Outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his chosen successor Dmitry Medvedev are benefitting from partisan broadcast media coverage in their favour, presidential election monitoring by the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations (CJES) has shown.
CJES Thursday released results of its monitoring of media coverage of candidates for the March 2 presidential election as well as of the outgoing president on primetime television (from 6pm to midnight) on five TV stations for the period February 2-25.
It also analysed the attitude of the programmes (positive, neutral or negative). Three of the monitored channels — Pervy Kanal, Rossia and Tv Tsentr are state-controlled and two, NTV and Ren TV are privately-owned.
“The results of the monitoring show that candidates to the presidential elections are not getting an equal share of coverage in the last weeks of campaigning,†Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said.
Putin and Medvedev are getting both more and better quality coverage. “Russians gets most of their news from TV, so one can reasonably ask if the people can form an unbiased opinion on the candidates and vote in an informed mannerâ€, RSF said.
The study concluded that Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev were overwhelming visible on Russian TV screens. On four out of the five monitored channels, their joint coverage was never lower than 85.5 per cent and even reached 97.5 per cent on NTV.
The only channel to have achieved a more balanced coverage, Ren Tv, gave 51.6 per cent of its coverage to the two. With the exception of Democratic Party's Andrei Bogdanov (6.3 per cent), the three others had 20 per cent and 21 per cent of airtime. The channel also marked itself out in terms of the content of issues broadcast, which were sometimes negative for Vladimir Jirinovski of the Liberal Democrat Party (LDPR) and Vladimir Putin. In addition, Ren Tv demonstrated the highest level of neutrality, completely at odds with the other four.
Putin and Medvedev were very largely linked to positive programmes on Pervy Kanal (3 hours 15 minutes for Putin out of about 3 hours 45 minutes programming and 1 hour 45 minutes out of a little over 2 hours for Medvedev).
“The lack of pluralism in the broadcast sector appears to be more than ever an inescapable obstacle to democratisation of the country. The next president must act urgently to put this rightâ€, RSF reacted.
In another example, NTV devoted a massive share of the relevant programmes to the pair (97.5 per cent, with 1 hour 30 minutes of programmes for Putin and nearly 1 hour 15 minutes for his probable successor), but it was chiefly neutral in terms of issues broadcast.
Four candidates are standing for president in the March 2 poll: Dmitry Medvedev (United Russia, backed by Vladimir Putin), Gennady Zyuganov (Communist Party), Vladimir Jirinovski (Liberal Democratic Party, nationalist) and Andrei Bogdanov (Democratic Party - pro-European).
