Friday, May 25, 2007

Creation of russian ETV channel is postponed

The main news of today seems to be that the creation of the russian ETV channel is postponed. This decision was obvious for me, nevertheless the idea of such channel isn't bad itself. The question is that it should be done long time ago, now it would look quite artificial, moreover russian speaking people don't trust to information is provided by the state. Main problems is that this community is too deep in the media-space of Russia mostly because the Estonian media in russian language is very, very bad (IMHO).

One time i was working with Swets Blackwell sending different printed media from Estonia to Russia, this time i could observe the degradation of newspapers in russian. All of them got really yellow sooner or later, there's no good authors. May be i just can't stand the way the information is presented. Here it should be noted, that the deviation of information was slightly changing, when the newspaper changed its owner, but general trends were still the same. At the same time Russian TV has been evolved rapidly and got its important place in life of most of russian speaking inhabitants of Estonia. That's why such channel would be necessary 15 years ago, but I'm not sure someone except Veidemann and few more was thinking on this issue, it was Jelzyn's era and no hostile propaganda came from foreign ether.

I'm not sure the expenses of creation of russian TV channel would ray off, anyway the coverage of such channel would be minimal. Moreover ETV in estonian is good as an infochannel, and not that much suitable for masses as a source of entertainment, as private ones.

In my opinion the best possible solution would be to subtitle the estonian programs, it's also helpful for learning the language, and at the same time it would be the same information as is provided for estonian speakers, it would be much more effective tool of integration. Digital TV would also allow to broadcast the additional voice channel, it would be also an option for those who don't like the subtitles. Let's see what will be next steps of National Broadcasting Company.