?€™t sink."
"Reading [the papers], I had a feeling I was back in the early ?€?90s," said Panfilov. "The press was criticizing the government openly and without fear. After years of bowing to different political interest groups, they remembered they still knew how to be free."
The papers published everything they could lay their hands on ?€” analyses, pictures of submarines, comments from retired naval officers, portraits of the sailors?€™ families and acerbic editorials scorning both the military and the president. But the greatest coup within the press corps came in the form of a simple list. On the fifth day of the tragedy, Komsomolskaya Pravda printed the names of the 118 sailors trapped inside the submarine, explaining that the paper had bought the list from a naval officer for 18,000 rubles ($650).
"From the very first day, we tried to get hold of the list of sailors on board. If a ship sinks, we should know who is on it. And they wouldn?€™t even phone the families and tell them their relatives were there," said Igor Kots, Komsomolskaya Pravda?€™s deputy editor. "They simply refused to give out the information. So we stopped asking questions and filing requests and did what you do in this country ?€” we bought it for 18,000 rubles."
For days to come, this list was the only source of information for the relatives of the sailors on board. "In Russia, everything is upside down," Kots said. "Instead of being informed by the government in the first hours after the disaster, the relatives had to find out their close ones were on the ship days later and from the media."
What Komsomolskaya Pravda did was "heroic," said Panfilov. "It said more about this country than all the other reports together."
But it was largely the print media, which has much less influence than broadcasters, that acted so "heroically."
"Only television has the power to convey or influence public opinion in Russia," said Panfilov. "They were the ones put on a real test."
And according to Alexei Pankin, editor of the Sreda monthly, which reports on the media, none of Russia?€™s three main television stations ?€” state controlled RTR, public television ORT and the commercial channel NTV ?€” passed this test.
"None of them spoke with the public interest in mind," he said. "They didn?€™t try to open a public discussion on the key issues. As always, they tried to achieve their own goals ?€” that is to say the goals of their owners. And this was also the case with the Kursk. For the majority, this was an attempt to take their revenge on Putin, who had offended them before.
"This is the wrong way to serve the public interest," Pankin added. "It?€™s cynical when the media accuse the military while they are is a part of the problem. They don?€™t pay taxes, so the state has no money to maintain the infrastructure. And they don?€™t send their sons to the army, so there are less and less educated, intelligent soldiers who would prevent mistakes from being made."
Panfilov agreed in part with this assessment, but said there was a slight difference. For RTR and ORT, the public interest came third after their own corporate interests and those of the state. For NTV, he says, it came second ?€” after their corporate interests but before the state?€™s.
"You could say that NTV was still closer to their public than any other television station," Panfilov said. "Only there you could hear both the official point of view and the criticism."
Indeed, NTV did have some corporate motives in mind while they were covering the Kursk tragedy. More than once, they reminded viewers that government officials refused to give them access to vital information. "It was the most difficult posting in my whole carrier," said NTV?€™s seasoned war reporter Yevgeny Kirichenko of his seven days in Murmansk. "We were banging our heads against the wall all the time."
"We were allowed only four to five hours a day recording sessions in Vidyaevo [where the officers?€™ families lived]," he said. "My crew was officially accredited and accompanied by the lower-ranking naval officers, but we were still constantly stopped at every corner, our accreditation checked and rechecked millions of times."
On the day the president visited Vidyayevo and met with the sailors?€™ families, the NTV crew was barred from entering the base without any explanation. "We had all our papers in order and nobody even questioned their validity. The soldier at the checkpoint at the entrance to the base simply said ?€” ?€?Today I have orders not to let you through.?€™ And that was it," Kirichenko said.
"There was practically no press in the hall where the meeting took place," explained RTL Moscow bureau chief Christoph Sagurna and his colleague Cristoph Wanner of the Deuitsche Welle radio.
"The only camera that was there belonged to RTR. At the same time, the head of the state broadcasting company, Oleg Dobrodeyev, was personally sitting in the RTL transmission van, controlling every frame that was sent to Moscow," the German correspondents said.
"He was sitting in our van looking for the pictures where the atmosphere was more or less calm," Sagurna said. Earlier, he told NTV they had witnessed moments of agitation among the relatives on the tapes Dobrodeyev was reviewing.
But RTR?€™s Mamontov, who was also present at the meeting, denies that the coverage of the meeting and his live reporting from the navy ship were censored. "It?€™s nonsense! There was no censorship on the boat. It was live coverage ?€” everything that was said into the camera was immediately transmitted. And I never got orders not to ask tricky questions," he said, adding that the meeting between the sailors?€™ families and the president was accurately represented by his station.
