The Russian TV producer who held up an anti-war sign during a live broadcast is an outlier in not just her homeland.
YOU’D NEED A heart made of granite not to be moved by Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian television producer who on Monday jumped onto the set of the state-run network Channel One during a live broadcast and shouted, “Stop the war, no to war!”
Perhaps the most touching aspect of Ovsyannikova’s action was the nature of the sign she held, which featured small Ukrainian and Russian flags and the words “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.”
It wasn’t a slickly designed placard, produced by graphic designers paid by an NGO funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Instead, it was hand-drawn, with some letters getting narrower near the right margin as she realized she was running out of space. Did she make this at home on her dining room table? Did she have an office at work with a door she could lock? At some point the paper had clearly been rolled up in a tube because as Ovsyannikova held it up, it was trying to curl back on itself.
So this was a single solitary person — maybe with a small support network — realizing that she had the means (an understanding of reality), the motive (telling the truth about matters of life and death), and the opportunity (access to a live TV broadcast) to take a stand, making international news. And while it’s impossible to know how many Russians know what Ovsyannikova did, given the severe clampdown currently taking place there, it seems implausible that the video has been completely prevented from filtering back from overseas.
But where are the other Marina Ovsyannikovas? There must be thousands of individuals across the world with the same means, motive, and opportunity. And while many countries have far less repressive media environments than Russia, the opportunities anywhere to challenge stultifying government and corporate propaganda on TV are still few and far between. For instance, there were exactly zero questions during the 2020 U.S. primary and general election debates about the U.S. drone program. In 2019, the main nightly and Sunday news programs spent a munificent 0.7 percent of their airtime on the climate crisis. Both subjects cry out for some Ovsyannikova-style treatment.
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