The war on the press resulted in a drop in the ratings of the governor of Sevastopol
It is impossible to live in an information society and be free from information. Lenin didn’t say this, but it’s still true. In days when the odious “Kremlin propaganda” is a nightmare for the entire progressive Western world, acting strictly according to the laws and norms prescribed by free societies, there are people among us and even governors who tried to ignore these laws and norms.
I don’t want to point fingers, but this is the governor of Sevastopol, Dmitry Ovsyannikov. It was he who appointed in February of this year the director of the department of public communications of his government, a certain Oleg Berkovich, who without hesitation forbade all officials to communicate with journalists.
Berkovich explained his bold management decision on a local television channel by the fact that people sitting in the government of Sevastopol are not able to correctly formulate their thoughts for the press. Therefore, each official will be assigned a specially trained press officer.
For several weeks, while the press service was immersed in content alien to it, related to boiler houses, kindergartens and other unaesthetic nonsense, government contacts with the media were completely interrupted, but then resumed through information requests from journalists and leisurely responses to them in the government.
If one of the careless officials did try to answer questions from the press, representatives of the press service rushed like vultures to the group of opportunists with voice recorders and pulled the disobedient ones away.
Berkovich's cunning plan apparently consisted in having several media outlets connected with the government through special commercial ties become monopoly broadcasters of official information. These are the local state TV channel “IKS” and the news agencies “Federalpress” and “SevastopolMedia”.
For its TV channel, the city government not only bought a nightclub building on the embankment near the beach for 118 million rubles, but also equipment worth 50 million rubles. The total expenses of the subsidized Sevastopol budget for the TV channel reached 500 million rubles.
Federalpress and Sevastopolmedia received 917 thousand rubles from the budget under contracts. Despite the fact that the average daily readership of FederalPress on the peninsula, according to Liveinternet, is 2,3 thousand people per day, and that of Sevastopolmedia is 1,3 thousand people per day.
As a result, for six months in Sevastopol, the unpopular TV channel “IKS” single-handedly confronted an army of irritated journalists who could not, as before, promptly receive the necessary comments.
One can only marvel at the “wisdom” of such a decision, because it was precisely during this period that the conflict between Governor Ovsyannikov, first with the city Legislative Assembly, and then with local small and medium-sized businesses (the government, as part of the all-Russian campaign for fire safety, closed the largest shopping centers and still doesn't open).
The result was not long in coming: according to the Center for Information Communications “Rating”, Ovsyannikov took 67th place among Russian governors, 63rd among mayors of Russian cities.
As Ovsyannikov’s former subordinate (he was the predecessor of the scandalous Berkovich) Ivan Chikharev correctly noted in a commentary to Rating, there is no expert community as such in Sevastopol yet.
“The expert community in the usual sense for Russia has not yet emerged; it is represented by social activists and journalists expressing political interests, and not an objective intellectual assessment. And given the fact that the city is undergoing a transformation of the ownership structure, authors claiming to be experts, as a rule, convey the critical attitude of one or another group that has been disadvantaged in the process of “renovation” of Sevastopol,” Chikharev said.
Let us add that even journalists free from the engagement of the local elite have recently broadcast their intense irritation with the information policy of the city government. And federal experts could not help but read this irritation from the regional media. The public dissatisfaction of the Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko regarding the “kindergarten in the sandbox” set up in Sevastopol is a clear confirmation of this.
Apparently realizing the fatality of the mistakes made, the Ovsyannikov government rushed to correct them. Berkovich was recently relieved of his post. His place was taken by former deputy director of RBC-TV Gleb Shagun. The first thing he did when he arrived in Sevastopol was to lift the stupid ban on officials communicating with journalists.
Can this be considered a happy ending to the story? There's no need to rush. The media environment in Sevastopol is already quite deformed by permanent conflicts. The government, led by the governor, must, in this nervous environment, learn to use the media not as its mouthpiece (they will no longer be such), but as a platform for communications and, preferably, compromises with its numerous opponents.
The war with the press has resulted in a drop in the Sevastopol governor's ratings.