It's All About the Eyeballs

This spring, the front page of the Yandex search engine surpassed Channel One in number of viewers, according to TNS statistics.

Many saw this as a tipping point in the trend away from television’s dominance over the flow of information to the public. In April, 19.1 million people opened the front page of Yandex, while only 18.2 million tuned in to Channel One, Russia’s most popular television channel, which is controlled by the state and widely seen as a mouthpiece of government propaganda.

The internet has been steadily gaining in influence, and broadband is stretching to more households, yet its relatively modest reach is widely believed, by those opposing Vladimir Putin, to be the reason for the president’s continued high ratings. Channel One and other widely distributed television channels are tightly controlled and their news programs allocate most of their airtime to bland reportage of what Putin and Prime Minister Medvedev are doing, never airing criticism and avoiding live broadcasts.

A Levada Center annual study released this spring showed, however, that television still dominates Russians’ private time, with 36 percent saying they have their set on all the time when they are home, and 79 percent saying they watched it every day in 2011. Still, 31 percent also said they use the internet daily, and the number of people who report never having surfed the web declined from 87 percent in 2005 to 53 percent last year.

Capitalizing on Russians’ increased reliance on the internet for gathering information, the opposition has launched a “counter-propaganda” machine, calling it the “Kind Machine of Truth.” (Добрая машина правды) The aim of the project [mashina.org] is “to educate citizens about the inconsistencies and untruths of the Putin government and its policies.”

So far, its creator, the blogger and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, is asking people to register and submit ideas on ways the protest movement can fight television’s overbearing presence in Russian homes and offer people alternative sources of information. Some suggestions have been subscribing your neighbors to opposition magazines and naming your visible wifi network something like “putinisathief.”

Meanwhile, Russians’ political preferences indicate that the Communist Party has lost much of its support, while a third of the country does not trust any political group.

Only 13 percent of Russians sympathize with the Communist Party, according to a recent poll by Levada Center. 17 percent say they like “democrats” while 18 percent prefer “the party of power.” But nearly a third of the country (31 percent) says they don’t like any political party. Since April 2000, the Communists have lost more than half of their support: at that time, the party enjoyed support from 27 percent of those polled.

* Some 16% of Russians believe that by 2020 Russia will become a leading world power.