ABSTRACT
As television became steadily more partisan by the 1999 Russian parliamentary elections, the question was not whether television would provide unbiased information, but how it would draw up the political battle lines in Russia. While the prime commercial channel had sided with the Kremlin in supporting Boris Yeltsin over Gennady Zyuganov in the 1996 presidential elections, relations among the Kremlin, the regions and other power bases had soured notably by late 1999. It was unlikely in any event that this Russian election would be marked with a spirit of cooperation and a disinterested supply of information for the voters. In fact, the 1999 Duma elections and 2000 presidential elections were distinguished by increasing bias on television, greater distortions of fact to fit the needs of political oligarchs, and the rise in popularity of forms of black PR and kompromat. By the end of these campaigns, a centrist Duma had been elected along with Yeltsin’s last prime minister as president while the quality of the Russian mass media continued to decline. This chapter uses both quantitative and qualitative analyses of political advertising, free time and the main nightly news on two channels to show how television, through the 1999 and 2000 elections, came more to resemble Soviet propaganda than the Fourth Estate in a developing democracy.
