The Moscow Times, Dec. 5, 2002. Page 3
Media Heads Have a Law in the Making
By Andrei Zolotov Jr., Staff Writer
While the restrictive amendments to the law on mass media that President
Vladimir Putin vetoed last week may have dominated debates in media circles in
recent weeks, a bigger issue looming for the media is a completely new media law
that might drastically change the way the media industry functions.
A draft of the new legislation -- which was conceived by the Press Ministry and
frantically hashed out last month by the Media Industry Committee, a lobbying
group of top media managers -- was presented Friday by committee chairman and
Channel One television head Konstantin Ernst to the Federation Council's
information policy commission.
"The old law is not bad," Ernst was quoted by Izvestia as saying. "But the
economy and ideology of the media field has changed so much over the past 10
years that the law has to be changed. The current law does not regulate a vast
number of situations."
The Federation Council commission approved the draft. Its head, Dmitry Mezentsev,
said the proposal, although raw, could serve as a basis for the law.
In a boost to the draft's chances of being passed into law, Putin has
tentatively agreed to a request by top media executives to submit it to the
State Duma -- a move that would give the Media Industry Committee's version
preference over another draft media law sent to the Duma in June, a senior Press
Ministry official said. The media executives met with Putin last week.
Mikhail Fedotov, a lawyer and a secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists,
penned the June bill, which was submitted to the Duma by the liberal Union of
Right Forces party and backed by a multi-partisan group of deputies. Fedotov was
one of three authors of the first glasnost-era Soviet and then Russian law on
mass media, which was adopted in 1991 and remains in force to this day -- albeit
with numerous amendments.
The current media law freed media from government censorship and is
internationally accepted as one of the world's most liberal media laws. But it
does not include new realities such as private media ownership and the Internet
that did not exist in the early 1990s.
The path to the new draft was paved when the Media Industry Committee formed in
July after a vigorous lobbying effort by Press Minister Mikhail Lesin. Lesin
urged media managers to get together to protect their own interests, and he gave
them an early draft of the new media law with which to work.
It appears that Lesin wanted to involve the managers from the beginning in order
to gain Putin's support for the ministry's draft. The reason: A bill submitted
to parliament by the president on behalf of the media industry would bypass
government bureaucracy -- and many changes in the process -- while retaining the
semblance of a democratic approach, which is crucial in the politically
sensitive area of media rights.
But the Media Industry Committee is not playing straight from Lesin's score. The
Moscow Times obtained two versions of the draft: the Press Ministry's version,
which was sent to the committee in October, and the committee's revised version,
which is dated Nov. 28. The committee draft is markedly different from the Press
Ministry's version. The committee took out a provision that bans a single owner
from having more than three publications in the same region or having 60 percent
of a region's circulation for print media.
The committee also watered down the Press Ministry's right to issue mandatory
instructions and warnings to media organizations, saying a violation of the law
must not only be "found" but a group of industry peers must agree that there had
been a violation.
Removed from the latest version is a requirement for special permission from the
Press Ministry to distribute media that receives more than 50 percent of its
funding from abroad.
Both versions establish three major subjects of the media law: the owner; the
publisher or broadcaster, who is contracted by the owner to organize the media;
and the editor/editorial office, which produces the media. Unlike the current
law, the bill allows owners to sell shares in a mass media outlet, sell a logo
and transfer broadcast licenses. The bill also extends licenses for television
and radio stations to 10 years from the current five.
One subject that appears to be missing in the bill is the journalist.
"In the current media law the main subjects are the editorial office and
journalist, but the main subject in the bill is the owner," said Andrei Richter,
director of the Center for Law and News Media at Moscow State University. "All
the other figures are 100, 200 percent dependent on the will of the owner, and
the owner receives rights -- albeit together with a responsibility -- that he
did not have before.
"This bill is written in the interests of the owners and media managers who want
to become owners."
Fedotov criticized the committee's bill as "illiterate" and said that poor
juridical background of its authors would prevent even its good parts from
working for the media. He also said he doubted Putin would submit such a bill to
the Duma. "The president is a lawyer, after all," he said in a phone interview.
It is not clear when the bill will be ready for submission to the Duma. A senior
Press Ministry official said it should be rushed through the Duma before
parliamentary elections next fall, because otherwise it would become overly
politicized.
In an indication of how the drafters are scrambling to get the bill approved,
the Nov. 28 version states the law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2003.