You can’t pardon wet

On Sunday, March 26, when, according to the most modest calculations, more than 60 thousand people came to the streets of Russian cities - from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, state media did not notice them. The rally in Moscow live only one state edition - not intended for the Russian -speaking audience, the English -language website of the Russia Today channel.

One pattern

This first full -fledged report in the state media, although it came out in English, but set the tone for all the subsequent ones. The installation was already set by the heading: "Hundreds of people were detained at an unauthorized opposition rally in Moscow."

The same thesis will then be repeated repeatedly, the whole essence and reports, and discussions on the air of federal television channels will be reduced to it: the rally is illegal, unauthorized, prohibited and so on. It is noteworthy that neither RT nor all subsequent news notes on the sites of news agencies, repeating literally in every paragraph about the “unauthorized” of the rally, did not say a word about its actual essence.

The news agencies (except for Interfax) at least released short notes away from the first page about "detained at an unauthorized action of the opposition." It seemed much more relevant, for example, the news “Russia Today”, the news with the heading “in the United States, the freedom -loving cow left the police pursuit.” This news, as well as a message about two Russian fans beaten in Belgrade, hung all on the top of the main page of the site Ria.ru on March 26. When “Russia today” nevertheless decided to give news about rallies, there was already a deep evening, and the news of the rallies, but their “unauthorized” was also a news occasion.

It seemed much more relevant, for example, the news “Russia Today” with the heading “in the United States, the freedom -loving cow left the police pursuit”

But federal television channels - at least news releases - continued to keep deep silence: only the host of the Late Sunday evening on the Russia 1 channel Vladimir Solovyov thoughtfully said that "the topic must be settled." The presenters talked about anything: about the next reports from the fields of Donbass, the situation in Mosul, the deadly avalanche in Japan, mass protests - but in France, corruption - but in South Korea. The final farce, even by the low rhetorical standards of Russian television, ended the timid attempt by a member of the “democratic choice” by Igor Drandin to raise the question-maybe on Russian television it is still worth discussing Russian events?

In response to Drandin, the senator from Crimea Olga Kovitidi, who called him a “goat” and a “traitor” who wanted to arrange a “second Ukraine”, fell on Drandin. And the leading talk show “First Studio” Artem Sheinin, who became famous for his brutal manner of entertainer, clearly explained why, in the prime time, the Russian federal television channel stubbornly refuses to devote at least a slightly airtime by the event of Russia itself (this time, as always, they discussed the next Ukrainian troubles). “We are Ukraine,” Sheinin said, “we will discuss until such screamers as you (turning a wide gesture to the imaginary viewer) will not understand what you want to bring the country with your conversations about corruption.”

Protect corruption!

Now about corruption, which rallies were formally devoted, although in each region, of course, there was its own specificity: the agenda intercepted in time was very useful. As one of the guests in the studio of the show of the same Vladimir Solovyov said: “And what they don’t like, the state is fighting corruption - here is Ulyukaev (Alexei Ulyukaev, the former Minister of Economic Development, arrested in the office of the state company Rosneft. - NT) they put them, which they were unhappy.” However, the dean of the faculty of the state administration of Moscow State University and the State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov in the issue of the program “Evenings with Vladimir Solovyov” on Tuesday, on March 28, chopped off his shoulder: corruption is all a pretext invented by the West to apply his technologies of color revolutions. The only country that is not susceptible to these technologies is Turkmenistan.

But what kind of corruption or, God forbid, whose corruption is (the surname Medvedev-no-no, is not pronounced in this context)-here Russian television still holds a blank defense. If you can talk about it, then in the most vague terms, ritually saying that corruption exists everywhere. (“And in Italy, or something, there is no corruption?”) But there are funny punctures associated with the too annoying use of technologies.

One of these was the incident with the Russian search engine “Yandex”, whose employees heard many extremely offensive words addressed to them. The headlines about rallies indeed at the key hours appeared at Yandex.NOVOS in a shimmering mode that representatives of the search engine explained the specifics of the work of algorithms that form individual news from different publications on a common theme to a single plot. Like, this is not censorship, we have nothing to do with it, it just happened that about the festival “Versi in the spring”, which opened in the capital's parks, writes significantly more publications than about the mass rally not far from the same parks. In the Yandex defensive press release, however, he hinted vaguely at the possibility of manipulating them by a robot from the authorities-that really took place and not today a trick: the Moscow City Hall was a pioneer. Dozens of completely identical and generally rather meaningless newspapers published by the administrations of different Moscow regions, on command, give news such as “Sergey Semenovich Sobyanin opened a kindergarten in Bibirevo”-and an impartial robot thinks that something really important happened.

