KAZAKHSTAN: THE STATE OF THE MEDIA - STILL A LONG WAY TO

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 ASTANA 002469

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TAGS: PGOV PHUM SOCI KDEM KPAO OSCE KZ
SUBJECT: KAZAKHSTAN: THE STATE OF THE MEDIA - STILL A LONG WAY TO
GO


1. (U) Sensitive but unclassified. Not for public Internet.


2. (SBU) SUMMARY: On November 26, the Kazakhstani Press Club hosted
a conference on the state of the media in Kazakhstan. Some 200
people -- including media experts, representatives of international
and nongovernmental organizations, editors, and journalists --
participated in the conference. (NOTE: The Ministry of Information
and Culture did not send a representative to the event, citing "lack
of available time." END NOTE.) Conference panelists concluded that
faulty media legislation, lack of competition among media outlets,
large numbers of paid articles, poor management and strategic
planning, and the poor quality of journalism training have hampered
the development of a professional media market in Kazakhstan. END
SUMMARY.

SURVEY REVEALS WEAK MASS MEDIA


3. (SBU) In preparation for the conference, the Kazakhstani Press
Club worked with Kazakhstani-Russian market research company BRiF to
conduct a survey on the media environment. Thirty-six media experts
between the ages of 40 and 50 participated in the survey.
Eighty-one percent of respondents said the current state of media in
Kazakhstan was "fair," and 13 percent said it was "poor." Only six
percent of respondents said the state of the Kazakhstani mass media
was "good." When asked what needed to be done to improve the mass
media in Kazakhstan, 50 percent of respondents said it was necessary
to change legislation to eliminate state control and censorship, 19
percent said it was necessary to create a fair and open media
market, and 17 percent said the system of education and training for
journalists needed to be improved. As for objective reporting, 94
percent of the media experts said the mass media served the
political interests of particular groups, whether it was the
government, opposition, or oligarchs. When asked if they thought
stated circulation numbers were accurate, 58 percent of respondents
said "no." Last, most respondents stated that the Kazakhstani mass
media offered little or no competition with Russian and Western
media outlets, but at the same time they considered Kazakhstan's
media to be much stronger than the media in other Central Asian
countries.

GOSZAKAZ AND LACK OF COMPETITION


4. (SBU) Many conference panelists said that the Kazakhstani media
were totally dependent on their owners and that, consequently, media
content did not meet readers' needs. Experts spoke at length about
the increasing dependence of many Kazakhstani newspapers on
"goszakaz," which literally means "orders placed by government" and
refers to government subsidies for media that have operated since
the Soviet period. After Kazakhstan became independent, only the TV
and radio station Khabar, owned 51 percent by the government,
received goszakaz. By 2004, however, the Ministry of Information
and Culture decided to make this largesse widely available, posting
story ideas eligible for funding on its website. Initially,
goszakaz was meant to support coverage of certain social issues,
Kazakh language media, and the development of regional media. But
over time, panelists said, goszakaz has had a negative impact on the
media market by making many media outlets heavily dependent on
government funding and producing the predictable result: a media
environment in which government subsidies equal government power to
control content and interfere with editorial decisions.


5. (SBU) Dosym Satpayev, a leading Kazakhstani political scientist
and director of the Risks Assessment Group, his one-man Almaty-based
think tank, spoke about the lack of competition as a threat to
national security. Satpayev argued that the elimination of
alternative information sources created an "information blockade"
around the country's key decision-making centers. As a result, he
said, the very people who were charged with making well-informed
decisions on behalf of the country were actually not informed.
Satpayev stated that the lack of competitive media "dooms Kazakhstan
to the information periphery" and forces Kazakhstanis to consume
"alien information and ideology." He used the recent conflict

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between Georgia and Russia as an example. He said that Kazakhstanis
who watched Russian media reports on the situation took Russia and
South Ossetia's side, and those who watched BBC and CNN coverage
were supportive of Georgia. As he put it, "if a state cannot
integrate into the world information-telecommunications system as an
independent player, then the independence and sovereignty of such a
state might become questionable."

MASS MEDIA AND THE LAW


6. (SBU) Conference panelist Tamara Kaleyeva, head of the media NGO
Adil Soz, said that new media legislation to implement one of
Kazakhstan's Madrid commitments would rescind several amendments to
Kazakhstan's media law that were made just two years ago at the
behest of then Minister of Information and Culture Yermukhamed
Yertysbayev. (NOTE: The amendments were opposed at the time by
many international and nongovernmental organizations. END NOTE.)
According to Kaleyeva, current Information and Culture Minister
Mukhtar Kul-Mukhammed wants to eliminate the 2006 amendments to show
that the government supports press freedom prior to Kazakhstan's
assuming the OSCE chairmanship in 2010. She nevertheless discounted
the impact of the new legislation, arguing that "the government
decided to do us a favor and threw us a pittance like a master to a
lackey."

POOR TRAINING MAKES POOR JOURNALISTS


7. (SBU) Although panel experts in the field of education had
differing views on why enrollment in journalism departments is
declining, they all agreed that the quality of journalism training
in Kazakhstan is poor. Twenty-three universities in Kazakhstan have
journalism departments, and experts agreed that they all share a
similar weakness -- an overemphasis on theory and lack of practical
courses teaching reporting skills. Conference participants
suggested other reasons for the decline in enrollment, such as the
lack of opportunity to conduct "real reporting" once in the
workplace. Panelists said that newspaper owners do not consider the
print media a business and, due to lack of competition, many
articles do not contain original reporting, instead merely
reprinting content from the Internet. Similarly, panelists noted
most television stations prefer not to spend time and money
developing original programming, but instead prefer to show films or
rebroadcast programs created by Russian stations. (COMMENT:
Panelists' comments regarding journalism training were of special
interest to post, since we are trying to establish a journalism
school in Almaty. The purpose of the school is to teach students
practical skills based on Western journalistic standards. Post's
proposed curriculum is heavy on professional skills courses and
reporting projects, with less focus on mass media theory. END
COMMENT.)

HOAGLAND