“I have a mortgage to pay, get out of my studio!”
A commentator dissents with the hots of NTV’s talk show Mesto Vstrechi and is escorted out. The two-minute clip has been seen more than 1 million times on YouTube.
Last Wednesday a talk show was interrupted on the pro-Kremlin TV channel NTV when a physical confrontation broke out between the show’s host and a Ukrainian guest.
The incident occurred during a debate over the downing of MH17 in the show Mesto Vstrechi (“Meeting Place”).
Brutally escorted out under strong applause
A commentator with Ukrainian background who had been invited to participate in the show accused its host of lying when he said that Russian Ministry of Defence never claimed that Ukrainian fighter jets shot MH17 down (the Ministry had indeed claimed this). One needs no knowledge of Russian to appreciate not only how brutally the dissenter is escorted out of the TV studio, but also the audience’s excited applause.
The incident spurred strong reactions in Russian social media.
Opposition leader Alexey Navalny brought it up on his blog and quoted one of the host’s former colleagues, who said that talk show host Mr Norkin had struggled to reconstruct the mortgage for his apartment back in 2010, and suggested that his behaviour was the result of a need for a salary raise. This led Alexey Navalny to suggest that next time the host faced opposition on his show, he should rather shout: “I have a mortgage to pay, get out of my studio! I have three more years to pay plus my car loan! Get out!””
Well-paid pro-government journalists
These reactions reflect the well-known fact that national pro-government media in Russia pay considerably higher salaries than, for example, independent media or local outlets outside Moscow.
According to Kremlin-loyal Izvestiya, top journalists on pro-Kremlin networks make salaries that easily compete with those of their European colleagues, reporting salary levels of up to 40,000 USD (36,000 EUR) per month and people who, including side jobs, earn up to 200,000 USD (180,000 EUR) per month in total. For comparison, a search for journalist job openings in the St. Petersburg region shows salaries around 400-500 EUR (30,000-40,000 rubles) per month.
Interviewed after the incident, talk show host Andrei Norkin said he has no regrets – except that he didn’t actually beat up his Ukrainian guest.
The victim of the scandal, Moscow-based Ukrainian businessman and commentator Sergei Zaporozhsky, wrote on his blog that he does not exclude that he will accept future invitations from NTV, “either for another show, or for another host than Norkin”.