October 9, 2004 Saturday
SECTION: Financial Times WEEKEND MAGAZINE - Feature; Pg. 16
HEADLINE: Broadcast views Russian television's skewed reporting of the Beslan tragedy has shone a light on the rapid erosion of independence within the nation's fledgling free media. It seems the public has become the ultimate loser in a game played out by oligarchs, the Kremlin and journalists
BYLINE: By ARKADY OSTROVSKY
BODY:

Beslan, North Ossetia, early in the afternoon of September 3. Chechen terrorists have taken hundreds of children and parents hostage in a school and the world's media are monitoring developments closely.

At 1.05pm, two explosions are heard from the school, terrorists start shooting the children, mayhem breaks out and fighting begins. Foreign networks such as CNN and the BBC broadcast events live. In Russia, on the two state-controlled TV channels, normal programming continues. An hour after the start of the battle, the Russian channels switch to what is by now turning into a massacre, but their coverage is confusing and brief. Channel One, the main national network, spends 10 minutes on Beslan before returning to a Brazilian soap opera called Women in Love. The Russia Channel - mouthpiece of the Kremlin - stays on air longer, for about an hour. Moscow Echo, the city's liberal radio station, keeps its viewers up to date by watching events unfold on CNN.

Throughout the day, both state channels feature news bulletins on the top of the hour, repeatedly reporting the official line: the authorities did not plan to storm the school; the terrorists started the shooting; the siege is the work of an international terrorist organisation whose numbers include ethnic Arabs and even an African (he later turns out to be Chechen).

The Russian networks also report the official estimate of the number of hostages - 354 - which is almost certainly a deliberate falsehood. They repeat the figure continuously, even as eyewitness accounts and common sense suggest there are well over 1,000 hostages. A surviving hostage later says the false figure angered the terrorists so much they started to deny the children tap water, forcing them to drink their own urine.

Several hours into the clash, the Russia Channel gives the impression that the fighting is over and that most of the hostages are now safe. Viewers see children being carried by their parents and hear a relieved voice behind the camera saying: "They are alive, it is OK, they are alive, alive." As some are reunited with parents, a correspondent comments: "There are tears here again, but this time these are the tears of joy." A presenter gives figures of those taken to hospital, but carefully avoids giving estimates of the number of people killed. "According to the latest information," he says, "the fighting in the school is over. There are no dead or wounded there... we can't give more exact figures of the injured... er... the precise figure of how many hostages were freed." Channel One reports that more than 100 people are dead. But even this figure is soon revealed to be well below the actual death toll. Neither channel questions the official figures.

Then, at about 9pm, after more than 300 children and parents have died, and as the firefight between the hostage-takers and special forces is still going on, viewers are treated to an extraordinary show. The Russia Channel shows footage of brave Russian soldiers fighting bearded Chechen bandits who are hiding in caves and shouting "Allahu Akhbar": these are scenes from the military drama On My Honour! Channel One shows Die Hard, a film in which Bruce Willis saves the hostages in a New York high-rise. Actors on the screen seem to take fictional revenge on behalf of those who in Beslan are still dying.

The TV coverage of Beslan provoked outrage from Russia's independent print media. The Organisation for Security and Co- operation in Europe (OSCE) criticised the government for not telling the truth about the handling of the crisis and accused broadcasters of failing to provide "accurate and up-to-date information". An independent national opinion poll taken two days after the incident found that only 13 per cent of Russians believed they received a genuine account of the crisis. "A triple credibility gap arose between the government and the media, between the media and the citizens and between the government and the people," the OSCE concluded. The biggest indictment, however, came from the people of Beslan, who physically attacked television crews for reporting official lies about the number of hostages. A less obvious casualty was the trust the Russian people may have had in the veracity and independence of television news reports.

It is tempting to blame Vladimir Putin, Russia's unyielding president, for the feeble state of Russia's television news: it was he who had squeezed out private owners and established state control over almost all nationwide channels, and under the veil of "managed democracy" in effect introduced censorship. But the truth is more complicated.

