Russian news says you loved this year’s Putin call-in show
On April 16, Vladimir Putin spent roughly four hours answering a handful of carefully selected questions from several prominent political figures, as well as a dozen or so random individuals. Putin’s so-called “Direct Line” with the Russian people was his 13th such event. Setting a new record, Putin received more than 3 million questions from people across the country. In Moscow alone, about 1.8 million people are thought to have tuned in on television.
A few hours after Putin’s call-in show ended, the government-controlled international news agency RIA Novosti published a roundup of reactions supposedly by readers of the Western media. The article, titled “Foreign Readers on Putin’s Direct Line: Open-Hearted and Sensible,” declares in its lede paragraph, “From their point of view, the dialogue between our leader [Putin] and the citizenry demonstrates that a democratic society has developed in Russia.”
The RIA Novosti story quotes online comments published at The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Huffington Post, CNBC, The Washington Times, and The Telegraph, as well as the Italian publications Il Fatto Quotidiano and Il Giornale, and the German newspapers Zeit and Die Welt. The story cites users with screen names like monteverdi1610, AmbassadorIII, hardeight, Italianfoodlover, and Joe Pope.
According to RIA Novosti, Western readers praised Putin’s “fearlessness” in answering so many questions on live television. An Internet user name “frombrussel” is quoted saying of Putin, “I’d like to see somebody like this as my leader.” Westerners also agreed, RIA Novosti reports, that Russia’s demands that France compensate it for the undelivered Mistral warships are entirely “sensible.” Readers in the West also agree, according to RIA Novosti’s analysis of these their online comments, that “Iran has the full right to buy weapons from Russia, and Russia has the full right to sell them [to Iran].”
24 paragraphs into the story, RIA Novosti first mentions that not everyone in the West welcomed Putin’s comments during the national call-in show, pointing out that some readers questioned his answers about Iraq, World War II, and the economy.
For more, see Meduza's special summary of Putin's televised Q&A.
A reader [of The Guardian] using the nickname Renfrow asked critics, “If the questions were all pre-selected according to a script, explain to me why they asked those obviously uncomfortable questions about Nemtsov’s murder?”