In 2000, NTV, a Russian television channel known for its independent, muckraking coverage, was among the country’s most watched stations.The evening news reported on atrocities committed by Russian forces in Chechnya and on corruption schemes that implicated top officials in the Kremlin. Its correspondents had looked into the possibility that the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., was behind a series of mysterious apartment bombings that had helped solidify Putin’s power. NTV’s owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, an oligarch who began his business career by founding one of the first for-profit worker coöperatives in the country, had faced all manner of governmental threats and attacks, most of which were thinly disguised as disputes over corporate debts.
That May, days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated to his first term as Russia’s President, a high-ranking Kremlin official conveyed a list of demands to NTV. If the channel hoped to survive, the official said, it must end its investigations into corruption in Putin’s entourage, abandon its unflinching coverage of the war in Chechnya, and more readily coördinate its editorial policy with the Kremlin.
A final demand pertained to one of the more popular shows on NTV: “Kukly,” or “Puppets,” which featured caricatured puppet versions of various members of the country’s political and business élite. In one episode, which had aired a few months earlier, Putin’s puppet appeared in the role of Little Zaches, a character from an E. T. A. Hoffmann fairy tale, an allegorical satire of how readily people can be fooled by superficial charmers. Putin was portrayed as an unsightly troll, who, by an act of magic—a spell cast by the puppet version of Boris Berezovsky, the magnate who helped engineer his rise to the Presidency—comes to appear beautiful and virtuous, the subject of great adulation and deference.
Putin, NTV journalists and editors learned, was incensed not just by the mocking tone and the implication that his popularity was based on P.R. hocus-pocus but also by the fact that his puppet was, like the character in the original Hoffmann story, short and rather ugly. “He took this as a personal attack, an anthropomorphic insult,” Viktor Shenderovich, one of “Kukly” ’s chief screenwriters, told me. The puppet’s short stature was a metaphor, Shenderovich said. “But where Putin got his education”—the late-Soviet-era K.G.B.—“they don’t believe in metaphors.” The official told the channel that the “first person,” meaning Putin, should disappear from “Kukly.”
Shenderovich nominally complied. The next episode of “Kukly” featured Putin as God—only not in puppet form but as a burning bush and a storm cloud. (An updated version of the Ten Commandments made an appearance: “Thou shalt not steal, unless He permits it.”) In any case, NTV’s fate was set. Before long, a media holding company of the Russian state energy giant Gazprom took a majority stake in the channel, ending its independence and giving the Kremlin decisive influence over its editorial policy.
Many at the channel, including Shenderovich, left; those who stayed quickly learned the new rules. “My greatest sorrow was that so many of my colleagues effectively helped Putin become who he did,” Shenderovich told me. “At first, Putin wasn’t strong enough to defeat everyone. He was far from omnipotent. But, by bending to him, they participated in creating what, over time, became his aura of unchecked power.” (Shenderovich left Russia in 2022, after a libel probe was opened against him at the request of a close Putin associate.)
The takeover of NTV also set an important precedent. Many more individuals and institutions would be suborned and co-opted. With one of the country’s most influential media outlets brought to heel, Shenderovich told me, “everything else became possible.”
I spent a decade living in Moscow, during which time independent journalists went from being intimidated and marginalized to being essentially outlawed. I wanted to ask the central players in the drama at NTV—who, at the time of their channel’s crisis, looked to the United States as a model of free expression and democratic values—what they made of the ongoing standoff between Donald Trump and the American media. Shenderovich noted that, for the health of a polity, its norms—what’s considered morally permissible—can often matter more than the laws that formally govern it. And those norms can change quickly, with much of society managing to adapt to a prolonged state of unfreedom. “People tend to accept new rules imposed from above quite readily,” Shenderovich said. “Unfortunately, it turns out the U.S. is no exception.”
In July, CBS announced that it was cancelling Stephen Colbert’s late-night program, which the network said was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” On September 17th, ABC suspended the late-night show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, because of comments Kimmel had made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Both Colbert and Kimmel have been frequent critics of Trump. And both of their networks had previously paid millions of dollars to settle lawsuits brought by the President. ABC paid fifteen million dollars to settle a Trump defamation suit stemming from comments made on air by George Stephanopoulos; Paramount Global, which owned CBS, paid sixteen million to settle a suit over a “60 Minutes” interview with then Vice-President Kamala Harris which Trump had claimed was unfair to him. In April, the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned, writing in a memo to staff that CBS’s corporate owners had undermined the program’s editorial independence: “It has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it.”