Elena Savina started working as a producer in Soviet television in the 1980s. When the regime crumbled, she moved to NTV, a private TV channel founded by Vladimir Gusinsky, the media entrepreneur who was later briefly imprisoned in the early days of Putin's rule, before going into luxury exile in Spain. Sitting in a coffee shop on the ground floor of the Ostankino television centre, Savina gives her assessment of the state of TV reporting in Russia today: "We have turned our self-censorship mechanisms on. Ten years ago we killed ourselves getting the information. Now we don't even try to do certain things, because we know it won't be allowed. Before, I could be told about Gusinsky's wishes after the programme. Now I am told about the Kremlin's wishes before the programme." When NTV was created in 1993 it was, says Savina, "like a huge explosion. We were paid Dollars 500 a month - enormous money in those days - and were told to do whatever we wanted. We created the best television network in Russia. We don't feel free any more."

This is a common theme among Russian journalists, and it is echoed by their counterparts in the west, where there is a widely held view that a relentless reduction of Russian freedom has been accelerated by Putin's post-Beslan moves to further concentrate power in the Kremlin. But to blame it all on Putin is to miss a crucial point: Russian television has been complicit in the shrinking of its own independence.

Irina Petrovskaya, a television reviewer for the daily newspaper Izvestiya and one of Russia's most thoughtful critics, says: "One of the most disturbing lessons of Beslan is the readiness of the television once again to become the re-translator of official lies. Ten years of democracy in Russia turned out to be not enough to create freedom of speech. And to a large degree the responsibility for this rests with the media and the journalists."

Russian journalists were not, and even now are not wholly, helpless pawns manoeuvred by the Kremlin grand masters of cynicism and power. They made and continue to make choices: and when the choices were easier, many chose in a way that makes free journalism more vulnerable now. Putin put it crudely during his meeting with foreign journalists after the Beslan tragedy when he compared the relationship between the state and the media with that between a man and a woman. "A real man always tries. A real woman always resists." To extend the metaphor, Russia's television journalists did not sufficiently resist the embraces of the new powers. "Ten years ago Russian journalists thought they were the fourth power, but have now been told by the president they are members of the world's oldest profession," Petrovskaya commented at the time. The fear of losing highly paid jobs, celebrity status and influence often turned out to be stronger than the desire for free expression.

Much of Russian television in 2004 looks like its western equivalents: talk shows, cooking programmes, reality TV, soap operas and cop serials dominate; commercials feature long-legged women advertising anything from razors to mobile phones. It is light-years away from the Soviet television that I grew up with, where middle-aged presenters in thick-framed glasses read out official Tass bulletins about the successes of the Soviet harvest, and every other news programme began with a picture of the general secretary of the Communist Party being greeted by his grey-clothed comrades. The Party controlled all the channels, there was no live broadcasting, and there were no commercials. Panasonic and Nescafe were sweet foreign words, and the only slim legs shown were those in Swan Lake. Programming stopped at about 11pm, which was often a relief.

Post-Soviet television - all of the channels, though Gusinsky's NTV was the market leader - swept away these absurdities, it seemed, in part by turning loose youthful journalists and producers on technology and the world TV market. But like any television which has not been obliged to make heroes of its political leaders, it made heroes of its own personalities.

The generation of journalists who shaped Russian television over the past 15 years was the brightest and most ambitious, the elite of the late Soviet era, who most despised the restrictions of that period. They learned to make western-style programmes and they adopted western habits of celebrity and financial comfort, drawing some of the highest salaries in the country. But they failed to create a public service journalism that was capable of keeping a check on government. This has made it easier to bring them back to heel.

Petrovskaya's verdict is that the collapse of the Soviet Union "released enormous journalistic energy. But it was a destructive energy aimed at crushing old ideological taboos. This energy (was) transformed into large pay packages, into personal comforts, into the idea of serving a master, into information wars between the oligarchs. But it did not transform into an energy of creation."

