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If you would like to meet with your fiancée in Paris, but scared of the students’ riots showed daily on television, this article is just for you. Hopefully, after reading it, you won’t cancel the trip of your dream because of television stations’ concerns with ratings.
Boob Tube News
By Alexei Pankin
On Sunday, my wife and our 8-year-old daughter returned from a spring-break getaway to Paris. In the days before they left Moscow, the television news was filled with reports from France about the demonstrations against the "first job contract" law, which is intended to encourage firms to hire young people with little or no experience. I was immediately reminded of the riots last fall in the suburbs of Paris, when many Russian tourists decided to play it safe and canceled their trips to France. I tried to convince my wife to call off the trip, but she wasn't listening.
Once they had arrived in Paris, I began to receive text messages from my wife every morning asking for the latest news on the demonstrations. Because of their busy sightseeing schedule, my wife was unable to catch the French television news, so she had no idea what was happening. She wanted to see the protests in person, and even asked a local where the action was. She was told to head for the Place de la Republique -- just a 10-minute walk from where she was standing. My wife never made it to the demonstrations, however. For some reason, our daughter associated protesting university students with the older kids at her own school, who are always flying through the hallways and pushing on the stairs. She categorically refused to endure this sort of thing during her vacation. They went on another sightseeing tour instead.
By the time they returned to their hotel, the only thing on television was sitcoms and variety shows. No breaking news, no live reports from the scene every time the police fired a tear-gas round, as happens in Russia. My wife concluded that the people in charge of French television stations must not be terribly concerned with ratings.
She did catch the occasional report about the demonstrations on CNN, which by all accounts offered more complete, up-to-the-minute coverage of the events in Paris than French television did. After watching one particularly dramatic report, she rushed downstairs to the front desk and asked how far the unrest had spread. She was assured that the demonstrations were limited to a single square. So she and our daughter set off for a stroll around the city.
Back in Moscow, I was glued to the screen. Our news programs were filled with scenes of confrontations between students and police, water cannons trained on the demonstrators, railway stations seized and train tracks blocked. By the end, I was exhausted from my television news marathon, and met my wife and daughter as though they had just arrived from a war zone. They, by contrast, were happy and satisfied and full of stories about the splendors of France and the helpful, friendly Parisians they had met.
My wife also mentioned that they were not given the hotel room they had originally booked. The manager told her that her Moscow travel agent was to blame -- the "Russian mafia," he said. Apparently, he gets his news about Russia from French television.
When you read these lines, I will be in the United States delivering a series of lectures on the current situation in Russia. I was warned that I would have to answer questions about the rise of totalitarianism. The people who will be sitting in the audience at my lectures clearly get their news about Russia from American television.
Professor Preobrazhensky, a character in Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel "Heart of a Dog," entered Russian folklore with the line: "Never read Soviet newspapers, especially before dinner." Updated for the beginning of the 21st century, this line would read: Only watch the television news when you already know what really happened.
Alexei Pankin is a freelance journalist in Moscow.
www.themoscowtimes.com
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