Is CNN Getting Kicked Out of Russia?

By Yasha Levine, eXiled Online. Posted September 12, 2008.

Putin may strip CNN of its Russian broadcasting rights after it
refused to air a 30 minute exclusive interview he gave the network.

You probably didn't know that CNN censored Putin for being just too
darn sensible. Yep, it's true. About two weeks ago, Putin gave the
network an exclusive 30-minute interview. And you know what happened?
Nothing. It was never allowed to air. CNN doesn't know it yet, but
that decision might have cost them their Russian broadcasting rights.

On August 29, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with senior political
correspondent Matthew Chance for a CNN exclusive interview. "This was
unprecedented access to Russia's powerful prime minister, the former
KGB spy now increasingly at odds with Washington," an overly dramatic
voice-over introduced the segment as Chance and Putin enjoyed pre-game
banter and a walk through the courtyard of Putin's palatial Sochi
residence. Once seated, Chance didn't waste any time with his
provocative questions:

Matthew Chance: But it's been no secret either that for years you've
been urging the West to take more seriously Russia's concerns about
international issues. For instance, about NATO's expansion, about
deployment of missile defense systems in eastern Europe. Wasn't this
conflict a way of demonstrating that in this region, it's Russia
that's the power, not NATO and certainly not the United States?

Vladimir Putin: Of course not. What is more, we did not seek such
conflicts and do not want them in the future.

That this conflict has taken place -- that it broke out nevertheless
-- is only due to the fact that no one had heeded our concerns.

I think both you and your -- our -- viewers today will be interested
to learn a little more about the history of relations between the
peoples and ethnic groups in this regions of the world. Because people
know little or nothing about it.

If you think that this is unimportant, you may cut it from the
program. Don't hesitate, I wouldn't mind.

It was a prescient comment. Not only did CNN delete Putin's historical
roundup of relations between Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia going
back to the 18th century that followed, the network cut out almost
everything else as well. Despite the "unprecedented access" hook, for
its U.S. feed, CNN reduced the 30-minute interview into a series of
sound bites that seized and ridiculed Putin's crackpot theory that the
Republican party started the war to boost McCain's ratings. CNN's
international audience, enjoying the news from hotel rooms all round
the world, got to see a little more of the the footage. But most of it
had to do with Russia's ridiculous "non political" decision to ban
some American poultry importers from doing business with Russia
because of their poor quality control standards. CNN's intentions were
clear: Putin must come off looking like a fool. And it seemed Putin
gave them the perfect material. Embargoes on dead chickens and global
neocon conspiracies? Gosh, what serious self-respecting world leader
would start talking this kind of gibberish? Even Ahmadinejad doesn't
sink that low. Well, the chicken meat embargo might have been a little
weak, but the neocon conspiracy I'm not so sure about. But more on
that later. (You can see the heavily edited interview clips on CNN
website, but the network never made the full version available. But
you can see it on Russian TV.)

Not surprisingly, this didn't go down none too good with the Prime
Minister. See, as it turns out, when Putin told CNN he wouldn't mind
if they cut some of his comments, he wasn't exactly being honest. Not
only did he mind, but he was sovereignly pissed off to find the entire
interview censored. After all, he is the one that usually does the
censoring. And it's not like he gives out TV interviews every month,
or even every year. If I'm not mistaken, the last interview Putin gave
to American TV was waaaay back in 2000, when he was on Larry King Live
making crude comments about the sinking of the Kursk submarine.

And then there's the issue of Saakashvili's CNN time. Just in the past
month, Saakashvili has appeared a dozen times on the network giving
interviews averaging 5 to 10 minutes each. As CNN correctly pointed
out, Putin is a former KGB spy, so he knows all the details, down to
the nearest second. And that's exactly why he's taken it as a personal
insult from CNN's headquarters (and probably more proof of an
international media/government conspiracy against him). But he just
might have the last word.

The word on the street here is Putin is out for blood. It's payback
time. According to a source with high-level government connections,
the Russians are planning punitive actions against CNN. At this point,
it is just a rumor, but they are preparing to kick out about half of
the half-dozen Western journalists working at CNN's Moscow bureau.
Sooner or later they're going to have to apply for a visa renewal and
that's when it's gonna go down. They'll be denied, clean and quiet
like. We can only pray that the tool Matthew Chance is up for a new
visa soon.

So why did CNN decide to cut the interview? The thing is, Putin came
off pretty darn well. Sure, the chicken embargo was embarrassing, but
the McCain/neocon conspiracy theory wasn't as crazy as some would want
you to believe. Gary Brecher has been saying all along that this
little war had the mark of a half-baked neocon plan for world
domination. As Gary says, Georgia's move makes no sense at all from a
Georgian perspective. Somebody must have told those idiots they'd be
safe to retake South Ossetia. And who better than Cheney?

In general, Putin was able to strike an unusually sympathetic chord
during the interview. It sure wasn't anything like the grotesque
interview he gave eight years ago, where he made that cruel "it sank"
Kursk joke. This time around, he was level headed, reasonable and,
most importantly, very convincing and believable -- not what you'd
expect from the evil Stalin/Hitler hybrid personality being pushed on
the American public. And that worried the hell out of CNN editorial
staff, enough to make them crudely censor the entire thing and hope no
one noticed.

So, what parts of Putin did CNN leave on the cutting room floor?

Putin the anti-Stalinist:

Therefore, those who insist that those territories must continue to
belong to Georgia are Stalinists: They defend the decision of Josef
Vissarionovich Stalin. [It was Stalin who first split up Ossetia and
gave the southern half to Georgia.]

Putin the caring:

For us, it is a special tragedy, because during the many years that we
were living together the Georgian culture -- the Georgian people being
a nation of ancient culture -- became, without a doubt, a part of the
multinational culture of Russia.[C]onsidering the fact that almost a
million, even more than a million Georgians have moved here, we have
special spiritual links with that country and its people. For us, this
is a special tragedy.

Putin the peaceful:

You and I are sitting here now, having a quiet conversation in the
city of Sochi. Within a few hundred kilometers from here, U.S. Navy
ships have approached, carrying missiles whose range is precisely
several hundred kilometers. It is not our ships that have approached
your shores; it's your ships that have approached ours. So what's our
choice?

We don't want any complications; we don't want to quarrel with anyone;
we don't want to fight anyone. We want normal cooperation and a
respectful attitude toward us and our interests. Is that too much?

Putin the conscientious business man:

Construction of the first gas pipeline system was started during the
1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and for all those years, from
the 1960s until this day, Russia has been fulfilling its contract
obligations in a very consistent and reliable way, regardless of the
political situation.

We never politicize economic relations, and we are quite astonished at
the position of some U.S. administration officials who travel to
European capitals trying to persuade the Europeans not to buy our
products, natural gas for example, in a truly amazing effort to
politicize the economic sphere. In fact, it's quite pernicious.

It's true that the Europeans depend on our supplies but we too depend
on whoever buys our gas. That's interdependence; that's precisely the
guarantee of stability.