One of the symbols of post-Soviet television, and one of its brightest personalities, is Yevgeny Kiselyov. More than almost any other Russian journalist, he developed something of a BBC tradition of reporting in Russia. But his - and most liberals' - interpretation of the political exigencies of the 1990s led him to put aside the effort to develop objective reporting, when he dropped the role of observer and became a participant in the political process. In July, Kiselyov, 48, agreed to have lunch with me to discuss why the promise of an independent media that had once seemed so bright had dimmed in the intervening decade.

He arrived at Cafe Green, one of Moscow's most expensive restaurants, in a chauffeur-driven black Audi with tinted windows, wearing an elegant white suit. As he walked up the restaurant stairs, waiters recognised him - not only as once Russia's most famous TV news anchorman - but also as one of their regular customers.

Kiselyov is a gourmet and a connoisseur of good wine. He has the look and taste of a prosperous businessman, not of a fighter for press freedom who has fallen victim to Putin's authoritarian regime. But such is the paradox of Russian life that Kiselyov is actually both: and, at least for now, Russian politics permits him to be both. At the peak of his power in the late 1990s, he was both the current affairs presenter and general director of Gusinsky's NTV - his dethronement was one of the early signs that the Kremlin wanted to regain control over the electronic media. But Kiselyov did very well financially out of NTV: and, like any liberal western anchor, he may have been fighting as much for his own status as he was for freedom of speech.

Like many journalists who shaped post-Soviet TV, Kiselyov came to television via Radio Moscow, the Soviet foreign language service that broadcast communist propaganda around the world. It was in effect a branch of the KGB. Many who worked there were highly educated and fluent in several languages. They knew more about - and lusted more for - the openness of the west than those who worked in Soviet television. These were people who read all the bourgeois western newspapers, listened to the BBC and had access to the writings of Soviet dissidents.

Of that generation, Kiselyov, handsome, fleshy and grave of manner, was the one who best developed the air of authority and solidity. On screen, dressed in a conservative double-breasted suit, often pausing for thought and groping for the right word, he spoke in deep, deliberate tones, with the appearance of intelligent common sense. Perhaps more than any other Russian journalist, Kiselyov was the man the Russian intelligentsia most trusted and identified with.

As we start to eat, the owner of the restaurant comes to greet the TV star - he ties an apron around Kiselyov's neck to protect his white suit from the juices of his grilled prawns. "After the failed communist coup d'etat of 1991 we journalists had set ourselves very simple tasks, the most important of which was not to lie," Kiselyov tells me. At the time, he was working for state TV, where he presented and hosted the analytical news programme Itogi (Results) - the weekly equivalent of the BBC's Newsnight. But the dictates of state television, even in the new era of chaotic freedom, were too restrictive for Kiselyov. In 1993 he approached Gusinsky, who already had media interests and was considering setting up NTV. Kiselyov took Itogi to NTV - it became the station's flagship current affairs programme. "When we started making NTV," he says, "we did not think about high matters. We were thinking of very simple things: good cameras, new lighting, mobility, modern computer graphics. We wanted to make the picture sing."

NTV quickly proved it was capable of objective and powerful reporting. A year after its launch in 1993, Russian troops went into Chechnya. This was the first full-scale war for newly independent Russia and NTV's coverage was unprecedented: its reporting was vigorous, unrelenting and - up to a point - objective. It became the main source of information about the war, exposing the understatements and lies of the government. The BBC and CNN bought its footage. State channels were left far behind. NTV's coverage earned the trust and respect of the Russian audience and doubled the number of viewers. But at the same time, the popularity of President Boris Yeltsin began to dwindle. As Kiselyov soon discovered, covering the war was an easier and safer task than treading the line between a Russian oligarch and an ailing president. If the Chechen war was NTV's finest hour, the presidential elections of 1996 were its most testing.

With his rating close to zero, a war raging in Chechnya and rebellious factions within the Kremlin, Yeltsin needed all the help he could get to be re-elected. Russia's oligarchs offered to help and bankroll the elections in return for shares in the country's most valuable companies. The deal would later become known as "shares for loans" privatisation.