According to the new rules on Yandex, state ministries and departments can now be registered as the media - and these rules have shown themselves in all its glory on Sunday during rallies, when about fifty of the “editorial staff” with names such as “Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Republic of Dagestan” and “Dagomrelia” issued the news written under the carbon carrier: “residents of Makhachkala did not support the anti -corruption rally ". It was the “journalists” of these brave “publications” that helped the Yandex algorithm to form a full-fledged plot-after that the reader had no doubt that the rally in Makhachkala still occurred, he was dedicated to corruption, and not something else and that the detentions on it still took place. And about the effectiveness of manipulations of the Yandex algorithms, for example, the fact that at the time of writing this text was the main Russian news: “Double embarrassment: Saakashvili twice disgraced in the congress in Malta.”

YouTube vs TV

By the middle of the week, when all the world media outlets came out with pictures of Russian protests, and the Internet was clogged with a video that filmed tens of thousands of smartphones across the country, Gossmi's murmurs began to look complete absurd. Then, on the federal air, they finally decided not only to pronounce the sized surname “Navalny”, but even to show a screenshot from the site of the Medusa publication, which showed the results of the calculation of the number of rallies throughout the country. On the air of the current show of Evgeny Popov and Olga Skabeeva (“60 minutes”, the channel “Russia 1”) was the speaker of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, who voiced the next line of information defense: yes, rallies, yes, detention, yes, the State Department and the European Union were condemned-but who is without sin? In Paris, for example, there are mass clashes of demonstrators with the police, and the European Union is silent about them.

By the way, about Medusa. The site with the editors in Riga, which on the average day collects approximately 400-500 thousand unique users, attracted almost 1 million people a day in the first days after protests. For comparison: the website of the Federal Agency "Russia Today" with a state of more than two thousand people and a budget of 7 billion rubles. collects 2 million unique users per day.

This example shows: you can, by a call from the presidential administration, drown out the lighting of any topic on television. But you cannot make people stop being interested in the current topic. The vacuum will find a way to fill himself. Such a channel was video bloggers working with an extremely young audience - the same, thanks to which these rallies began to be unnecessarily called the "crusad of children." The fatal mistake was made by one of the radio-cabinets for Vesti FM, who said that children have nothing to do in politics, they do not understand anything in it that the electoral qualification exists is not in vain, so that-let them discuss their Diana Shurygin (the victim of the rape, which has become a heroine of social networks and several talk-houses on federal channels.-NT).

Когда у крупнейших федеральных телеканалов в интернете меньше зрителей, чем у подростка с видеокамерой, старые приемы создания искусственного информационного дефицита больше не работают

And then one of the very "children who discuss their Shurygin" answers him. The video blogger Sobolev, no more than 20 years old, records a 12-minute video, the description of which says the following: “Rallies pass throughout the country ... The authorities are silent! When will there be a reaction to a resonant investigation of Navalny's corruption schemes? Why are we ignored? The most important topic of the month! "

The SOBOLEV video blogger has 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube. The Russia-24 television channel is not gaining 700 thousand. The average release of Vesti of the Week with Dmitry Kiselev (which this Sunday did not remember the rallies with a single word) collects approximately 300 thousand views. The Sobolev video scored 1.5 million per day (more details on page 38).

Attack of robots

Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but on Thursday the news was released in the Prochrevskaya newspaper Izvestia: the Ministry of Education and Science "will launch a program of patriotic education of youth on social networks." 8 million rubles were allocated for the program, and, according to the description of the tender on the website of the State Pruis, in 2017, the Ministry of Education still considers the Livejournal to the Youth Social Network.

Well, on the fields: on the broadcast of “Vesti FM”, a particularly zealous guest in the studio demanded from protesting gratitude for the fact that they did not release “Cossacks and“ Antimaydan ”, although they really wanted to. And “Komsomolskaya Pravda” (which covered protests-for example, evaluated the cost of Alexei Navalny’s sneakers, in which he was traditionally detained at the Moscow rally and put for 15 days) issued a completely scientific and fantastic threat, creatively supplementing the statement of the Deputy Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that the provocateurs can be applied to the most progressive technical means. Moreover, even police officers are not needed, Komsomolskaya Pravda said: “robotic complexes” can release “robotic complexes”, which - a quote - beat not only pain, but also useless.

By the end of the week, it became clear that neither silencing, nor hypocritical sighs about the double standards of the West, nor the threat of action had had an idea, and conciliatory rhetoric sounded: they say, the requirements of the protesters should be listened, both in the Federation Council and the State Duma. On Thursday, President Putin finally spoke out, who reminded the townsfolves of the horror stories - the Ukrainian Maidan and the Arab Spring and, as Soviet leaders liked to do it, threatened the West with a finger: in Soviet times it was customary to remind that “you were linked”, Putin told about the dispersal of demonstration in Paris. But the information moment was obviously and fatally missed. In a situation where the largest federal television channels on the Internet - that is, in a space in which millions of young Russians have almost from birth, there are fewer spectators than a teenager with a video camera, the old techniques for creating an artificial information deficit clearly no longer work.

Photo: Alexander Zemlyanichenko/AP/TASS, screenshot of the television program "60 minutes"/"Russia 1"