Is Trump’s Attack on the Media Following Putin’s Playbook?

In 2000, NTV, a Russian television channel known for its independent and moving cover, was among the most watched stations in the country. The evening news reported on the atrocities committed by the Russian forces in Chechnya and on corruption regimes that involved the senior Kremlin officials. Its correspondents had examined the possibility that the FSB, the successor agency of the KGB, is behind a series of mysterious bombings of apartments which had helped to consolidate the power of Putin. The owner of NTV, Vladimir Gusinsky, an oligarch who began his commercial career by founding one of the country’s first cooperatives of lucrative workers, had faced all kinds of government threats and attacks, most of which were barely disguised as litigation on business debts.

In May, a few days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in his first mandate as president of Russia, a high -ranking official in Kremlin conveyed a list of requests to NTV. If the chain hoped to survive, said the manager, he must put an end to his surveys on corruption in the entourage of Putin, abandon his unshakable coverage of the war in Chechnya, and more easily coördicate his editorial policy with the Kremlin.

A final request concerned one of the most popular shows in NTV: “Kukly” or “Puppets”, which presented versions of caricatures of various members of the country’s political and commercial elite. In an episode, which had broadcast a few months earlier, Putin’s puppet appeared in the role of Little Zaches, a character from a fairy tale Eta Hoffmann, an allegorical satire of the way people can be due to superficial charming. Putin was portrayed as a unsightly troll, which, by an act of magic – a spell thrown by the puppet version of Boris Berezovsky, the magnate which helped to conceive its ascent to the presidency – is appeared beautiful and virtuous, the subject of a great adulation and a deference.

Putin, journalists and publishers of NTV, learned not only by the mocking tone and the involvement that his popularity was based on the practical hocus, but also by the fact that his puppet was, as the character of the original history of Hoffmann, short and rather ugly. “He took this as a personal attack, an anthropomorphic insult,” said Viktor Shedenovich, one of the main writers of “Kukly”. The short stature of the puppet was a metaphor, said Shenderovich. “But where Putin obtained his studies” – The late KGB of Soviet – “they do not believe in metaphors.” The official told the channel that the “first person”, which means that Putin should disappear from “Kukly”.

Shenderovich respected nominally. The next episode of “Kukly” presented Putin as God – but not in the form of puppets but like a burning bush and a storm cloud. (An updated version of Ten Commandments has made an appearance: “You will not fly, unless it allows it.”) In any case, the NTV fate has been defined. Before a long time, a portfolio company of the media of the Russian state giant Gazprom has taken a majority participation in the canal, ending its independence and giving the Kremlin a decisive influence on its editorial policy.

A lot to the chain, including Shenderovich, on the left; Those who stayed quickly learned the new rules. “My greatest pain was that so many of my colleagues have helped Putin to become what he did,” said Shenderovich. “At the beginning, Putin was not strong enough to defeat everyone. He was far from being omnipotent. But, leaning over, they participated in the creation of what, over time, became his aura of uncontrolled power.” (Shenderovich left Russia in 2022, after a defamation investigation against him at the request of a close partner of Putin.)

NTV’s takeover has also established an important precedent. Much more individuals and institutions would be suborn and co -opted. With one of the most influential media in the country brought to the heel, Shenderovich said to me: “Everything else has become possible.”

I spent a decade to live in Moscow, a period during which independent journalists went from intimidation and marginalized to be essentially prohibited. I wanted to ask the central actors of the NTV drama – who, at the time of the crisis of their chain, considered himself in the United States as a model of free expression and democratic values ​​- which they have done the in progress between Donald Trump and the American media. Shenderovich noted that, for the health of a policy, its standards – which is considered to be morally authorized – can often have more than the laws that officially govern it. And these standards can change quickly, with a large part of the company managing to adapt to an extended state of non-liberty. “People tend to accept new rules imposed from the top more easily,” said Shedenovich. “Unfortunately, it turns out that the United States is no exception.”

In July, CBS announced that it canceled Stephen Colbert’s late evening program, which, according to the network, was “purely a financial decision against a difficult context at the end of the evening”. On September 17, ABC suspended the late evening show organized by Jimmy Kimmel, because of comments that Kimmel had made in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk. Colbert and Kimmel were both frequent Trump criticism. And their two networks had already paid millions of dollars to settle the proceedings brought by the president. ABC paid fifteen million dollars to adjust a Trump defamation costume from comments made on the air by George Stephanopoulos; Paramount Global, who owned CBS, paid sixteen million to settle a pursuit on a “60-minute” interview with the vice-president of the time, Kamala Harris, who said that Trump was unfair. In April, the executive producer of “60 minutes” resigned, writing in a memo to the staff that the corporate owners of CBS had undermined the editorial independence of the program: “It has become clear that I would not be allowed to execute the show because I have always executed it.”