One of the oligarchs was Gusinsky. He seconded NTV's then president, Igor Malashenko, to lead Yeltsin's election campaign. Kiselyov suspended his principle of independent and objective reporting and began to promote Yeltsin. Each programme began with a summary of Yeltsin's heroic political career, followed by extensive coverage of his campaign. Yeltsin was shown visiting the ancient city of Yaroslavl, promising to give its cash-strapped citizens "everything and take back nothing". He was shown in the newly restored cathedral of Christ the Saviour near the Kremlin, "ruined under the communists and restored under Yeltsin". Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin's main communist rival, was depicted hobnobbing with the oligarchs in Davos or in international airport VIP lounges. It was an outrageous inversion of reality, but the biased reporting was not solely the result of commands to journalists from their proprietors.

All Russian liberals feared what could happen if Yeltsin lost and the communists returned to power. Over his giant prawns, Kiselyov demurs. "Nobody had to tell us how to cover the election campaign. Yes, we were biased, but we genuinely believed - and still believe - that Yeltsin's victory would save the country and that Zyuganov would throw it back and put an end to free speech. We were defending ourselves. You can't judge us from the point of view of western democracy. Russia was at a critical crossroads. When a house is in flames you don't think that by throwing water or using an extinguisher you would damage the books and spoil the carpets. You use whatever means possible."

Petrovskaya saw far enough into the future to pose the key question of that fraught time: "If they manage (to get Yeltsin elected), will television be able to return to those democratic principles? Will the new (old) power allow it? Or will it turn a temporary love affair with the media into a compulsory admiration?"

After the victory, the reckoning. The oligarchs got their property. Gusinsky was granted a permanent frequency and loans from Gazprom, the state-backed gas monopoly. Kiselyov was among the winners, and having crossed the line that separates journalists and politicians, he found it hard to step back. "The real mistakes were made after the 1996 elections, when we started to be so friendly with Yeltsin's family," he says. "Malashenko, who returned to NTV as president, could walk into any Kremlin office. Every other weekend there was a gathering at Yeltsin's dacha with Yeltsin's daughter and son-in-law and other friends such as (the oligarch) Roman Abramovich. So when we and other media tried to distance ourselves from the Kremlin, it was seen as a betrayal."

The changes were evident to viewers. A year after the election, Petrovskaya wrote: "Kiselyov in his Itogi programme is preaching, rather than broadcasting. He is speaking, not even on behalf of the presidential team, but as one of its fully accepted members." Membership of this club created the kind of comforts journalists and their bosses found hard to surrender.

There was another problem. Having tested the power of their media assets, the oligarchs started to use their media outlets as tools to attain business interests and fight with each other, rather than to serve the interests of the public. Boris Berezovsky, who controlled the main national channel ORT (now Channel One), deployed his top journalist, Sergei Dorenko, to attack Yury Luzhkov, a powerful Moscow mayor with presidential ambitions. NTV's Gusinsky backed Luzhkov and used his network to return fire at Berezovsky. Then in March 2000, Putin, a former KGB operative, was elected president, immediately taking a firmer line on both the war in Chechnya and the Russian media. He began to crush Gusinsky, imprisoning him for a few days. The state-controlled Gazprom managed a hostile takeover of NTV using its previous loans as leverage. Then Putin turned on Berezovsky, who had assisted in bringing him to power.

By the end of 2001 both oligarchs were in exile - Gusinsky in his villa in Spain, Berezovsky in a mansion on the Cote d'Azur. Kiselyov, who by then had been appointed general director of NTV, tried to mobilise public support for the network. But he had spent too much of his capital of trust. In early April 2001 a handful of liberals demonstrated against the Kremlin's action against NTV. But to most people observing the fight between Putin and Gusinsky it seemed to be merely a tussle between an oligarch and a new president trying to consolidate his power.

