Valentina Totskaya. ORT

ORT - heads or tails
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Valentina Totskaya

Publication date: February 12, 2002

Since Russia has long been declared a part of the world community, let us follow this statement and take it for granted that the main event of the past week was the opening of the Olympics , which united all countries, perhaps with the exception of those where there is no television.

opened in Salt Lake City At the end of American Friday , the Winter Olympic Games . Due to the time difference, this ceremony was shown to us on Saturday evening on the ORT channel . For those who were interested in watching what was happening at the Olympic stadium in real time, NVT+sport “performed the ceremony” live and, moreover, for those who like to get up late, they repeated it on Saturday evening.

There was no competition even expected. The powerful ORT, which allocated an hour and a half for the opening of the Olympics, hardly considered the channel, which until recently was available only to owners of green plates and had a very limited audience, as a real competitor. However, the strongest clearly miscalculated.

NTV+sport won this involuntary competition. It was simply impossible to show the opening of a global event worse than ORT did.

ORT reduced the broadcast time of the Olympics by making larger cuts, for example, in showing the parade ceremony of the participating teams. As a result of this show, it could be concluded that not a single country whose name begins with the letter “A” was awarded the right to be represented on Russian air. Even Austria, whose athletes have a very high chance of winning prizes. We started with friendly Belarus, and ignored countries that somehow did not please the first channel, such as Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and many others. Even China was not worthy of showing their team's performance on ORT. About the following was said about the Russian team: here it comes, look. At the same time, we were touched for quite a long time by the Kenyan team, which consisted of one person, who took 92nd place in the cross-country skiing race at the last Winter Olympics.

ORT’s biggest mistake, in my opinion, was inviting Nikita Mikhalkov to play the role of second commentator . Viktor Gusev, an experienced sports commentator, would probably have carried out the broadcast of this ceremony much more successfully alone. Then, perhaps, we would learn about which athletes will represent Russia in Salt Lake City, what their chances of winning are, with whom they will compete, and other useful information when it comes to sports. Moreover, it was possible to communicate it not only during the passage of our team, but also at the moment when an ice show dedicated to American history was taking place at the stadium. And what was done (the complaint is not against ORT) is extremely inept.

Commentator Mikhalkov spent the entire hour and a half on air talking about only one thing - about the national spirit of the Americans, from whom we should take an example. All this was said without stopping and without any attempt to somehow develop banal and primitive thoughts. Nikita Sergeevich did not fail to praise the president’s initiative to physicalize the country. And at the same time, the thought never once occurred to the famous filmmaker that pride in one’s country could not be imposed.

Fortunately, Nikita Sergeevich was not the only one who represented the opening of the Olympics to us. Master of sports television journalism, NTV+sport commentator Anna Dmitrieva , without going into politics, spoke brilliantly about all the proposed circumstances of the Games that had begun - about the chances of our athletes, about our competitors, about winter sports.

To the general joy of television viewers, there was little “Mikhalkovism” on ORT air. We were pleased with the metamorphoses that occurred with Nikolai Nikolaev’s “Independent Investigation” program. Having parted ways with Kiselev's NTV, where the vast majority of its programs were devoted to settling scores with the opponents of the oligarch-owner, Nikolaev only benefited. His latest program, telling about the tragedy of the Leonov family, is worthy of high praise. The head of the family, Viktor Mikhailovich, was put in a pre-trial detention center only because his last name, first name and patronymic completely coincided with the full name of a person who was wanted. The police had no other motives, but Leonov spent three months in a cell. He was released only when the criminal with the same name confessed. The victim Leonov, a disabled person of the second group, had difficulty enduring the horrors of being kept in a Russian pre-trial detention center. After his release, he lived only a few days, dying from a massive heart attack. His widow demands moral and monetary compensation from the Bryansk Department of Internal Affairs, but law enforcement agencies have stood up like a wall to defend their pseudo-dignity.

Nikolai Nikolaev allowed all interested parties to speak on air. He did not occupy the position of a prosecutor, lawyer or arbitrator, but he managed to ask and pose the main questions. I don’t know whether this program will help Leonov’s widow, but the Ministry of Internal Affairs will have to clean up its shoulder straps for a long time.

Having started working for ORT , Nikolai Nikolaev freed himself from the shackles of an ideological order. Unlike his colleague on the channel, Alexey Pimanov, the host and producer of the “Man and the Law” program. In the next program, as if chasing the fame of Minkin or Khinshtein like a blue bird, Pimanov, reveling in his role as a “fighter for truth,” spoke about the “spy” activities of the journalist Pasko. So that it would be distasteful to others.

The host of the program about justice, Pimanov, forgot about one thing. These are the axioms of journalism, which say: in order to draw conclusions, you must, at a minimum, listen to the enemy’s side. By the way, a colleague and a person who has the right to present at least his version of what is happening.

The project "The Last Hero" ended last week, and today it can safely be considered a serious television event. At the same time, one cannot help but notice that the true scale of this act by Konstantin Ernst , Alexander Lyubimov and Sergei Kushnerev did not immediately become clear. At first, the intrigue developed, in my opinion, rather sluggishly, and the pathos of the program surprised me with its cynicism. Was it worth going to a desert island to play The Weakest Link in the jungle? The first of those who did not become the last heroes were not remembered for much.

The behind-the-scenes creators of the island world seemed confused at first; they clearly lacked a clear positioning of the final task of the project. This goal was formulated during the game, and in the last issue it was even named by one of the participants. Of course, the center and driving force that makes you watch this program with great interest are moral questions: what can you sacrifice to gain three million rubles and what is the price of preserving your own personality? Gambling with Robinson has turned from a spectacle with glossy pictures of tropical nature into a serious study of man as such. I don’t know what competitions, tasks and winnings appeared in the Western versions of this game, but it was obvious that our authors did not copy them. The psychology, biography and behavior of each individual participant were taken into account. In addition to “provocations” for the team as a whole, verification tests were invented for each individual. The more clearly the task of the game was formulated by its creators, the sharper and brighter the dramaturgy of the program became, the more not drawn, not decorated with tropics, but the real life of its participants became part of us, the audience. After all, despite the absence of any interactivity in “The Last Hero,” we also had to make a choice, decide on our sympathies and answer the questions: why do you like or dislike this or that person and what criteria in knowing the truth do you consider the most important? for myself?

Today it becomes clear that two types of television consciousness are fighting on the ORT channel: one works according to order, the other according to conscience; thanks to one thing, they are probably trying to maintain funding for the channel, thanks to another - to attract viewers and remain the first among the first in demand.

Ernst and the company of professionals working with him provide poor service. Remember Dorenko. The program of Vladimir Pozner, even if he sometimes speaks inappropriately and allows his guests to become bored, seems to every caring person to be truly interested in what we will be like tomorrow. It’s probably worth showing, for example, the film series about the women’s prison mental hospital “The Cage” (broadcast last week) not in prime time, but instead of Dibrov and his nightly hallucinations. And yet I would like to believe that the struggle between two elements, two types of consciousness on ORT will end in the victory of what is in demand by a person (read - by the viewer). By the way, this will be a direct victory of the market economy over the pseudo-capitalism in the media that we have observed in the last ten years.