This morning I set aside an hour and a half and read everything written on social media about “Navalny vs. Vedomosti.” Well, everything I could find, at least. It was tremendously interesting and instructive.
Sasha Plyushchev called it “Navalny against the media again.” I categorically disagree. To me, this is really: “Navalny for the media, and against those who damage, break, and corrupt it.”
A brief summary for those who want to save themselves that hour and a half.
We published an investigation into the apartment owned by the 82-year-old mother of State Duma Speaker Volodin (the lower house of Russia’s parliament). The elderly woman owns apartments worth 230 million rubles (about $3.6 million at the time). We attached an extract from the state property register.
Any reasonable person understands that this fact is of major public significance; it tells us a great deal about the Duma, about Volodin, and about the authorities in general. Of course, the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) would like the media to cover this story and ask Volodin some questions.
As usual, only a fairly small number of outlets dared to write about it. Nothing new there, really. More than a day later, I noticed a protected tweet from one journalist saying that even the “business publications” — Vedomosti, Kommersant, and RBC — had ignored the story.
That surprised me, because Vedomosti had at least contacted us about our filings with the prosecutor’s office. So why didn’t they write about it? I wasn’t too lazy to go and check. While I was checking, I had to search for “Volodin” on Vedomosti’s site to answer another question: maybe they just considered our story too minor? Here’s what I found:
I got angry and wrote a post far less polite than that journalist’s:
That was my mistake. Of course, propagandist hacks should be called propagandist hacks, but hierarchy matters. I’m still a long way from having insulted and branded all the journalists who deserve it before moving straight on to Vedomosti.
In my defense, I can say that I see the long-running drama of crooks taking over Vedomosti as the theft of something personally very valuable to me. Vedomosti was my main newspaper for 18 years, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch its degradation calmly.
But one way or another, I myself raised the temperature of the discussion with all that talk about “prostituting propagandist hacks.” I regret that, and I will apologize to Vedomosti’s journalists for that language if they answer the question I’m about to ask below.
As for RBC and Kommersant, everything said about them was correct. They’re already beyond redemption.
Two and a half hours after I went after them, Vedomosti published a news item, saying they hadn’t done so earlier because they “needed to fact-check it.” (Interestingly, for The Times, the post and the registry extract were enough for a story.)
This lie is obvious and ridiculous — find the “fact-checking” in this piece. It’s the usual “as Navalny wrote.” A retelling of the post and our complaint to the prosecutor’s office. A standard news brief that makes up 95% of all journalism. On Navalny LIVE, it’s 98%. “One guy said this, and we’re retelling it to you.”
It’s no different from “The Justice Ministry will pay compensation to Navalny”, which was written based on my post. Without any fact-checking in the form of my bank statement or a payment order from the Justice Ministry.
And then off it went. Vedomosti journalists started running around Facebook shouting “fact-checking, we’re not obliged to take anyone at their word,” while ignoring the fact that there had been no fact-checking at all and that they only published the item after I called them out. Kommersant journalists crawled out from under the bed and started liking all of it, hoping to find some kind of moral allies. And so on.
The two most important and interesting pieces: Navalny vs. Vedomosti — Who’s Right? Let Me Explain in PlainEnglish**
This is, so to speak, “from the journalists’ side.” It’s a good article listing all the articles of faith of modern journalism, the kind taught in journalism school. Everyone recites them, no one ever follows them, but everyone is very proud that they exist.
And there’s a long Facebook post by Valery Adzhiev, written from the perspective of an ordinary person for whom the public interest matters more than lofty declarations.
The most spectacular moment in the discussion was a post by former Vedomosti editor-in-chief Tatyana Lysova, which, after an update, no longer looked nearly as impressive as it had before.
This post is not only highly entertaining, but also — and I’m not being ironic here — reveals the full drama of a certain segment of modern Russian journalism.
This is classic psychological compensation. Tatyana Lysova, once legendary (you can google what I wrote about her before — I never called her anything but “legendary”), has now gone to serve as chief editor of Interfax’s political news service.
That means she is responsible for creating a picture of the world in which not only is there no Volodin’s mother with her 400-square-meter apartment, there aren’t even the rallies against raising the pension age announced by our campaign headquarters. Try finding them on the Interfax website.
In the Russia described by Tatyana Lysova, neither I nor our 44 regional headquarters ever announced anything of the sort. (Perhaps the “fact-checking” still hasn’t been done.)
And that’s very hard for a person to live with. Her new profession is called “lying for money.” How do you live with that? The brain helps. It compensates and redirects aggression. Lysova does not want to denounce and condemn those who pushed her out of Vedomosti, those who are destroying the media, those who force her to lie at work. She will never write a post like that about Sechin, or Volodin, or Putin.
