Television during the “special operation”: how Russian TV channels changed the broadcasting grid
- BBC Monitoring Service
- for bbcrussian.com
While hostilities continue on the territory of Ukraine, which the Russian authorities call a “special professional operation,” the main government television channels are increasing their information impact on their audience, depriving them of entertainment programs during their usual hours.
In the last weeks of information and political broadcasting, entertainment programs from the air of Channel One and Rossiya 1 are actually allocated, on the placement of only serials for night owls.
If, before the start of the war, viewers of Channel One could watch Fashion Sentence, Let’s Get Married, Male / Female and Let They Talk during the day, and viewers of Russia 1 could watch Malakhov and The Fate of a Man, then now the daytime airwaves are heavily occupied with talk shows and broadcasts about Ukraine, which, as they say, urgently needed to be denazified, and about the insidious NATO.
The paramount importance of the above programs was revealed, judging by the Yandex TV program, their fans consume emissions only at night on weekends, when “Fashionable sentence”, “Let’s get married” and “Male / Female” emissions, emissions from two hours Moscow time.
Weekend programming looks more relaxed overall, even making room for the popular Hollywood movie Pretty Woman, as it did on the big land, for example.
Most of the weekdays on Channel One are now tagged in the Information Channel matching program, which requires attention to the assumption: “In the center is a mandatory military operation required by the Russian armed forces conducted in Ukraine. Official data on the norms in Ukraine” (quote by “Yandex.TV program”).
By all this we mean such shows as “The Time is Showing”, which run from 10 am to 1 pm, from 2 to 5 pm and another hour and a half after the news release at 6 pm with rotating observers – Ruslan Ostashko, Anatoly Kuzichev, Olesya Loseva and Artem Sheinin.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, at five, eight and 11 o’clock in the evening (the last slot is already out of the broadcast of the “information channel”) in recent days, the information defense (or information attack) is being conducted by the program “The Great Game”, which was named by deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov. All this is interspersed with regular news releases with similar rhetoric.
In addition, Channel One launched on the morning air, from 9 am, the program “Antifake” with host Alexander Smol, who in the world time hosted a program about entertaining videos about children and animals (it continues to be shown on weekends). Small became famous in 2017, when on the air of Krasnoyarsk TV, where he then worked, applauded the American deputiesdecided to double their salary.
According to Small himself, in his new program, he “leads his fight against fakes and disinformation.”
TV channel “Russia 1” has expanded the two releases of the program “60 minutes” with Olga Skabeeva from almost one and a half hours to two and a half each.
Between the two episodes, Russia 1 returned to its arsenal the program of pro-Kremlin political scientist Dmitry Kulikov “Who is against?”, which did not last long on the air in 2019. Now she is serving a good two hours – until about 17:00 Moscow time. Kulikov himself of Ukraine is from the Donetsk region.
They moved it to an earlier time, after the evening issue of “Vesti”, and “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, which the reader almost fully completed earlier. Only after Solovyov did observation have the opportunity to watch several series in a row at once, including the historical series Godunov.
Of the rare or less entertaining programs that can be seen in the morning on Rossiya 1, perhaps the health program “On the most important thing”, but immediately after it, at 11 am, an active information offensive begins.
Even in the evening hours this week, Channel One literally overwhelmed the coverage with mass and near-political content, which saw, if a rare entertainment series broke through (at 10 pm Moscow time), then the one about the “free Cossack” who was observed in captivity by the Turks and becomes a Janissary. Almost fully watched the documentary “Russophobia”.
On Friday, the late evening information and political stream will be diluted with the show “Voice. Children” and a film with Tom Cruise from the 80s. In the afternoon, the First, “Russia 1” and more than a dozen different ones broadcast a rally-concert in Luzhniki in honor of the anniversary of the “annexation” of Crimea.
At the same time, judging according to research company Mediascope, for the week from March 7 to March 13, the highest frequency of observations among observations from 18 to 54 years old is associated with various news releases on Channel One, the films “Love and Pigeons”, “Girls”, “Pretty Woman” and the show “Voice. Children “.
And on “Russia 1” for the same period in the top – news, the films “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” and “Office Romance”, as well as the Sunday program “Moscow. The Kremlin. Putin” and the release of “60 Minutes” dated March 7, which walked at the time that is now occupied by “Who is against?”
What will happen to TV advertising?
The Bell Edition analyzed the consequences of the withdrawal of foreign companies from the advertising market. The publication designates 2021 as a “super successful” year for the advertising market: in months it grew by 25% after the covid 2020 to 395 billion rubles – and these figures do not take into account the fourth quarter, which often sees a peak in spending by companies and government agencies.
Since the end of February, marketing activity in Russia has been curtailed by eastern foreign companies entering the top 30 advertisers, writes The Bell. For example, the publications of Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and others. The total advertising spending of the departed companies in 2020 is estimated at 39.4 billion rubles.
Particularly painful is the departure of advertisers for television. Four companies, Nestlé, Reckitt Benckiser, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, were among the top five advertisers and in 2020 followed, according to the publication, 15.8 billion rubles – this is almost half of the revenue of the National Media Group (NMG) media holding.
Experts are not yet talking about a market collapse and hope that some companies have only suspended their activities and are considering “transferring budgets” to the second half of the year.
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