At 4am on April 14 2001, Kiselyov and his journalists were forced out of their studios by new managers appointed by Gazprom. Berezovsky offered Kiselyov an escape to a minor channel - Channel 6 - which he controlled. But that soon folded. Kiselyov ended up at the Moscow News, a liberal newspaper owned by another oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is now in prison awaiting trial on multiple charges, forced to watch the Kremlin strip his Yukos oil empire.

As Kiselyov leaves lunch, he says: "We failed in one thing above all: to create the conditions so that private and state channels could co-exist. And the responsibility for this failure must be shared between the state and the private channels themselves."

A week before Kiselyov was ousted from NTV, one of the channel's brightest and highest-paid stars, Leonid Parfenov, 44, published an open letter in the Kommersant newspaper to his boss, offering his resignation. Parfenov wrote that he did not want to climb the barricades with Kiselyov, and could not watch the general director sacrificing young NTV journalists to the altar of Vladimir Gusinsky's struggle with Putin. "I can no longer hear your preaching in the newsroom - these 10-minute-long outbursts of hatred - and I can't just ignore them as long as I work here," he wrote.

Whether Parfenov was right or wrong in principle, the timing and the style of an open letter turned him in the eyes of many NTV journalists into a hate figure. "You are a traitor!" NTV's flamboyant night talk show presenter, Dmitry Dibrov, shouted at him on air: "You have betrayed our battle for the freedom of speech! You have betrayed people who are working here!"

Ever ironic, Parfenov kept his cool, asking his fuming colleague: "Do you really think that the words 'traitor', 'freedom' and 'battle' should be pronounced with three exclamation marks?" Beneath his calm exterior, Parfenov was no less concerned about freedom of speech than Kiselyov. His disagreements were stylistic. "I am a professional journalist - not a professional revolutionary," he told me. "My job is to report, not to climb the barricades. Kiselyov crossed the line. What he was doing was politics, not journalism."

After Gazprom's takeover of NTV, Parfenov returned to the channel, replacing Kiselyov as its main political anchorman. But in June "professional journalist" Parfenov was sacked by the post-Kiselyov, post-Gusinsky NTV. His political programme - Namedni (Recently), which had replaced Itogi - has been taken off air. The official explanation is that he had breached the corporate ethic by leaking to Kommersant newspaper an internal memo banning him from broadcasting an interview with the widow of a Chechen leader who had been assassinated by the Russian secret services. But to most Russian liberals it signalled another infringement of freedom of speech by the government.

Even then, Parfenov remained cool. There would be no presentation of himself as the victim of a bloody regime. "I am convinced," he told me, "that this is a zig-zag, not a return to the Soviet era, that Russia today is still more liberal than it was last year and the year before. But this liberalism is not in politics. It is on the internet, in fashion shops, in this cafe."

It is several weeks after his sacking, and we are sitting in Cafe Bosco - one of Moscow's most stylish cafes - on the ground floor of GUM, an elegant shopping arcade once synonymous with empty shelves and long queues. The cafe, squeezed between Italian and French boutiques, faces the Kremlin wall and Lenin's mausoleum. A few of its white tablecloth-covered tables under canvas umbrellas almost spill out on to Red Square.

"This cafe is Russian liberalism. Having tables on Red Square was impossible under the Tsars, let alone the Bolsheviks," he says. "There is no one Russia. It is a myth. There is the Russia of young, energetic people who have the imagination to build such a cafe and the Russia of people who still live their past." A waiter dressed in the black and white garb of a Parisian brasserie brings me my Dollars 20 asparagus dish; a battalion of Russian soldiers marches past the mausoleum.

Parfenov was also a product of Russian liberalism. He was never a political fighter or a dissident. Unlike Kiselyov, he did not have a privileged background, he did not speak foreign languages and he had little interest in politics. The son of a school teacher and an engineer from a provincial town, he gravitated towards a peculiarly Russian version of what might be known in the west as "lifestyle journalism". His first programmes were overtly non-political. Namedni, for which he is best-known, was initially "non-political news of the week, which talked about fashion, music - anything but politics". Style was paramount: "how" was more important than "what". Irony, postmodernist detachment and sarcasm were key ingredients.