The classic mechanism works perfectly: yes, our country has many shortcomings, but these people are even worse. Scoundrels. They insulted me and are trying to teach me journalism. Me! The chief editor of Interfax’s political news service!
And so on. We’ve seen this a million times. It was precisely this kind of psychological compensation that brought Irina Yarovaya and Yelena Mizulina — once respectable members of the Yabloko party (a liberal political party) — to the front lines of the fight against the “fifth column.”
And Andrei Norkin was fiercely oppositional not so long ago, but he has a mortgage.
Even Dmitry Kiselyov was once decent. It’s an eternal story.
To our great regret, that is exactly how it works. Every time Lysova turns a story titled “Volodin cannot explain where he got the money” into one called “Muscovites have taken a liking to wide and convenient bike lanes,” she will lecture us about journalistic ethics and curse the vile oppositionists — marginal figures with no constructive agenda.
Every time a journalist is too cowardly to ask Putin a proper question at a press conference, he will обязательно write something on Facebook about how, looking at those who are against Putin, you start to become a little bit pro-Putin yourself.
C’est la vie.
So that was a long preface, and here is why I’m writing this.
The further fascinating discussion about “old and new media,” about ethics, about the “Vedomosti dogma”, and everything else will be much more interesting for me — and, I’m sure, for everyone — if every Vedomosti journalist answers one question for me.
It is a matter of principle for me, because I view everything happening at Vedomosti through this lens. If there were no reason for this question, I wouldn’t even have gone after them over Volodin.
I ask it constantly, but it’s as if people suddenly develop selective blindness or deafness whenever they hear it.
It’s as if I write this question in invisible ink in every post — it gets ignored.
And now it’s happening again. I wrote about it in my original complaint. I mentioned it in the comments. And I can see journalists bustling around, liking everything in sight, commenting, saying various things — and once again not seeing my question.
They keep their eyes down.
So I’m going to break my question into parts and ask it directly in this huge post. I ask all former and current readers of Vedomosti to support me and urge every participant in this heated discussion to answer it. And to make any future paid subscription to Vedomosti conditional on there being a sensible answer.
The questions:
There was a presidential election recently. And everyone with even the slightest connection to politics and journalism knows perfectly well that the head of one candidate’s campaign — Ksenia Sobchak’s — was Vedomosti owner Demyan Kudryavtsev, not Igor Malashenko, as was publicly claimed.
Kudryavtsev had an office at Sobchak’s campaign headquarters. He dealt with both the money and various kinds of political maneuvering. He worked there with a great many people, most of whom are terribly talkative.
So how did it happen that absolutely everyone knew about this, while Vedomosti journalists somehow came down with collective blindness?
Everyone knew, but they kept quiet.
The famous “Vedomosti newspaper dogma” — that code of strict journalistic rules and principles — what was it doing at that moment? Was it not burning like the burning bush? Was it not howling? Was it not shouting across the newsroom about conflict of interest, about a journalist’s duty?
When you were caught claiming that you had supposedly kept Sobchak’s announcement of her candidacy under embargo for a month and a half, why did you keep lying?
Here, Volkov formulates this part of the question perfectly:
When, before New Year’s, Vedomosti suddenly introduced a special category, “Mystery of the Year,” into its regular “People of the Year” poll, and Ksenia Sobchak won by editorial decision, shouldn’t there have been a veeeeery small note saying: we should disclose that the owner of our newspaper, who appoints the editorial leadership, is serving as the campaign manager for this “mystery of the year”?
In that same poll, I was named “Politician of the Year,” and I’m sure that if Volkov owned Vedomosti, I wouldn’t even have been allowed to participate in the poll because of the conflict of interest. And that would have been right.
I know for a fact that some Vedomosti journalists were furious about what was happening, but why were they not supported? And who in the newsroom took which side?
It seems to me that these are all very important questions, and without answers to them it is hard to go on discussing journalistic ethics with Vedomosti. Personally, for me, no “Dogma” exists anymore. Or rather, of course it exists, but it’s something like Article 31 of the Russian Constitution (guaranteeing freedom of assembly): something very proper is written there, but it has no relation to reality.
I don’t need an answer from Kudryavtsev. I don’t give a damn about him. He’s not a Vedomosti person; he came from Kommersant, and over there lying and political-media manipulation are simply the standard way of doing business.
I would like the Vedomosti journalists themselves to speak out about how this happened. Just write a few words on their Facebook pages. Ideally, they would gather in the newsroom, discuss it, and issue a statement. Tatyana Lysova, who still sits on Vedomosti’s board of directors, should also write about how exactly she “failed to notice” it. And the rest of the board as well — there are many respected people there.
I’m waiting for an answer, dear editors.
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