November
18, 2007
TO the world out there, the recent events here
on the rim of the old Soviet empire may have fallen under the heading of One
More Upheaval in a Place I’ve Never Heard Of. The opposition in
But then the owner of the television station
howled, and that voice was hard to ignore. How did Rupert Murdoch end up in the
middle of all this?
It turns out that Mr. Murdoch’s expanding television empire began managing the most popular station in
When the president accused the station of
fomenting a coup and padlocked its doors, Mr. Murdoch was caught up in the
convoluted alliances that have long played out in this region.
As a result, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation
has found itself going up against
Mr. Murdoch has publicly upbraided Mr. Saakashvili, who the administration had thought represented
a new generation of democratically oriented leaders in the former Soviet
republics.
But Mr. Saakashvili
had been coming under fire at home, where rivals accused him of trying to
concentrate power in his own hands. And his standing abroad plummeted when he
imposed a state of emergency on Nov. 7, the night he shut down the News
Corporation station.
He lifted the state of emergency only on
Friday, under White House pressure, and with the station’s license still
suspended. Still, what remained was Mr. Saakashvili’s
firm attachment to the idea that
By challenging Mr. Saakashvili,
the News Corporation had to some extent put events in motion that President Vladimir V. Putin
in
American influence has grown in this area,
which
The
Mr. Saakashvili in
turn has blamed Russian spies for many of his misfortunes, and suggested that
the News Corporation television station, Imedi, is a
Kremlin tool.
Imedi, which means “hope”
in Georgian and which transmitted both news and entertainment, does not
consider itself an opposition station, and says it has no ties to the Russians.
Its executives say they invited members of the government to appear on news
shows, only to be rebuffed.
Aides to the country’s leader note that the
News Corporation’s former partner in the station, Badri
Patarkatsishvili, who is Georgia’s richest man (and no
friend of Vladimir Putin, by the way), has grown
increasingly hostile toward Mr. Saakashvili and is
now planning to run against him.
For the
Matthew J. Bryza, a
senior State Department official who came here last week to ask Mr. Saakashvili to lift the state of emergency, said he was
hopeful that Imedi could reopen soon, given the News
Corporation’s ability to repair the extensive damage that government riot
troops did to the station.
“Their American partner is one of the world’s
all-time-greatest media people,” Mr. Bryza said,
speaking of Mr. Murdoch. “He knows how to make things happen.”
This being the
Remember “convoluted”? Try this:
Imedi’s founder, Mr. Patarkatsishvili, let the News Corporation manage the
station for a year, then sold it outright to Mr.
Murdoch’s company last month.
But don’t assume that Mr. Patarkatsishvili
is a friend of the Kremlin just because he is an adversary of Mr. Saakashvili. Mr. Patarkatsishvili
is a confidant of Boris Berezovsky, the Russian
oligarch-in-exile who is a bitter enemy of Mr. Putin.
Both Mr. Patarkatsishvili and Mr. Berezovsky
are wanted men in
For now, Mr. Patarkatsishvili
is out of the picture and the station is fighting a legal battle to recover its
license. Bidzina Baratashvili,
the station’s general director, said he expected that when it began
broadcasting again, it would attract public sympathy.
Asked whether the News Corporation was angered
by the closure, he said: “I don’t think so. They are clever enough to
understand that just for the business, it’s a very
good step. Because when we get back on air, this channel will be twice as
popular as it was.”
Copyright
2007 The New York
Times Company