The New Yorker Radio Hour - How Channel One Keeps the News Safe for Putin

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

Joshua Yaffa recently profiled a Russian media mogul named Konstantin Ernst. Ernst is the C.E.O. of Russia’s largest state-controlled media network, Channel One, and his personal evolution from idealistic independent journalist to cynical mogul is a cautionary tale for the free press of any nation. Channel One effectively dominates Russia’s news cycle and subtly controls what its viewers believe. Ernst, Yaffa explains, has dispensed with the straight propaganda that was broadcast in Soviet times, in favor of a much slicker approach that’s more like a disinformation campaign. Rather than denying any specific facts or allegations against the regime, its news shows air conspiracy theories, contradictory interpretations of facts, and doctored footage to sow confusion. So, even though Russians have independent media outlets and access to the Internet, Channel One perpetuates a feeling that that the truth can never be known, one interpretation is as good as another, and there is no objective basis to critique what Russia gets from its leaders.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a bonus episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're just a minute. Is it normal on all right? No. Josh Jaffa is a Moscow correspondent for the New Yorker. And he's written a piece about a man called Constantine Ernst, a television producer who is really at the center of Russian politics

and at the center of Putinism. And he has been for the last 20 years. Josh, Constantine Ernst is currently the CEO of Channel 1 Russia. Can you start by describing... what Channel 1 is, what its importance is in politics and in Russian life today? Channel 1 is a bit like NBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and Walt Disney all rolled into one. It was, as its name suggests, the chief television broadcast station in the Soviet era and continued to play that role in post-Soviet Russia.

It's the channel whose tone, visual tone, cultural and political tone translates outward and broader into the culture. It's the channel under Ernst's direction. So how is Channel 1 today in 2019, going into 2020, how is that different than what we think of as Soviet television, which was kind of wall-to-wall propaganda even into the 70s and 80s? How is this different? I think there's a few key distinctions between Soviet-era propaganda and the much slicker, more postmodern propaganda of Putin's Russia. Soviet propaganda was essentially about convincing the viewer of a single truth at the expense of some other truth, and that in the later days of the Soviet Union reached a real state of absurdity. Propaganda like that could really only work for so long and would certainly never survive. into the kind of information and media age we have today.

And I would say what Channel One does and other Russian state media outlets is, first and foremost, they appeal to a kind of truth that viewers are already inclined to believe. You know, as one of your predecessors as Russia correspondent for first the Washington Post and then the New Yorker, I knew a lot of these people who worked in Soviet state television and then in Russian state television after 1991, after the Soviet Union fell. And their relationship with the Kremlin and Kremlin leadership was extremely close and they took orders. And if they went too far, they really heard about it. Now, Constantine Ernst comes with a background of not news so much as show business. And how is that background played itself out? Why is that important in the projection of

Putinism. Tell me a little bit about Constantine Erins and what he brings to the party. I think what makes Constantine Ernst so interesting and so good at his job is exactly that backstory you alluded to. He came of age during Parastroica. The convulsions of the time led him

toward art, toward music, toward film, and he was really a kind of counterculture, not quite hippy, then someone certainly consumed with this new flood of information and the new cultural opportunities. And he developed really art house, offbeat impulses.

One of Ernst most beloved projects from the mid-90s was a musical variety show called Old Songs About Important Things. He brought those tastes to state television along with a sense of high production values, quality, a realuteur's eye to how to deliver a visual product that was compelling and attractive and that people really wanted to watch. I think that's the other thing that people should understand

that to a certain degree, a place like Channel One has to compete for viewer eyeballs. And Ernst has proven that he can deliver the kind of entertainment programming that people really want to watch. Josh, how is it possible even to have a kind of all-embracing propagandistic system in the age of the Internet? When I go to Russia, I see a kind of mixed system. Television is wall-to-wall. Wall-to-wall. There's nothing really, really penetrates the, the official line on things. But there are things in print. There are certainly things online that are quite different, a great deal freer.

There's an internet television outlet called Dost, Rain, Television Rain. There's a radio station called ECHO Mosque, the Echo of Moscow, that's listened to by older liberals and is quite a bit more liberal than the official press. So you have a kind of mixed system, certainly more mixed than in, say, China or the old Soviet Union or God knows North Korea. How does that function? The way that Channel 1 counteracts this loud, contradictory informational froth is by actually leaning into it, by throwing up so many contradictory versions of events

with the point being not to convince the viewer that this or that thing is definitely or explicitly or uniquely true, but rather to have the viewer become so exhausted, so overwhelmed, so confused, that she simply throws her hands up and decides there is no such thing, or at least there is no possibility in getting to the bottom of the truth.

