ABSTRACT
As the 2000 election approached, state and private television companies alike provided President Putin with access to channels of communication with Russian voters (EIM 2000: 42-94). Yet after the election, Russia’s television-owning oligarchs quickly proved unreliable partners for the new president. The first test of Putin’s leadership, and the loyalty of the media barons to his administration, came with the sinking of the Kursk submarine on 12 August 2000. The dramatic nature of the accident ensured that the story dominated television news for several days. As it became apparent that offers of international rescue assistance had been accepted too late to save the stranded sailors, media indignation became focused on President Putin. News reports on television channels NTV and ORT were especially critical of Putin (Steele 2000). Putin’s decision not to visit the site of the tragedy was framed by ORT and NTV as his greatest political error since assuming office. Only state-owned television channel RTR continued to support the president (Uzelac 2000c). 1 The honeymoon between the media barons and the presidential administration had come to an abrupt end. In an interview broadcast on RTR on 23 August, Putin blamed the television media for enflaming passions over the Kursk disaster, stating that:
The people on television, who for ten years were destroying the army and the navy, where people are now dying, are the first among the army’s defenders … They want to influence the mass audience in order to show the military and political leadership that we need them, that we are on their hook and must fear and obey them, and let them further rob the country, the army and the navy. 2
The government-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta echoed Putin’s sentiments, accusing television journalists of using the Kursk disaster to undermine the president, his government and the image of Russia abroad:
They are making energetic use of the well-known methods of the notorious ‘black PR’ in representing the position of the government and president. At their prompting, some of the Western mass media are also beginning to speak
of something not far short of a political crisis that has supposedly broken out in Russian society in connection with the Kursk disaster.
