God’s TV, Russian style
On a sunny afternoon in Moscow, the Russian tycoon Konstantin Malofeev is holding court in the studios of his newly launched television channel Tsargrad TV, dressed in a designer suit, a blue silk handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. Above him is a makeshift cathedral cupola weighing in at half a tonne. Behind him are 24ft-high windows through which the Kremlin’s red towers are visible, their glass communist stars glistening.
Malofeev, who has the cheeks and figure of a man who likes a good meal, is in a buoyant mood. In a sign of his growing clout, he has just had lunch with two of the richest oligarchs on the Forbes list. Yelena Mizulina, a leading conservative senator, who has come to Tsargrad’s offices, is patiently waiting for the businessman to fit in a tête-à-tête before he departs on his summer holiday.
Over the past few years, Malofeev, 41, has morphed into one of Russia’s most influential businessmen and lobbyists, in part thanks to his devout Russian Orthodox faith and conservative values, now back in vogue during Vladimir Putin’s third term. As the founder of private equity firm Marshall Capital Partners, Malofeev accumulated substantial personal wealth, largely through an investment in the Russian telecoms giant Rostelecom. (His friend Igor Shchegolev, a fellow Russian Orthodox and now Putin adviser, was telecoms minister at the time.) Now he is paying it back as a self-styled Christian philanthropist and one of Putin’s loudest ideological supporters.
It is as part of this next act that Malofeev has launched Tsargrad TV, his own Russian Orthodox TV channel, which aims to put a conservative yet modern spin on global news. In June, Tsargrad began broadcasting daily on Spas, a religious channel run by the Russian Orthodox Church, in addition to an online platform. According to Malofeev, Tsargrad’s closest international equivalent is Fox News in the US, making him something of a Russian Roger Ailes.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/27125702-71ec-11e5-ad6d-f4ed76f0900a.html
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