| NTV НТВ |
|
|---|---|
| Launched | 1993 |
| Owned by | Gazprom Media |
| Picture format | 4:3 (576i, SDTV) |
| Country | Russian Federation |
| Broadcast area | Russian Federation, CIS, Eastern Europe, Middle East, United States, Canada |
| Headquarters | Moscow, Russian Federation |
| Formerly called | 1967-1976: Program 4 1976-1984: Network 4 1984-1991: National Channel 4 1991-1993-10-10: Channel 4 Ostankino |
| Website | http://ntv.ru |
| Availability | |
| Terrestrial | |
| Analogue | Channel 4 |
NTV (Cyrillic: НТВ) is a Russian television channel. As a subsidiary of Vladimir Gusinsky's company Media-Most,[1] it was a pioneer in the post-Soviet independent television media, but was later taken over by state-owned Gazprom.
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Vladimir Gusinsky's company was founded in 1993 and attracted the best journalists and news anchors of the time: Tatiana Mitkova, Leonid Parfyonov, Mikhail Osokin, Yevgeniy Kiselyov, Vladimir A. Kara-Murza (father of Vladimir V. Kara-Murza), Victor Shenderovich and others. The channel set high professional standards in Russian television, giving live coverage and sharp analysis of current events. Its political puppet show Kukly ("Puppets"), had become a signature of the time when the freedom of speech was virtually unlimited. NTV was reputed for its news operation and popular entertainment programmes. In the late 1990s it ran prime-time news show Segodnya ("Today") with Mitkova and Osokin daily at 7 p.m and 10 p.m and weekly news commentary programme Itogi ("Summing up") with Kiselyov on Sundays at 9 p.m., both top-rated.[2]
NTV was heavy on criticism of the Russian government, especially with respect to the First and Second Chechen Wars (even going as far as conducting interviews with Chechen rebel leaders). However, it favourably commented on President Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996.
By 1999 NTV had achieved an audience of 102 million, covering about 70% of Russia's territory, and was available in other former Soviet republics.[3]
During parliamentary elections in 1999 and presidential elections in 2000 NTV was critical of the Second Chechen War, Vladimir Putin and the political party Unity backed by him. In the puppet show Kukly in the beginning of February 2000, the puppet of Putin acted as Little Zaches in a story based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Little Zaches called Cinnabar", in which blindness causes villagers mistake an evil gnome for a beautiful youth.[4]
This provoked a fierce reaction of Putin's supporters. On February 8 the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti published a letter signed by the Rector of St. Petersburg State University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the Dean of its Law Department Nikolay Kropachyov and some of Putin's other presidential campaign assistants that urged to prosecute the authors of the show for what they considered a criminal offence.
On March 24, 2000, two days before the presidential elections, NTV featured the Ryazan events of Fall 1999 in the talk show Independent Investigation. The talk with the residents of the Ryazan apartment building along with FSB public relations director Alexander Zdanovich and Ryazan branch head Alexander Sergeyev was filmed few days earlier. On March 26 Boris Nemtsov voiced his concern over the possible shut-down of NTV for airing the talk.[5]
Seven months later NTV general manager Igor Malashenko said at the JFK School of Government that Information Minister Mikhail Lesin warned him on several occasions. Mr. Malashenko's recollection of Mr. Lesin's warning was that by airing the talk show NTV "crossed the line" and that the NTV managers were "outlaws" in the eyes of the Kremlin.[6]
According to Alexander Goldfarb, Mr. Malashenko told him that Valentin Yumashev brought a warning from the Kremlin one day before airing the show promising in no uncertain terms that the NTV managers "should consider themselves finished" if they would go ahead with the broadcast.[7]
On May 11, 2000, tax police, backed by officers from the general prosecutor's office and the FSB, stormed the Moscow headquarters of NTV and Media-Most and searched the premises for 12 hours. Critics considered this move politically motivated, as NTV voiced opposition to Putin since his presidential electoral campaign. Putin denied any involvement.
Viktor Shenderovich claimed that an unnamed top government official requested NTV to exclude the puppet of Putin from Kukly.[8] Accordingly, in the following episode of the show, called "Ten Commandments", the puppet of Putin was replaced with a cloud covering the top of a mountain and a burning bush.
The program Itogi went on investigating corruption in Russian government and the autumn 1999 blasts in Russia.
On June 13, 2000, Gusinsky was detained as a suspect in the General Prosecutor Office's criminal investigation of fraud between his Media-Most holding, Russkoye Video - 11th Channel Ltd. and the federal enterprise Russkoye Video. At the time, Media-Most was involved in a dispute over the loan received from Gazprom. On the third day, however, he was released under the written undertaking not to leave the country.[9]
On July 15 the puppet of Putin acted in the Kukly show as Girolamo Savonarola.
