No live riots please on Russian TV

When violence flared up during the student protests in London on 9 December, Britain's news channels were on hand to provide virtually uninterrupted coverage well into the night. The disturbances also dominated the main news bulletins that evening.

Two days later, serious disorder erupted in central Moscow as thousands of football fans and ultra-nationalists vented their anger over the death of a Spartak Moskva supporter in a brawl with members of ethnic minorities from the North Caucasus.

It was the biggest outbreak of violence in the centre of the city since 1993, and included clashes between nationalist protesters and riot police, and attacks on people of non-Slavic appearance - both on Manezhnaya Square and at a nearby metro station.

Most of Russia's TV channels did not give the events the kind of treatment their UK counterparts had given the student protests.

State-owned news channel Rossiya 24 initially provided live continuous coverage of the riot on Manezhnaya Square, but broke away as the violence escalated to screen a historical documentary about the state bank.

The main state-controlled TV stations - Rossiya 1, Channel One and NTV - all led with the story on their main bulletins that evening, but it did not dominate the news agenda and reports omitted or glossed over some of the more controversial and disturbing things that had gone on.

The flagship weekly news reviews on these channels on Sunday night - the day after the violence - relegated the story to half-way down their running order - behind routine reports on the activities of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and, in the case of NTV's Itogovaya Programma (Round-up Programme), behind a report about shark attacks in the Red Sea.

Viewers looking for a more incisive treatment of what happened could have tuned in to REN TV's Saturday night news magazine Nedelya (Week) or NTV's offbeat current affairs programme Tsentralnoye Televideniye (Central TV), which went out on Sunday evening.

For those who wanted uninterrupted coverage of the dramatic events of 11 December, though, with rapid reaction from a range of eye-witnesses and experts, there was only one place to turn - Dozhd (Rain), a TV channel launched in the spring by Natalya Sindeyeva, owner of a commercial music radio station.

Dozhd was originally an internet-only channel but is now available on satellite, including on the NTV-Plus platform. It is an unashamedly niche project, with a mixture of news, politics and high-brow and left-field arts programming targeted at an upmarket audience. 

Dozhd's lead reporter, Ilya Vasyunin, was in the thick of the action on Manezhnaya Square and later followed protesters as they headed down to the nearby Okhotnyy Ryad metro station. The footage he and his crew filmed there - the station hall chock-full of chanting and saluting fans and ultranationalists, a mob attacking a metro train and one of its victims lying on the ground - was a scoop and, as Radio Liberty's TV critic Anna Kachkayeva observed, was used by a number of other TV companies and internet sites.

One of Dozhd's main selling points is that most of its programming is live. The channel says that only around 30% is pre-recorded. This sets it apart from nearly all other Russian TV channels, where live content - especially if it is in any way politically controversial - is very much the exception. As REN anchor Marianna Maksimovskaya told Radio Liberty: "People have lost the knack of working live. Everyone has lost this knack. There are no talk-shows that go out live."

The only real exception to this rule is Vladimir Putin's annual televised conversation with the nation. But, as is well known, the questions put to the prime minister on that show are carefully vetted and sometimes planted.

The virtual disappearance of live political content on Russian TV can be probably dated to the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. NTV's rolling coverage of that event, which included an interview with guerrilla leader Movsar Barayev, came in for savage criticism from Putin, then in the third year of his presidency. The criticism is widely believed to have led to the departure of the channel's director-general Boris Jordan and a further erosion of its editorial independence.

Subsequent terrorist incidents in Russia have not been covered live on Russia's main TV channels. For instance, none of them carried any special bulletins for several hours after this March's suicide bombings in the Moscow metro. In such circumstances, informing the public is clearly not their main priority.