And although Dobrodeyev has denied repeatedly that he struck a deal for exclusive footage with the presidential administration and the military concerning the contents of the Kursk coverage, media watchers are more skeptical.
"Mamontov was alone there. He was given information by officers whose only task was to hide the truth," Panfilov summed up. "He was simply channeling the state-controlled information. The only exclusive right he got was to show the surface of the Barents Sea from different angles."
For Kommersant?€™s Kolesnikov, who has co-authored a book about Putin, the behavior of the state officials came as no surprise.
"They made news pools the Russian way," he said. "RTR was the only station that made a deal with the government. The others refused to do it, so they were not allowed on the ship."
As for the other major networks, their critical approach to covering the crisis inspired the ire of Putin. Disregarding the idea the press might have been working in the public?€™s interest, the president accused them of political blackmail. He also accused their owners of "destroying the country and the army" by tax evasion.
"The pattern of their work and their logic is simple," Putin explained to the relatives of the dead soldiers during their meeting in Vidyayevo, using a vocabulary disturbingly like the one his ex-colleagues from the KGB used throughout the Communist regime. "They want to influence the masses and show the army and the political leadership of the country that we need them, that they had us hooked, that we should be afraid of them, that we should listen to them and let them plunder the country, the army and the fleet. That is their real aim.
"Unfortunately we cannot order them to stop," the president complained. "Although that would be the right thing to do."
"It would have been even less had he not gone to Vidyayevo to see the relatives," VTsIOM director Yury Levada said. "As it was, he softened them up a bit."
Levada believes that the public?€™s approval of the media is very well grounded. "They don?€™t praise them for nothing," he smiles. "They did very good work that can have some important consequences."
The most immediate of these, Levada said, was forcing the government to accept offers of foreign aid to rescue the sub. Later, they were pressed into recovering the bodies. "The atmosphere the media created forced the government to invite foreign help [to recover the bodies]. That surely wouldn?€™t have happened without them," Levada said.
But whether or not the media?€™s outcry during the Kursk disaster has a longer lasting effect is of some debate among experts. Levada believes that it will have a positive, long-term effect. "The media caught state officials in quite a few lies and that?€™s very useful. They reminded the people that they shouldn?€™t trust the government blindly. And they?€™ve been trusting it in the past year far more than is healthy."
But other media-experts and journalists fear another consequence of the openly critical Kursk coverage. "I?€™m expecting only further pressure against a media that dares to criticize the government," said Panfilov. "Putin truly believes that it was the press that complicated matters with Kursk ?€” it made too much noise, put him in an unpleasant situation, spoiled his image. So he will take his revenge."
Almost as if in grim confirmation of Panfilov?€™s words, one week after the Kursk tragedy the tax police visited the offices of Ekho Moskvy radio station, which belongs to the same media group as NTV and is often very critical of the government.
Kommersant?€™s Kolesnikov, who was one of the few journalists attending Putin?€™s meeting with the sailors?€™ relatives, agreed with Panfilov. "I saw Putin after the meeting in Vidyayevo, and he was furious," said Kolesnikov. "I was stupefied by the words he used to describe his attitude toward the media. His opinion of them changed for the worse and he will not treat them kindly. Freedom of the press will surely not benefit from that."
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/indexes/89.html Click here to read our Special Report on the Kursk Tragedy.
It is a picture Russia will remember for a long time to come. After days of unsuccessful rescue efforts, the hand of a Norwegian deep-sea diver opened the emergency hatch on the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine, discovering nothing but water.
Minutes later, a familiar face filled screens all over the country. After days of hourly reports from the disaster zone, RTR?€™s Arkady Mamontov broke the bad news to a nation glued to their television sets: The path to the sub?€™s escape hatch was flooded and so, more than likely, was the rest of the submarine. All hope that any of the lives of the 118 men aboard could be saved was gone.
It seemed only natural that the news should come from Mamontov. He, after all, had been the one standing on the deck of the navy?€™s Peter the Great all week, offering television viewers unprecedented live coverage from the Barents Sea of the biggest Russian military disaster in the last decade.
It was an amazing picture: a television crew on board a military cruiser, its cameras pointed toward the ships of the Northern Fleet, its correspondent reporting live. For a few moments it seemed as if freedom of the press had reached Russian waters ?€” if not its shores.
But on dry land, everything was different. For hundreds of Mamontov?€™s colleagues, covering the Kursk tragedy boiled down to evading hostile military checkpoints and dragging out bits and pieces of information from the Northern Fleet?€™s reticent press service. The only thing that united Mamontov and his less-privileged colleagues was the mishmash of lies, evasions and half-truths issued by officials who were overwhelmed by a crisis beyond their control.
