Our Leadership

Coffee Time News:

American Polls for Breakfast

By Diana Kulchitskaya

Russians received the U.S. election results news with their morning coffee. In the early hours of November 5th, people saw the American euphoria in the TV news programs. However, the election results coverage was not as intensive as expected. Most of the pieces devoted to the election outcome were mainly informative, giving not much analysis, but a broad view of the situation. The reason for that was probably President Medvedev’s address to the Federal Assembly which he delivered on that very day. His first official speech while in office received great publicity and outshone the news on the American election results on federal TV channels and some pro-government media.

The newspapers had already printed their issues by the time the election results were released, which is why there were no stories concerning Obama’s victory. Some papers were also slow to update their web-versions.

Some newspapers published analytic articles ahead of the polls, before knowing who would be America’s 44th president. The national daily Rossyiskaya gazeta ran two stories concerning the elections. The two pieces were focused mainly on how Obama’s policies would affect Russia-U.S. relations. The news item published in the national edition of the paper says that the outcome of America’s elections is of great importance for Russia.

The Russian news agency RIA novosty, on the contrary, was quick to react to the news. It announced the victory of Sen. Obama immediately and provided the people with different types of multimedia content. RIA novosty posted infographics material on its web-site and provided Internet-users with photo reports and video clips.

The daily newspaper Kommersant surprisingly did not prioritize the election results. There was only a single piece devoted to the U.S. elections, which was focused on Obama’s landslide victory. It explained the peculiarities of America’s political system and gave a general view of the voting process.

The media that had what was probably the best coverage of the Election Day was the Radio Echo of Moscow. Journalists stayed up all night to be able to give updates throughout the voting process. On November 5th one of the main news issues on the station’s web-site was the Election Day result. The station announced ‘the news of the day’: the Russian President Dmitryi Medvedev may have an official meeting with President-elect Obama on November 5th. There were a lot of banners on journalists’ blogs, devoted to the U.S. election campaign. The station also posted Obama’s victory speech and its translation in Russian on the site.

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