Rejoice, all true patriots of our Motherland! Our country has acquired the first 24-hour English-speaking news TV channel! Russia Today is our Russian CNN, our Slavonic Orthodox Christian Al-Jazeera!

But from the very first day things somehow went wrong: on December 10, the channel hit airwaves, but suspended broadcasting in 24 hours. The official version—the hackers tried to break into Russia Today’s computer network in order to destroy the national television. Informal version—lack of professionalism… The western journalists, having watched the channel’s technical broadcasting (it’s been available since September 15), were shocked by lack of professionalism in its functioning—especially in relation to other Russian TV channels, which, according to the international standards, are quite professional. But it’s nothing but jealousy, petty jealousy!

By Tuesday the channel was more or less fixed and started to air again. Russia Today was worth about 30 million dollars for our government. It is headed by Margarita Simonyan, a sweet girl of 25. Plus about five hundred employees who day and night toil and moil under her wise supervision for our Motherland’s glory! In other words, everything is done in the best way to fit Russian classical literature—from Gogol to Saltykov-Shchedrin.

Seriously, the project founders simply didn’t quite get what game they were about to play. True, that with the appearance of Al-Jazeera channel information monopoly of the Western television companies, namely, CNN, BBC, World, Sky News, Fox News has been questioned. But the Arab journalists have succeeded not due to their opposition to the American propaganda. On the contrary, Al-Jazeera, technically based in Qatar, is not an instrument of the local government. It doesn’t have citizens of this country among its employees, and its broadcasts are not subjected to government’s censorship. Challenging Americans has become possible only because Al-Jazeera had won its independence of the Arab leaders by expressing frequent criticism, giving floor to Israeli representatives, and having an apparent West-oriented reporting style. That is why the Israeli right circles had been outraged by the channel’s activity and had become panic-stricken. Dumb anti-Israeli, as well as anti-American propaganda was more than enough in the Middle East, but no one had seen anything of this new kind. The reason for Arab audience to rush and to take a look at the channel was its critical view on the local regimes. Before, the relevant information was available only from the Western resources. Now the interest towards the latter has nosedived.

Another alternative network in relation to CNN is TELESUR, founded on Venezuelan money in Latin America. The project was initially designed to operate as a continental Spanish-speaking television. Though Hugo Chavez’s administration remains its principal sponsor, the creative crew is being selected from different countries, and the international team of experts is monitoring the process in order to preserve independence of journalists. The leader of this expert team is Tarik Ali, a prominent English writer and a playwright. His firm belief is that the project will succeed and go on, if and only if the channel’s reporters will have an opportunity to have a critical vision of Chavez’s activity in Venezuela. Actually, starting from here, things differ significantly from what they look like in the Arab countries and even in Russia. More than a half of Venezuelan TV channels are controlled by the opposition forces, who are continuously fighting information wars against the President. The state television is relatively weak—both informatively and technically. So Chavez takes no risks by allowing the independent—but not hostile—channel to operate. It won’t get worse anyway.

The Latin American project ideologists say that they’ll get a Spanish-speaking Al-Jazeera. What will come out of it, we’ll know in a couple years. Today TELESUR, regardless of all its creators’ efforts, looks like a provincial, regional project, having neither developed international reporting network, nor access to the European information markets, though eventually it could have covered significant audience: Spanish is kind of more frequent than Arabic.

Shortly English-speaking Al-Jazeera will be introduced to the European market.

It remains unclear who is going to watch the Russian government’s propaganda reports in English. What’s more concerning is, who actually needs so many reports from Russia, if government itself is doing its best to deprive our country of any happenings? Our own Al-Jazeera could have been worked out as an international network broadcasting in RUSSIAN, understood by millions of people in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, not mentioning millions of Russians, scattered throughout the world. The demand for this project does exist. There are however two problems. Firstly, its goals do not coincide with the priorities set by the Russian authorities. Secondly, it will have to work, but not just draw funds.

The last requirement makes this project in essence impossible to be carried out in the contemporary Russia.

Boris Kagarlitsky is a Director of The Institute for Globalization Studies.

December 19, 2005