In his frameless glasses and sleek suits he was a fashion icon for a generation of well-travelled, urbane, westernised Russians and aspiring journalists such as Andrei Loshak - one of Parfenov's talented proteges. "We were not interested in democracy or Perestroika - that was the stuff of our parents' generation. We cringed at Kiselyov's pathos. We were apolitical and ironic. We all wanted to be like Parfenov - to speak like him, to behave like him."

Parfenov's style would have been a fine complement to mainstream journalism. The trouble was that in the absence of serious journalism, it became the mainstream of Russian news reporting. After Kiselyov's departure, Parfenov turned Namedni into the main political programme of the week. It was faster and glossier, but less serious than Kiselyov's Itogi. Where Kiselyov had preached, Parfenov informed and entertained. Where Kiselyov had used meaningful pauses to underscore the gravity of his subject, Parfenov used half-squinting irony and sarcasm. And unlike Kiselyov, Parfenov was free of oligarchic ties and selected news on its merit, not someone's political agenda. But he did have his own agenda: "We tried to encourage people with initiative by showing that they are not alone. We portrayed Russia as more liberal than it really was."

Parfenov provided extensive coverage of Chechen terrorist attacks and he interrupted the coverage of President Putin's re-election to show a fire in the centre of Moscow, but he also showed "the heroes of capitalist labour" and sent crews around the country searching for the unusual and the entrepreneurial. Whatever he did, his signature was a style that often made use of montages, animation and computer graphics.

Namedni's coverage of Putin's inauguration mixed images of the actual ceremony with scenes from The Barber of Siberia, a kitsch fiction film about Tsar Alexander III. Putin's arrival at the Kremlin in a black limousine was mixed with the arrival of Alexander III on a white horse: when Putin addressed the Kremlin guards he got a reply from Alexander III's soldiers. Playfully, Namedni was putting across a serious message: Putin's ceremony was a blessing of a new monarch, rather than the inauguration of a president. Yet he was also saying: it's all just images. It's not serious.

Parfenov neither praised nor campaigned against Putin, but his playfulness became increasingly out of place in Putin's Russia. When Namedni was taken off air and Parfenov was sacked, many Russian observers recalled a famous line used by Soviet literary critic and dissident Andrei Sinyavsky during his trial in 1966: "My contradictions with the Soviet Union were purely of a stylistic nature." Such were Parfenov's contradictions in relation to the Kremlin.

The night after leaving the channel, Parfenov invited his team to a Chinese restaurant to thank them for their services. "Hopefully we'll get a chance to work together one day," he told them. There were no slogans, no calls to arms. To anyone walking in off the street that night, it would have seemed like an office party where people were simply having a good time. Nobody was planning to climb the barricades - they knew Parfenov would not have approved. And they knew that if they did, they would be lonely.

One member of the generation of journalists who began their careers in the late 1980s has stayed the course and arrived at the top. Konstantin Ernst, general director of Channel One - one of the networks most criticised for its coverage of the Beslan massacre - is among the most powerful and driven figures in the nation's media. At 43, he not only rules the TV station that reaches most viewers across Russia's 11 time zones, he also produces films and publishes books, most recently a Russian translation of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

With his long, flowing hair, Ernst is a member of the generation created by both the Soviet Union and the reaction against it. He is a blueblood of the Soviet intellectual establishment; his father, Lev Ernst, is a famous professor of biology and Ernst himself has a PhD in biochemistry. Drawn to the media in his late twenties, he became a talented TV producer and presented Channel One's slick cultural programme Matador, which took viewers into the world of Hollywood studios, film stars and the Cannes film festival. In one memorable episode Ernst told the story of the creation of Apocalypse Now. Dressed in a US Air Force uniform for effect, Ernst seemed intoxicated by the energy of the scene where US helicopters bomb the Viet Cong to the soundtrack of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries". Francis Ford Coppola seemed a natural role model for the young Ernst. In 1995, Boris Berezovsky singled him out for his determination and ambition, appointing him programme director of the channel. Four years later, he was elevated to general director.

