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The Media-political
System |
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With Putin’s
appointment as prime minister and the onset of the new war in
Chechnya, it became obvious that the media-political system would
hardly be able to survive beyond the next parliamentary and
presidential elections. The irony of the situation was that Putin
owed his own elevation, to a great extent, to the mechanisms of the
system. Putin’s sudden rise out of nowhere was the work of the
Kremlin strategists and their allies in the media, who created his
neatly packaged media image, which scored such a success with the
voters.
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Crucial
electronic and other media outlets, including Russia’s two main
television stations, Channel 1 (ORT) and Channel 2 (RTR), controlled
either by the government or pro-Putin businessmen, were consistent
in promoting both his candidacy and the war in Chechnya. They waged
sustained and often vicious attacks against Putin’s rivals, the
former prime minister Evgeny Primakov and Moscow’s mayor Yury
Luzhkov.
Having used
the instrumentality of “manipulated democracy” to effect his ascent,
Putin then proceeded to wrestle the levers of the media-political
system from the hands of the media magnates. It is clear that Putin
sees the media as a vital tool for shaping public opinion and
achieving national accord on major political issues. These include,
first and foremost, the war in Chechnya: Putin authorized stronger
military controls over the media in the battle zone and appointed a
wartime “media tsar,” Sergei Yastrzhembsky, to control the flow of
information about the war to the press.
Copyrighted material
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