"They [state officials] were lying, deceiving and hushing-up just like they did in Soviet times," said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Moscow-based media watchdog the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations. "What made it absurd is the fact that everything around them has changed. The country is different and so is its media."
Indeed, the central newspapers that are so bitterly divided over many political and economic issues suddenly found a united voice. They all demanded answers from the military and political leadership to the same questions: Why weren?€™t offers of foreign help accepted immediately? Why was the navy unequipped to conduct the rescue operation? And why did the president choose to stay on vacation in Sochi instead of taking charge of the rescue mission?
In a banner headline above a picture of Putin in a navy cap, the usually pro-Kremlin Izvestia daily wrote: "False information about the tragedy of the Kursk is Sinking the Military?€™s Reputation," and that story warned that "The Admiral?€™s Helplessness is Suffocating the Kursk Crew."
The twice-weekly Novaya Gazeta published the same photo with another bitter headline: "Putin, it turns out, was overboard on the days of our national tragedy." And Moskovsky Komsomolets published three photos, one of a tanned Putin in Sochi, another of Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev playing billiards and one of Vladimir Korayedov with the caption: "They don?€™t sink."
"Reading [the papers], I had a feeling I was back in the early ?€?90s," said Panfilov. "The press was criticizing the government openly and without fear. After years of bowing to different political interest groups, they remembered they still knew how to be free."
The papers published everything they could lay their hands on ?€” analyses, pictures of submarines, comments from retired naval officers, portraits of the sailors?€™ families and acerbic editorials scorning both the military and the president. But the greatest coup within the press corps came in the form of a simple list. On the fifth day of the tragedy, Komsomolskaya Pravda printed the names of the 118 sailors trapped inside the submarine, explaining that the paper had bought the list from a naval officer for 18,000 rubles ($650).
"From the very first day, we tried to get hold of the list of sailors on board. If a ship sinks, we should know who is on it. And they wouldn?€™t even phone the families and tell them their relatives were there," said Igor Kots, Komsomolskaya Pravda?€™s deputy editor. "They simply refused to give out the information. So we stopped asking questions and filing requests and did what you do in this country ?€” we bought it for 18,000 rubles."
For days to come, this list was the only source of information for the relatives of the sailors on board. "In Russia, everything is upside down," Kots said. "Instead of being informed by the government in the first hours after the disaster, the relatives had to find out their close ones were on the ship days later and from the media."
What Komsomolskaya Pravda did was "heroic," said Panfilov. "It said more about this country than all the other reports together."
But it was largely the print media, which has much less influence than broadcasters, that acted so "heroically."
"Only television has the power to convey or influence public opinion in Russia," said Panfilov. "They were the ones put on a real test."
And according to Alexei Pankin, editor of the Sreda monthly, which reports on the media, none of Russia?€™s three main television stations ?€” state controlled RTR, public television ORT and the commercial channel NTV ?€” passed this test.
"None of them spoke with the public interest in mind," he said. "They didn?€™t try to open a public discussion on the key issues. As always, they tried to achieve their own goals ?€” that is to say the goals of their owners. And this was also the case with the Kursk. For the majority, this was an attempt to take their revenge on Putin, who had offended them before.
"This is the wrong way to serve the public interest," Pankin added. "It?€™s cynical when the media accuse the military while they are is a part of the problem. They don?€™t pay taxes, so the state has no money to maintain the infrastructure. And they don?€™t send their sons to the army, so there are less and less educated, intelligent soldiers who would prevent mistakes from being made."
Panfilov agreed in part with this assessment, but said there was a slight difference. For RTR and ORT, the public interest came third after their own corporate interests and those of the state. For NTV, he says, it came second ?€” after their corporate interests but before the state?€™s.
"You could say that NTV was still closer to their public than any other television station," Panfilov said. "Only there you could hear both the official point of view and the criticism."
Indeed, NTV did have some corporate motives in mind while they were covering the Kursk tragedy. More than once, they reminded viewers that government officials refused to give them access to vital information. "It was the most difficult posting in my whole carrier," said NTV?€™s seasoned war reporter Yevgeny Kirichenko of his seven days in Murmansk. "We were banging our heads against the wall all the time."
"We were allowed only four to five hours a day recording sessions in Vidyaevo [where the officers?€™ families lived]," he said. "My crew was officially accredited and accompanied by the lower-ranking naval officers, but we were still constantly stopped at every corner, our accreditation checked and rechecked millions of times."