I meet Ernst in his spacious office on the 10th floor of the Ostankino television centre. He has just flown back from Los Angeles, where he has sold worldwide distribution rights for the Channel One-produced film, Night Watch, to 20th Century Fox. The film is the first real blockbuster in post-Soviet history: it collected more than Dollars 16m in four weeks following its release on June 8, breaking box office records and putting it ahead of even The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

It is a special effects-filled horror thriller, set in a contemporary Moscow where ordinary people have parallel otherworldly existences as vampires and witches. They are agents of the forces of light and darkness, who have been fighting with each other since life began.

"It is a story about the balance between good and evil," says Ernst. "In western tradition, the good always wins. In eastern tradition there is more dualism: the good and the evil co-exist side by side. Russia, being halfway between the east and the west, offers a balance between the two."

Ernst says the film offers a convenient construction that helps to explain the inexplicable in Russian life. Among the film's product placements, Night Watch features a scene from Channel One's nine o'clock news programme Vremya (Time), in which a smooth-looking presenter informs his audience about a plane crash. The reference to Vremya is significant. More than any other news programme, Vremya has created a sense of stability in Russia; a balance between good and evil, as the plot of Night Watch would have it. And the guarantor of this stability, at least as portrayed by Vremya, is Vladimir Putin.

Vremya - which has inherited its name, time slot and theme tune from Soviet days - typically starts with Putin travelling around the country or meeting ministers in his office. The picture is almost always the same: the thoughtful president sits back in his leather chair and listens to a government official reporting on his brief. Every now and then Putin interrupts with a probing question or a comment, the essence of which is, "Your results are not bad, but they should be even better." The programme ends with the weather, accompanied by a soothing tune which conjures up memories of Soviet times in anyone who watched television at that time - which is the large majority of Russians. Unlike any other programme on the channel, Vremya goes out uninterrupted by commercials - another tribute to the Soviet days.

Vremya does not allow itself any scorn or ridicule. The tone of the presenter is always stern and serious. It seems to aim to assure viewers that they can sleep peacefully in the knowledge that the country is governed by a wise and caring president who will make the right decisions; that criminals and terrorists will be punished and the champions of labour rewarded. "Any stabilisation makes news calmer. If news works like a constant nerve irritant - as it did in Russia in the 1990s - it is a sign of instability rather than of the freedom of speech," Ernst says. He believes his job is to support Putin's government in all its positive initiatives.

"Nobody calls me and orders me to do anything. But the government has the right to explain its action to the people and it does so through the channel where it is a shareholder."

Ernst is defiant about his channel's coverage of Beslan. "We have nothing to blame ourselves for. I don't feel any shame for our coverage. The only criticism is that we did not give the real figure of hostages in the school. But we did not have any other source of information apart from the official one. Yes, it is unfortunate that the figure we were given was 354 hostages and not 1,200. But this was not a crucial point because no action was taken on the basis of this information."

The main purpose during the siege of Beslan was not to harm the hostages. "Our task number two is to inform the country about what is going on. Today the main task of the television is to mobilise the country, to explain that we are in a situation of war with terror. Russia needs consolidation. Today, Putin is the person who can do it. When we started, our energy was directed at fighting the communist system. None of us wanted to live in a communist country, but none of us wanted the Soviet Union to disintegrate either."

Like Putin, he considers himself a state-ist. "I feel my energy should be directed at making Russia a strong country with a strong economy equal to other developed countries, a country people can be proud of."

As for freedom of speech, he says it can't be measured in absolutes. "There is no such thing as an absolute freedom of speech... the freedom of speech is the ability to report information, the withdrawal of which would harm people. Everything depends on your purpose." The question is, what is the purpose and who decides what is good for it? "A doctor does not ask the patient under the knife what is good for him. He simply tries to save him."

Arkady Ostrovsky is an FT correspondent in Moscow