Russia’s largest media holdings are losing independence, journalists sacked
Over the last 10 years, the 3 most reputable business media: RBC, Commersant, and Vedomosti, have lost their independence one after another.
The fall of the “Russian Bloomberg”
In 2016 after a series of publications on RBC.ru about the business of the alleged Putin’s son-in-law and Putin’s daughters, the owner of RBC, a Russian oligarch Prokhorov, quietly and without any notice sells RBC to another businessman, Berezkin. Officially, the media holding still had the status of being privately-owned, but the rumors of Berezkin’s links to the government were quickly confirmed, as most key employees of the editorial team were fired. More than half of the employed journalists showed their protest and left the company of their own accord. The new leadership of RBC kept denying the connection between the sale of the company, the publications criticizing Putin, and the collective layoffs that followed. This connection was later established and proven by meduza.io, one of the main opposition media in Russia. They presented a recording of a speech by Trosnikov and Golikova (the newly-appointed heads of RBC’s editorial teams) who were unaware of being recorded. They confirmed what everyone already knew — the old team was sacked and replaced by the people who would enforce the Kremlin’s censorship.
Vedomosti is selling out to the government
Historically, Vedomosti has always been considered the most important business media, its site is vedomosti.ru, but used to come out as a daily printed issue as well. Its history dates back to 1703 when Vedomosti was first printed under Peter the Great. It was reborn in 1999 in a more modern format by Derk Sauer, a very prominent media manager in Russia of dutch origin. He played a large role in shaping both Vedomosti and RBC as we know them.
On February 5 2020 the current owner of Vedomosti, Demian Kudriavtsev, stated that for over a year the real owner of the media had been his business partner Vladimir Voronov, I witnessed the events as an investigative journalist in the technology department of Vedomosti. Voronov is rumored to be a close acquaintance of Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, a large state-owned oil company, and a close friend of Putin. Igor Sechin has had several conflicts with Vedomosti due to them publishing materials that criticized him or his business. In 2014 he won a lawsuit of honor against the media. Unofficial sources have it, that the new owner of Vedomosti is preparing massive layoffs and dramatic changes in the editorial policy, that will lead to severe censorship.
How Media in Russia is put under pressure
For a long time, only a few chosen knew how exactly the decision making worked behind the list of “undesirable” topics and articles. In 2015 there was a major chat leak, and the public saw how the employees of Roskomnadzor, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, communicate with other officials and representatives of the mass media (e-mails are available here with screenshots, all in Russian).
The key takeaways were, of course, that behind the policy-making stood not the interests of the society at large, but those of high-ranking officials and large business owners. Currently, this is how the system works, and what’s worse — we must keep in mind that it’s funded by taxpayers’ money. The interests of the government and large businesses are lobbied directly or indirectly via the means of misinformation.
