Opposition fury over NTV documentary

21 Mar 12 | Russia

Opposition activists have sued Russian television station NTV after the channel aired the documentary “Anatomy of Protest”, which claimed people were paid to participate in recent mass protest rallies.

Eleven years ago thousands of people gathered in Moscow in support of Russian private NTV channel, protesting against state-owned Gazprom’s subsidiary — Gazprom Media Holding — buying it from media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. He had faced pressure from Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to sell NTV (as well as “Echo of Moscow” radio station). That rally didn’t influence the transaction; NTV was passed into the hands of Gazprom-Media, which later fell under control of Yury Kovalchuk who is considered a close friend of Putin.

Eleven years have passed and Vladimir Putin has returned to power, ignoring mass protests against his third presidential run. Now NTV is the focus of another rally. This time some 300 people gathered near Ostankino TV tower on Sunday, protesting against NTV policy and particularly the documentary, which was aired twice last week suggesting people received money and cookies for protesting against Vladimir Putin.

Many of the protesters held placards reading “NTV lies”, flowers and old broken televisions “to mark NTV’s funeral as mass media”. Dozens of people were arrested, including opposition leaders Sergey Udaltsov and Boris Nemtsov. All were released by the following morning.

The arrests angered many, with complaints on NTV’s Facebook page, and “NTV Lies” hashtag trending on Twitter.

The Democratic Choice opposition movement has filed two lawsuits against NTV. One is for libel — the movement is demanding NTV withdraw statements in the documentary about opposition leaders hiring people to attend rallies and aiming to arrange provocations and bloody revolution in Russia.

The other lawsuit relates to Democratic Choice authors’ rights — the documentary included a video showing citizens of Kenya attending a rally in support of Vladimir Putin, who didn’t seem to understand the Russian language and could not explain at all why they supported Putin.

“Democratic Choice” activists claim the video was shot by them to show that Putin’s assessments of how many people actually supported him on rallies were controversial. The NTV documentary claimed that the Kenyans interviewed might have been hired by opposition activists.

A libel lawsuit against NTV was filed by politician Boris Nadezhdin, and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has called for a  boycott of all NTV programmes. Bloggers have called on advertisers including Proсter & Gamble to pull the plug on the company. The company responded, saying it respects freedom of expression, but prefers to stay out of politics and doesn’t see itself as a party in this conflict.

Expert magazine editor-in-chief Valery Fadeev, who appeared in the NTV documentary, said his words were taken out of context. He added that not only his magazine, but the whole Expert publishing house is ending any cooperation with NTV.

Gazprom Media Holding denied the allegations, issuing a statement from the group head Nikolay Senkevich.

Senkevich said that NTV “covers each aspect of social life” and that calls to boycott the channel go against democratic principles. Andrey Isaev of Putin’s United Russia party called the opposition reaction to the documentary “hysterical”.

Russia’s journalists are divided by the controversial documentary. To some, working on NTV is still seen as a normal journalistic activity, as far as it doesn’t concern making Kremlin propaganda movies about Russian opposition. To others, it is no longer acceptable.