Alyssa praises NBC’s choice of David Remnick to provide political commentary on the Sochi Olympics:
Remnick’s done reporting work (as well as editing the New Yorker) that touches on many aspects of civil society. He’s covered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia from exile and written about the life of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Remnick’s reported on the rise of Russian oligarchy and the war in Chechnya. In 2007, he wrote a long profile of Gary Kasparov. Last year, he checked in with Petr Verzilov, who is married to Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. This year, he filed a thoughtful dispatch on the experience of exile and how it shaped the Tsarnaev brothers, authors of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Remnick, in other words, is a commentator qualified to explain Russian society in some depth to American audiences. The “gay propaganda” law sounds bizarre out of context. But as an attempt to defend “Russian values,” including the Russian Orthodox Church, and to defend and define Russia after the national trauma that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ongoing territorial disputes like the one in Chechnya, it makes somewhat more sense. If the “gay propaganda” law is to be the signal issue of the 2014 Winter Olympics, and part of the point of moving the Olympics around the world is to familiarize international audiences with countries they may pay varying amounts of attention to, Remnick is positioned to both contextualize the law and provide a full portrait of Russia to international audiences.
She contrasts Remnick with the new chief of the new Russia Today, Dmitry Kiselyov, suggesting that the latter’s appointment in the lead-up to the Olympics was no coincidence:
[Kiselyov has] suggested that he believes the Cold War isn’t over, but rather, has heated up. His appointment by Putin to head Russia Today suggests that one of the flashpoints in that war is gay rights. And that move is a perfect illustration of the dilemma for NBC, and all the athletes and heads of state who are trying to figure out their approach to the Olympics. Condemning Russia’s treatment of gay people, as well as its other authoritarian policies, is both personally satisfying and morally necessary. But internally, it may only serve to harden the sense among some Russians that their country is culturally different from the people, entities, and nations who criticize it, and that standing firm on Russia’s treatment of LGBT people is an important way for the country to emphasize its cultural and political independence from the decadence around it.
To get a sense of Kiselyov’s anti-gay rhetoric, here is a quote from a couple months back:
“I think that just imposing fines on gays for homosexual propaganda among teenagers is not enough. They should be banned from donating blood, sperm. And their hearts, in case of the automobile accident, should be buried in the ground or burned as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”
Amar Toorf provides the basics on the Kiselyov appointment:
In a decree issued Monday, Putin abruptly liquidated the prominent news agency RIA Novosti, merging it with radio service Voice of Russia to create a new media conglomerate called Rossia Segodnya, or Russia Today. Like its predecessors, the new company will be state-owned, and will be separate from the Russia Today television station, now known as RT. Yet aside from the company’s executive director — a TV presenter and Putin loyalist known for his anti-gay rhetoric and conspiracy theories — details on its scope, structure, or the timeline for its liquidation remain unclear.
Leonid Bershidsky laments the loss of RIA Novosti Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk, who tried to make the agency as independent as a state-run outlet can be:
Mironyuk was known as something of a liberal, aligned with former President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as Putin’s prime minister. “She has done a lot to make sure that, despite the toughest censorship, RIA Novosti supplied relatively objective information and analysis,” political commentator Grigory Melamedov wrote on his blog at Echo.msk.ru. No one will say this of Kiselyov…
Mironyuk thrived under Medvedev’s presidency, channeling government funds into innovative media products ranging from a large infographics service to commentary delivered by a rapper. Even Russia’s few remaining independent media outlets relied heavily on RIA Novosti for breaking news coverage: With more than 1,700 staff, the agency delivered more news from more locations than the others could ever afford. Mironyuk’s ambitions were expensive. The news agency pays its staff salaries well above market rates for private media outlets. Both Putin’s decree and Ivanov spoke of the need to cut costs. Under Kiselyov, Russia Today will concentrate on carrying a pro-Putin message to foreign audiences, and RIA Novosti projects aimed at the domestic market will be scrapped or downsized.
Marc Champion has more on Kiselyov:
Here’s a quick taste of how he might go about his job. When protests recently broke out in Ukraine, Putin called them “pogroms.” Kiselyov, on his TV show, called the protests a plot by Sweden, Lithuania and Poland to avenge their 1709 defeat by Russian forces at the battle of Poltava. No evidence for this interesting conspiracy was offered.
What Daisy Sindelar is hearing:
Igor Yakovenko, the former head of the Russian Union of Journalists, said the sudden move spoke of “if not panic, then a certain alarm” among the Kremlin elite. “It’s an extremely ineffective decision. I would even say a stupid one,” Yakovenko said. “Because in fact the style of propaganda that’s characteristic for Dmitry Kiselyov is simply open lies. Everything that he says about ‘Maidan,’ everything that he used to say about the Russian opposition, is a complete lie and sometimes sleight of hand. And that’s possible only when you have censorship — conditions in which there’s a monopoly on information.”
The Dish 