Putin dominates television as Russia gets ready to vote

Featuring bizarre televised debates between candidate surrogates, government critics sounding off on state television and vicious propaganda battles fought over the internet, recent Russian political discourse has been anything but boring.
But as the world's biggest country counts down to a presidential election on March 4, Russia's problems and political conflicts and how they are depicted in the media have boiled down to a single man: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the overwhelming favourite.
There is no central theme to the presidential campaign, just vastly differing and even more unbalanced views of Russia's most powerful politician.
It is clear that someone or something is putting pressure on opposition media. In recent weeks Ekho Mosvky radio, NTV television and the prestigious magazine Kommersant-Vlast have all run into difficulties with courts or government inspectors, after making public materials critical of the former KGB spy.
Meanwhile, across the spectrum of state-controlled media, in television, newspapers and internet, Putin is omnipresent. A full two-thirds of all election coverage mentions Putin by name, political scientists say.
His visits to provincial cities, typically to praise factory workers or soldiers, or to promise better social support to lower-income groups, are catalogued step-by-step by the state media. Sometimes, the news reports are indistinguishable from his campaign ads.
Television debates between Putin and the four other registered candidates would have been a sensation of the political season but he "did not have time." So the national television channel aired debates between Putin subordinates and surrogates from his opponents, who said they were unwilling to debate their platforms on TV without Putin on the stage as well.
One of Putin's opponents, the often-lampooned ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, called the entire election campaign "a comedy." A newly formed League of Voters said most news reporting in the country amounted to "blatant propaganda" in Putin's favour.
Russia has been in some turmoil in recent months, with the largest anti-government protests in a generation taking place in Moscow and close to two dozen other Russian cities in December and January.
Putin has met the unrest head on and, fully in keeping with his tough-guy image. He has made avoiding a Russian relapse into the chaotic 1990s a top campaign theme.
State television aired detailed reports of the street protests, but with Putin's own spin. According to the official line, most of the tens of thousands of marchers are well-meaning patriots, but also people who are being targeted by Western spy agencies wanting to foment instability in Russia.
Only one independent television channel, Dodzhd, covered the demonstrations and gave full voice to demonstrator complaints about alleged vote fraud in favour of Putin's party in last year's parliamentary election. There has been a near-blackout about the matter in official media.
The station is now being investigated by a Moscow prosecutor on allegations it receives financing from illegal and possibly foreign sources.
Putin's campaign promises - from government programmes to convince his countrymen to have more children to turning Russia's remote Far Eastern provinces into a high-tech economic engine rivaling China and cracking down on illegal immigrants - have been front page news
The Komosomolskaya Pravda newspaper recently cited Putin's bland assertion that Russian army food was better than in the US armed forces. Reports that Russian recruits were being fed dog food, which became public when an inspecting officer posted his findings on the internet, were simply left out of the article.
The battle over Putin's internet image has been vicious, with one Youtube video showing the Prime Minister being indicted, held in a cage and facing long sentence in a Siberian jail for alleged "theft of government property in massive proportions."
The Prime Minister's supporters, meanwhile, have offered up the slickly produced VVP (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin), whose upbeat chorus runs "VVP, saved the country/VVP, defends us/VVP, he raised up Russia/VVP, and she develops more and more." The tune received more than a million hits in 10 days.