Russian media targets US over Moscow protests coverage

Russia's state-funded English-language broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) has targeted US broadcasters over mistakes in the coverage of protests in Russia.

It does not appear, though, to have reported on the much more significant omissions on the part of Russian broadcasters.

The 'fair elections' protest that took place in Moscow on 10 December was the largest seen in the capital in more than a decade. Police estimated that 25,000 attended. Other sources put the turnout at not less than 40,000.

The 10 December protest followed a rally five days earlier and another rather smaller one on 6 December. Both resulted in several hundred arrests.

The protesters were demonstrating against the results of the parliamentary election on 4 December, which they believe to have been rigged. The election resulted in a victory for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party United Russia, but with a much reduced majority.

After ignoring the protests earlier in the week, the main domestic channels in Russia covered the event that day in a more or less neutral or even positive way, stressing how peaceful it was. But RT's reporting was more negative.

RT aired a number of live reports on 10 December from correspondent Anissa Naouai, who was at Bolotnaya Square, the scene of the protests in Moscow. In a series of live dispatches, Naouai spoke at length about links between the protesters and the US. She also repeatedly criticised "misleading broadcasts" from Western news outlets about protests in Russia.

She said that Fox News had shown footage of disturbances in Greece to illustrate the recent protests in Moscow. She also said that CNN had used archive footage from a violent nationalist protest.

RT has posted a more detailed report on its website and YouTube channel advancing the view that Fox News' "misleading" reporting on the Russian protests was part of a US-government-inspired policy of "encouraging revolt elsewhere under the mantle of spreading democracy". This report also claimed that CNN had used footage from a violent nationalist protest in a report about a rally in Vladivostok. This happened back in December 2010, though, and was not related to the current wave of post-election protests, as Naouai had clearly implied. The report also featured a clip of an on-air apology that CNN had made to viewers at the time.

Criticism of Fox News appeared in another report, uploaded to RT's YouTube channel on 8 December, in which British journalist John Laughland defended the election in Russia against criticisms from the West.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, Fox News said that the use of the wrong footage in its reporting on the Russian protests was a simple error and that it has been removed from its site.

In one of her live dispatches on 10 December, Naouai said that, "if you watched any of the major Western media networks this week, you certainly didn't get a clear picture of what was happening on the streets of Moscow."

But if you had been watching the main national news bulletins on Russia's three main state-controlled TV stations earlier in the week, you would not have got any picture at all of what was happening on the streets of Moscow. None of them reported on the protests on 5 and 6 December.

TV critic Arina Borodina told Kommersant FM radio that she could not "remember a more total news blackout in recent times". As at 14 December, RT had 11 videos about the opposition's post-election protests on its YouTube channel. None of them referred to the Russian state TV 'blackout'.

RT has also appeared keener to criticise the police in the US rather than their counterparts in Russia. In evening bulletins on 7 December, RT reported on arrests at the protest in Moscow the evening before but did not mention accusations that police had assaulted a journalist and an MP. In the same bulletins, it showed lengthy reports detailing allegations that police had been using brutal methods to break up the long-running 'occupy' protests in the US. It also suggested that Washington was living in a "glasshouse of hypocrisy".

Stephen Ennis is Russian media analyst for BBC Monitoring.