On July 19 investigators of the office of Prosecutor General of Russia came to Gusinsky's home, distrained and arrested his property.
In a surprisingly informal deal, the charges against Gusinsky were lifted after he signed an agreement with Mikhail Lesin, Minister of Media, on July 20. Under the agreement, Gusinsky would discharge his debts by selling Media-Most to Gazprom, which had held a 30% share of NTV since 1996, for the price imposed by the latter, and was given a guarantee that he would not be prosecuted. After leaving the country, Gusinsky claimed he was pressured to sign the agreement by the prospect of the criminal investigation. Media-Most refused to comply with the agreement.
Tax authorities brought a suit against Media-Most aiming to wind it up.
On January 26, 2001, Gazprom announced that it had acquired a controlling stake of 46% in NTV. The voting rights of a 19% stake held by Media-Most was frozen by a court decision.[10]
Putin met with leading NTV journalists on January 29, but the meeting changed nothing. The parties reasserted their positions; Putin denied any involvement and said that he could not interfere with the prosecutors and courts.[11]
Around that time American media mogul Ted Turner appeared to be going to buy Gusinsky's share, but this has never happened.
On April 3 Gazprom Media headed by Alfred Kokh by violating the procedure conducted a shareholders' meeting which removed Kiselyov from the NTV Director General position.
On April 14, 2001 Gazprom took over NTV by force and brought in its own management team. Its director-general Yevgeniy Kiselyov was replaced by Boris Jordan. Many leading journalists, including Yevgeniy Kiselyov, Svetlana Sorokina, Viktor Shenderovich, Vladimir A. Kara-Murza, Dmitry Dibrov, left the company. Leonid Parfyonov and Tatyana Mitkova remained. Kiselyov's Itogi program was closed down, replaced by Parfyonov's Namedni.
Citizens concerned by the threat to the freedom of speech in Russia argued that the financial pressure was inspired by the Vladimir Putin's government, which was often subject to NTV's criticism. Some tens of thousands of Russians rallied to the call of dissident NTV journalists in order to support the old NTV staff in April 2001. Within the next couple of years, two independent TV channels which absorbed the former NTV journalists, TV-6 and TVS, were also shut down.[12]
In January 2003 Boris Jordan was ousted as director general and replaced by Nikolay Senkevich, son of TV-presenter Yuri Senkevich from Channel One.[13] A few days earlier he was also discharged from Media-Most director-general position, where he had replaced Alfred Kokh in October 2001. As insiders claimed, Jordan was sacked because NTV had carried a live translation of the culmination of the Moscow theater siege in October 2002 and had been too critical of the way authorities handled it.
Since then, entertaining talk-shows have become more prominent on NTV, rather than political programmes. However, unlike other leading TV channels in Russia, NTV went on reporting on-the-fly about some opposition activities and government failures, including the conflagrating fire of the Moscow Manege on the day of Russian presidential elections on March 14, 2004, and the assassination of the pro-Russian President of Chechnya Akhmad Kadyrov on Victory Day May 9, 2004.
On June 1, 2004, Leonid Parfyonov, one of the last leading journalists from the old NTV staff who remained, and who was still critical of the government, was ousted from the channel, and his weekly news commentary programme Namedni was taken off the air.[14][15] Its last announced episode never aired. Shortly before this, Parfyonov had been forbidden to present an interview with Malika Yandarbieva, widow of Chechen rebel leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiev. Zelimkhan Yandarbiev had been assassinated in exile in Qatar earlier that year. Parfyonov had shared this decision with the public on May 31.[16]
On July 5, 2004, Senkevich was replaced by Vladimir Kulistikov (b. 1952) as director general of NTV.[17] Tamara Gavrilova, formerly a fellow student with Vladimir Putin at Leningrad State University, was appointed deputy director general.[18]
Soon the political programmes Freedom Of Speech hosted by Savik Shuster (Shuster works in Ukraine since 2005[19][20]), Personal Contribution hosted by Alexander Gerasimov, and Red Arrow were closed down.
From 2006 to 2009, NTV ran weekly news commentary programme Sunday Night in a talk-show format and political talk-show On The Stand, both hosted by Vladimir Solovyov, as well as weekly news commentary programme Real Politics hosted on Saturdays from 2005 to 2008 by political analyst and key Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky.
The "NTV" logo as well as the iconic green sphere was designed by Simon Levin, the Russian designer, and became a symbol for the new graphic language of television design in Russia.
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