On the day the president visited Vidyayevo and met with the sailors?€™ families, the NTV crew was barred from entering the base without any explanation. "We had all our papers in order and nobody even questioned their validity. The soldier at the checkpoint at the entrance to the base simply said ?€” ?€?Today I have orders not to let you through.?€™ And that was it," Kirichenko said.
"There was practically no press in the hall where the meeting took place," explained RTL Moscow bureau chief Christoph Sagurna and his colleague Cristoph Wanner of the Deuitsche Welle radio.
"The only camera that was there belonged to RTR. At the same time, the head of the state broadcasting company, Oleg Dobrodeyev, was personally sitting in the RTL transmission van, controlling every frame that was sent to Moscow," the German correspondents said.
"He was sitting in our van looking for the pictures where the atmosphere was more or less calm," Sagurna said. Earlier, he told NTV they had witnessed moments of agitation among the relatives on the tapes Dobrodeyev was reviewing.
But RTR?€™s Mamontov, who was also present at the meeting, denies that the coverage of the meeting and his live reporting from the navy ship were censored. "It?€™s nonsense! There was no censorship on the boat. It was live coverage ?€” everything that was said into the camera was immediately transmitted. And I never got orders not to ask tricky questions," he said, adding that the meeting between the sailors?€™ families and the president was accurately represented by his station.
And although Dobrodeyev has denied repeatedly that he struck a deal for exclusive footage with the presidential administration and the military concerning the contents of the Kursk coverage, media watchers are more skeptical.
"Mamontov was alone there. He was given information by officers whose only task was to hide the truth," Panfilov summed up. "He was simply channeling the state-controlled information. The only exclusive right he got was to show the surface of the Barents Sea from different angles."
For Kommersant?€™s Kolesnikov, who has co-authored a book about Putin, the behavior of the state officials came as no surprise.
"They made news pools the Russian way," he said. "RTR was the only station that made a deal with the government. The others refused to do it, so they were not allowed on the ship."
As for the other major networks, their critical approach to covering the crisis inspired the ire of Putin. Disregarding the idea the press might have been working in the public?€™s interest, the president accused them of political blackmail. He also accused their owners of "destroying the country and the army" by tax evasion.
"The pattern of their work and their logic is simple," Putin explained to the relatives of the dead soldiers during their meeting in Vidyayevo, using a vocabulary disturbingly like the one his ex-colleagues from the KGB used throughout the Communist regime. "They want to influence the masses and show the army and the political leadership of the country that we need them, that they had us hooked, that we should be afraid of them, that we should listen to them and let them plunder the country, the army and the fleet. That is their real aim.
"Unfortunately we cannot order them to stop," the president complained. "Although that would be the right thing to do."
"It would have been even less had he not gone to Vidyayevo to see the relatives," VTsIOM director Yury Levada said. "As it was, he softened them up a bit."
Levada believes that the public?€™s approval of the media is very well grounded. "They don?€™t praise them for nothing," he smiles. "They did very good work that can have some important consequences."
The most immediate of these, Levada said, was forcing the government to accept offers of foreign aid to rescue the sub. Later, they were pressed into recovering the bodies. "The atmosphere the media created forced the government to invite foreign help [to recover the bodies]. That surely wouldn?€™t have happened without them," Levada said.
But whether or not the media?€™s outcry during the Kursk disaster has a longer lasting effect is of some debate among experts. Levada believes that it will have a positive, long-term effect. "The media caught state officials in quite a few lies and that?€™s very useful. They reminded the people that they shouldn?€™t trust the government blindly. And they?€™ve been trusting it in the past year far more than is healthy."
But other media-experts and journalists fear another consequence of the openly critical Kursk coverage. "I?€™m expecting only further pressure against a media that dares to criticize the government," said Panfilov. "Putin truly believes that it was the press that complicated matters with Kursk ?€” it made too much noise, put him in an unpleasant situation, spoiled his image. So he will take his revenge."
Almost as if in grim confirmation of Panfilov?€™s words, one week after the Kursk tragedy the tax police visited the offices of Ekho Moskvy radio station, which belongs to the same media group as NTV and is often very critical of the government.
Kommersant?€™s Kolesnikov, who was one of the few journalists attending Putin?€™s meeting with the sailors?€™ relatives, agreed with Panfilov. "I saw Putin after the meeting in Vidyayevo, and he was furious," said Kolesnikov. "I was stupefied by the words he used to describe his attitude toward the media. His opinion of them changed for the worse and he will not treat them kindly. Freedom of the press will surely not benefit from that."
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