Maria Yulikova�s daily news diet
Every morning, before leaving for work, I turn on Ekho Moskvy radio station to entertain myself during breakfast. Ekho Moskvy is a good radio station, if not exactly entertaining: the journalists are critical and they tend to discuss serious issues in Russian life. After this morning shower, I go to work where I constantly use the Internet, sporadically catching up with the most intriguing news from various sources (these are mostly rbc.ru and newsru.com). Rbc.ru�s headlines (the major Russian business consulting company) are often posted on the email port� I use. Their stories seem to be quite independent. The website newsru.com is one of the leading independent news sources in Russia. It provides hot news in politics, economics, sport, culture, religion, technology, travel and entertainment. Besides this, Newsru.com�s sub-sites, InoPressa.ru and Zagolovki.ru contain a round-up of the best news stories � Russian on Zagolovki.ru and foreign (translated into Russian) on InoPressa.ru. If I am not very busy, I try to find 10-15 minutes to read the most appealing stories from the New York Times which comes to my email box daily. Most often, this is my main source of news on US foreign and domestic policy.
�Coming home after a full working day, I try to relax, and don�t want to hear about problems. Nevertheless, trying to keep up with current affairs I watch Euronews, then either CNN International or BBC World. Their views on Russian politics are particularly interesting for me: they give a sense of how my country looks to the outside world.�
�After that, when I feel exhausted and sleepy, I switch to a Russian federal TV channel, most often RTR. Their news programme Vesti is a bit less formal than Channel One, and more professional than TV-Centre. Vesti presents Russian state news i.e. the information allowed by the government.�
�Watching news on major Russian TV channels nowadays may be quite healthy: at least it makes you feel calm and satisfied. These programmes are usually about the Russian government�s success in implementating so-called �national projects� (federal reform in health, education, housing and industry), fighting corruption, and presenting Russia as one of the world leaders in international politics and economy. Local TV news constantly generates the image of Russia as a rapidly developing, optimistic society and politically stable country. This type of TV programming can serve as a good soporific.
�These programmes also remind me of my childhood, when the news on TV was nothing but boring, old, barely talking Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders supporting each other. I remember how weird I felt living in one world at school, and in a totally different world at home. There was no connection between these two planets. One of them was populated by people praising the �fast developing socialist society�, future communism and victory over the hostile imperialistic West. While everyone at home felt that they lived on a separate island, closed to other cultures, peoples and trends - apart from �socialist countries� that were quite similar. We extraterrestrials didn�t pay much attention to the Soviet media, but tried to catch the jammed Voice of America and Radio Liberty, whose theme tunes I think I will never forget. These melodies meant something very intriguing for me, I knew that they were coming from the US, and that journalists there were telling the truth about both the Soviet Union and other countries. This was real information, real news, stories about real life, not artificial and full of communist ideology.
�Meanwhile, life started changing: the period of �glastnost� came. A free press emerged, and the radio stations were not jammed any more. We were flooded with new information that had been previously banned. At that time, during the� 1990s, we felt open to all the winds of information, both true and false. This was a lot of� fun, because apart from the yellow press, a lot of talented journalists got access to the mass media. The major newspapers and popular TV channels became very interesting, and I was surprised to find myself reading Argumenti i Facti and other newspapers, being not particularly interested in politics at the time.
�The TV news was even more interesting. The news programmes of NTV in particular and the analyses presented by Evgeny Kiselev were so good, that it was not easy to switch off the TV and do other things, especially when everyone around discussed Kiselev�s or Leonid Parfenov�s latest programmes.
�Nevertheless, Russia is never the same for long. Along with its leaders, the media changes too. The current Russian media once again is giving us a chance to choose between two planets within the same country. And it�s not necessary to move anywhere to switch planets now - we just need to switch programmes.
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