A very important event took place the other day – a meeting of the National Media Group’s Public Council. The preparations for this meeting were very thorough, because a public council within a private company is something completely new. Even the state-owned TV channels have nothing like this, and I hope it will function efficiently and have a serious impact on the quality of the media output from the group’s assets. At any rate, that’s one of the main reasons the Council was formed, and of course this places a great deal of responsibility on all the Council’s members.

Another of the Public Council’s main aims is to take part in forming a development framework for National Media Group, and to do this you have to know what’s going on in all the group’s assets. The meeting was almost entirely devoted to Channel Five, and at future meetings we’ll continue our discussion of the group’s other assets: REN TV, Izvestiya and NTK.

I often get letters on the website from all sorts of people who are concerned by the state of affairs in television, by all the vulgar and pointless programmes on the air. They ask me, persuade me and even demand that I do something to stem the flow of this type of TV output. I can tell you that the members of the Public Council are also concerned about the same problem. We realize that any business, including a media business, needs to make a profit for its owners. But we’re also convinced that you can earn money not just through sensational, low-grade content. I’m sure if you take an intelligent approach the TV schedules could be filled with educational, value-based and informative programmes, without the channels losing money as a result. So during the debate on Channel Five the members of the Public Council put forward lots of recommendations to the channel’s management, and also approved their stated policy of creating an intelligent channel with interesting and meaningful programming.