Page 33 - bne magazine September 2023

bne September 2023 Cover story I 33
“Others, like liberal opposition paper Novaya Gazeta led by Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, and Kommersant are trying to follow the letter of the law, stubbornly avoiding the word 'war,' although their discomfort with it and with the war itself is quite apparent if you read between the lines,” Bloomberg reported.
Zhelonkin claims that he follows the same journalistic ethics as before the war, but the series of new media laws pose a significant challenge.
Still, the word “war” frequently appears in Kommersant’s texts. This primarily has to do with its use in interviews with celebrities, politicians and
public figures, who are always quoted verbatim, Zhelonkin says. This includes interviews with so-called “foreign agents” whom the paper is required by law to identify as such.
Kommersant continues to provide its readers with objective information about the war and presents a variety of views, Zhelonkin added. For example, in May 2023 alone, the newspaper published 150 articles presenting the Ukrainian point of view on the conflict. Nearly half of these cited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
and representatives of Ukrainian government bodies as the main source.
“There is no censorship on our pages. It’s not a question of pushing the boundaries outwards, but of preventing them from shrinking inwards. But we can’t violate the law. Beyond that, we don't practise self-censorship – the same as in other countries,” says Zhelonkin.
At a July 2023 press conference with the Russian president following the Russia- Africa summit, Kommersant’s special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov was the only journalist to pose a direct question to Putin about the recent arrests of individuals who had spoken out about the war. “People are being arrested for words spoken or written.
Is that normal? Thank God, we're not
in the year 1937...or maybe, as some people think, it is 1937?” Kolesnikov asked, referring to the year that marked
the height of Stalin’s Terror, when hundreds of thousands of people were arbitrarily executed or imprisoned for being domestic “saboteurs.”
"We are in 2023, and the Russian Federation is in a state of armed conflict with a neighbour. I think there should be a certain attitude towards those people who cause us damage inside the country,” Putin responded.
Between a rock and a hard place
As Russian media has sought to not fall foul of the Kremlin’s legislation,
a number of outlets and companies have garnered criticism from the West for appearing to cater to the Kremlin’s censorship.
Russian internet giant Yandex was accused of “promoting Kremlin propaganda” after it was found that the top headlines in its news search, Yandex. News, featured only state-approved media. The EU sanctioned the company’s founder, and Yandex has since sold off its news aggregator. The problem was the news aggregator was only linking
to media officially registered in Russia
– it is illegal to pull up anything other than Russian sources. As time went
on, there were fewer and fewer such sources registered in the country. In
the end, it turned out that the selection did indeed include mostly the official state-owned media, most of which are rabidly supportive of the war in Ukraine. Effectively Yandex.News was not
favouring these sources out of any sense of duty; it was precluded from linking to almost anything else.
Kommersant was also accused of doing the Kremlin’s bidding in 2011, when
it terminated its contract with the editor-in-chief of Kommersant Vlast (Kommersant Power, the political division of Kommersant) Maxim Kovalsky after the magazine printed an article with a photo of a tainted voting ballot on which a swear word against the Russian president, deemed offensive, was written. The photo caption read: “A correctly filled-out ballot that has been invalidated.” This caption, according to Kommersant’s management team, misled the reader and was an important reason for Kovalsky's dismissal.
“At that time, I was not yet working at the publishing house, but I’m familiar with the story,” Zhelonkin says. “As far as I know, the contract with Kovalsky was terminated by Kommersant’s CEO and editor-in-chief, not because of criticising the authorities or due to Kremlin pressure, but simply over a violation of the publishing house’s professional standards and ethics. Firing employees in these kinds of cases is actually a global common practice.” Kovalsky ultimately left the newspaper on the terms of a mutual agreement, but later returned and continued to work at Kommersant until his death from cancer in 2019. The article that
Yandex news website homepage. Shutterstock.com
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