And we saw this among many, many other cases, but in a very acute and dramatic way in the way that Channel 1 responded to the shootdown of MH17, the civilian passenger jet flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down over eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014 by all accounts and confirmed by a multilateral Dutch-ledged investigation, the responsibility of Russian-backed separatists,

likely with anti-aircraft missile supplied by Russia. And how did Channel 1 respond to that news? Not by trying to convince viewers of Russia's unique, or very objective particular innocence because there was some other clear theory for what happened, but rather by running with all manner of explanations that Ukrainians were trying to shoot down

Putin's presidential plane, that it was CIA black op, that it was Ukrainian fighter jet that shot down the aircraft to frame Russia. Every day or every hour there was a new theory. And to me, the point of all of these programs was just to make the whole question of culpability in MH17

seemed so murky, so confusing, that whatever the viewer might also have heard on a place like Dost or Echol-Moskui, as you said, or elsewhere on the internet, maybe in foreign or English language sources that more clearly pointed to Russian culpability, that all of that blended together in a big soup of theories and versions,

and that all of those ended up feeling like they had equal weight and therefore kind of no weight in the viewer's mind. I have to say, Josh, what you're describing says an awful lot like what I see on Fox or Reed in Breitbart or other places and reaches congressional committees. For example, the notion that somehow it was Ukraine and not Russia in the 2016 election that interfered. And we could go on and on about the way that conspiracy theories have entered the rhetoric not only of right-wing media, but also the mouth of the president of the United States. who is always using the phrase, people are saying, I don't know, but I've heard, and all that

kind of thing. Have we learned all too much from Russia somehow? I don't know exactly the causal relationship. I'm not sure how much Russia here can take the credit or the blame, as it were. We seem to have sadly stumbled upon this approach all on our own. But certainly, when I turn on American television or just follow American politics these days. I see that exact strategy in play. And perhaps President Trump, members of the Republican Party, those on Fox News, have seized upon this strategy because it works. Josh, I know that you don't appear on Russian television all that often, but we have a clip of you on a Russian news show called Vremia Pocashe. Time will tell. And let's listen to that for a second.

Let's first tell the truth here that your Russian is superb, and I think that you owe it to all of us to translate a little bit what happened. I was going to say, you playing that on air is the real compromise. What we're talking about there, surprise, surprise, is Trump, U.S. Russian relations. And this was, I think, from some time in 2018, when the attitude in official quarters in Moscow was certainly beginning to sour on Trump

or at least there was some disappointment and frustration with Trump and that here was this person who said he was going to magically reset relations with Russia that he was going to be a president who was much more conciliatory to Russian interests. He couldn't really deliver on that. And so what I'm doing on the show

is playing purposely a bit of the provocateur and I'm asking the host, are you sorry? Do you have regrets? Would you even like to apologize, I tried to say, to the viewers of Channel 1? The host, Anatoly Kuzov, didn't really take the bait, and perhaps you could hear me getting yelled at by some of the other guests in the studio that day. I should say, whenever I did go on the show, I was reliably outnumbered five to one, at least, by pro-Kremlin Russian guests versus me,

the lone American who functioned as the kind of birthday part. party pinata that everyone got a chance to step up and have a whack at. But I did get an interesting admission out of Kuzachev. Essentially, yes, we were a bunch of fools. We believed words. We believed the words of Trump that he wanted to do this and that in regards to Russia. And yeah, now we look like the suckers who believe those words. And here we are left high and dry. Josh, your piece for the magazine was part of a book, a terrific book that's coming out in January, between two fires, truth, ambition, and compromise in Putin's Russia. And in that book, you use a Russian word, Prispasoblinniz to describe those characters. What does that word mean? It comes from a Russian verb, Proposabluica, which has a negative connotation, but it's essentially the act of shifting, oneself, one actions, always managing to know which way the wind is blowing, to not really have

deep or heartfelt personal convictions of one's own, but to know how to manipulate and position oneself in whatever system or greater order rules the day to extract maximum benefit for oneself. One funny thing that Ernst said, he told me a funny story. story about how oftentimes various government officials call him and want him to air the most rot or kind of boring footage from ministerial meetings, Putin's sitting at a desk, across from him as a minister at the other end of the desk, and this very, I should say, Soviet-era type of propagandas is being requested of him to put on air. Ernst the Estet thinks this to be a quite boring television genre. But he narrated to me a bit.

how sometimes he says yes, sometimes he says no, sometimes he says yes, because it's easier to say yes than to explain why you don't want to put it on air. And he plays a little game with that kind of footage. And that struck me as a somewhat representative story or prism for understanding what a lot of Russians go through. And here, I think the experience could be universal. So people start out making these small compromises in service of what they think are their jobs. just virtuous, totally justified, ambitions, goals, plans. But over time, of course, those compromises begin to change you, and they begin to change your own ambitions and plans

and how you see yourself and what you want from life. And you can really come out the other end of those compromises a very different person than when you begin. Josh Schaffa, thanks so much. Thanks to you.