Why Russian TV is important

The survey covered in this Moscow Times article, accessible via Johnson's Russia List, highlights precisely why the restriction of free expression and multiple viewpoints on Russia's national TV channels (a theme which I have covered in the past) is so detrimental to democracy in Russia and so upsetting - the channels are tremendously influential in shaping public opinion:

Moscow Times, March 15, 2005
"To Join the Elite, It's TV That Counts," By Nabi Abdullaev

It's not how powerful you are but how much coverage you get on television. That was the finding of a recent opinion poll that asked Russians across the country to name the most influential personalities in politics, business, culture and science.

Unsurprisingly, respondents readily picked President Vladimir Putin as the most powerful politician and pop diva Alla Pugachyova as the leading cultural figure. [...]

Many respondents were unable to name a single scientist, leading to a top- 10 list that bunched together Nobel Prize winners with dead scientists, television hosts and a hostage negotiator.

The sometimes startling answers are a direct result of television, which is the sole information source for many people these days, said Irina Palilova, a sociologist with the Levada Center, the independent polling agency that carried out the survey.

"This poll reflects that people just don't understand what the elite is and can only come up with names of figures who are popular in the media," said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, head of the Center for the Study of the Elite in the Russian Academy of Sciences. "Members of the elite are those who rule and decide, but the public knows little about those people," she said.

As such, Putin was followed on the list of the political elite by ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose fist-waving antics are often shown on television. Third place went to Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose complaints about government social reforms got significant television coverage in January, when the poll was conducted. Also on the list were State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov (4), liberal politician Irina Khakamada (5), Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov (7), and one-time political heavyweights Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky (9) and Mayor Yury Luzhkov (10).

After Pugachyova, the list of cultural figures included Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov, crooner Iosif Kobzon, comedian Yevgeny Petrosyan and pop singer Nikolai Baskov. Not a single writer, artist or philosopher made it into the cultural top 10.

"The cultural elite is only identified as those who are stars," said Vera Zvereva, a culture researcher with the Institute of General History. [...]

Only 67 percent of respondents were able to name anyone in the scientific community. In the end, Nobel-winning physicist Zhores Alfyorov topped the list of scientific elite, while the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Alexander Sakharov placed third and Nobel-winning physicist Vitaly Ginzburg placed fifth.

The list also included physicist Sergei Kapitsa, who hosts a TV science show (2); the late eye doctor [and former presidential candidate] Svyatoslav Fyodorov (4); pediatrician Leonid Roshal, who assisted in negotiations during the Dubrovka and Beslan hostage crises (6); and animal television show host Nikolai Drozdov (8). The science list was rounded off by Moscow State University rector Viktor Sadovnichy (9) and, bizarrely, Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (10).

The survey asked 1,600 people in 46 regions to name five or six people who they believed were members of the nation's political, cultural, economic and scientific elite. The margin of error was less than 3 percentage points.

I suppose television is the "sole information source for many people these days" for many in America and Western Europe as well, but these are countries where television channels (if not individually, then taken as a group) present the news in a more or less balanced fashion. Not so in 21st-century Russia. The wide-open media window of the '90's has slammed shut.