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International Journalismbeen granted without effective competition.Still, despite such dubious proceduresand in a very short time, televisionsucceeded in enabling the post-Soviet Russian public to access multiplesources and contending points of viewin the news. NTV did it with greatestcredibility, and during each crisis itsratings climbed. In our 1998 Russiannational survey, 59 percent said thebest journalists work at NTV; 29 percentgave OKT as an answer, and only12 percent said RTR. 1Television allowed viewers to seewhat Soviet rulers long had feared andprohibited. Viewers learned that theirown dissenting opinions were also heldby many others, some in prominentpositions. During the war in Chechnya,viewers saw some military officers condemnthe action, while others supportedit, and some elected deputiescriticized the President, while cabinetministers defended him.The reverse occurred when the nationalnetworks coordinated their coverageduring the 1996 presidential campaign.The first order of theadministration’s business was to provethat Yeltsin was physically fit to be acandidate, and television was the key.sidelined by a series of heart attacksconcealed by the networks and describedas merely a cold. Yeltsin cameback on television only just before thefinal vote.The networks’ partisan collaborationdid not nullify some fair-campaignrules. All candidates got free time inrandomly assigned slots. Paid politicaladvertising spots were purchased bythe President’s campaign and most ofhis competitors in the first round. CommunistParty leader Gennady Zyuganovdid live interviews on NTV, answeringreporters’ hostile questions, but a similarsearchlight was never turned onYeltsin’s abundant campaign promisesor his precarious health.Yet it would be a mistake to ascribetoo much influence to television andtoo little to the capacity of voters tomake their own evaluations. Sweepingstatements that exaggerate the persuasivepower of television in this electionare wrong except on a critical dimensionthat probably will not apply tofuture campaigns: Television presentedvisual evidence to the nation that BorisYeltsin really was a “live” candidateand almost killed him in the process.Owners’ AgendasRussian President Boris Yeltsin dances at a rock concert after arriving in Rostov onMonday, June 10, 1996. This AP photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko won a 1997Pulitzer Prize.For many months, he had been anabsent or remote figure, cordoned offby officials, and obviously out of touch.Suddenly he was portrayed as the modelof a vigorous incumbent, dominatingthe news with a new initiative everyday. The newly energized Presidentled an impressive campaign, and ittook its toll. In the two weeks after thefirst round of the election, Yeltsin wasIn anticipation of the 1999-2000 electionseason, television outlets are increasingin value to candidates andtheir backers. If they do not controltheir own properties, they often lookfor alliances with managements of commercialor state-run stations.At the national level, the politicallyambitious Mayor of Moscow, YuriLuzhkov, converted the city’s televisionstation into a new channel, TV-Center (the city also has a piece of theMoscow radio station and a newspapergroup), and has made some allianceswith politically compatible regionalstations. He also put on TV-Center’sboard some of the strategists from the’96 Yeltsin campaign, including the1These findings are drawn from a national survey of urban (including very small communities) Russians. I directed the survey, together withthe Public Opinion Foundation, under the direction of Alexander Oslon and Elena Petrenko. It was fielded from June 1-10, 1998.28 Nieman Reports / Fall 1999