Russian Television Executives Ready To Manage TV-6

Sources in the administration of the President say that nobody is in fact going to close the TV-6 channel: "Nobody will fire anybody," assured one of them. "First, TV-6 reporters have nowhere to go, and secondly, it is exclusively a matter of the political content of the news. And this problem is easy to resolve: the owner will be replaced, the executives will be replaced, and that's it. The problem, is therefore limited to three or four names, and nothing else." It is no longer a secret in the Kremlin that the 'financial' dispute between the TV-6 management and the non-governmental pension fund LUKoil-Garant, which holds 15% of the shares in the TV company, was initiated by the state. The presidential administration simply had no other way to influence the policies of the non-governmental information channel. The Kremlin's strategists reckon that the decision to revoke the license for broadcasting of the TV-6 can be made quite soon, and nobody will allow for events like the spring 'uprising at NTV:' all heads of the departments of the state TV of Russia have been banned from taking vacations until the end of December. The same decision was made in April of this year, when the chairman of the Russian State TV and Radio Company, Oleg Dobrodeyev, came to the TV center at night during the takeover of NTV. Not only a news team but also several groups of reporters appeared at the TV company at 4 a.m. They were ready to start broadcastings if the NTV staff would have refused to make news programs. That time this situation was avoided by means of dividing the company's personnel. Now the Kremlin prefers to prepare for the worst scenario: despite optimistic forecasts by the presidential staff, there may not be enough 'turncoats' in the current TV-6 team, the Noviye Izvestia newspaper wrote.