Nearly 70% of the airtime that Russia’s largest federal TV channels devoted to political parties in the two weeks before the State Duma election went to the Kremlin-aligned United Russia party. Of the 89 minutes of party airtime from Aug. 31 to Sept. 6, the ruling party received 62 minutes, according to monitoring by the Election Atlas project, which evaluated a total of 216 news broadcasts across six Russian networks.
As The Insider calculated, United Russia’s share of this airtime nearly doubled in a week — from roughly 39% to 70%. From Aug. 24–30, the channels also allocated a total of 89 minutes to political parties, but United Russia received just under 35 minutes. In other words, the overall volume of campaign coverage did not grow, but a significantly larger share of it was redistributed in favor of the ruling party.
Notably, 89% of segments about United Russia in the last week of monitoring had a positive tone. For the New People party, by contrast, this figure was 71%, and for the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), only around a third of the coverage was positive. The average length of United Russia-related segments came in at 2.7 minutes, while the majority of material about its rivals lasted under a minute.
United Russia’s main news hook involved Vladimir Putin’s meeting with the top five candidates on its federal list: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, “war correspondent” Yevgeny Poddubny, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, and head of the pro-Kremlin Yunarmiya youth movement Vladislav Golovin. Five of the six television channels examined in the study devoted coverage to the meeting, with Channel One running its segment three times. Putin himself is not on the federal candidate list.
United Russia has used Putin’s persona as a promotional tool in its television campaign more than once. On Aug. 22, the president came to the party’s pre-election congress and, even before the vote, called United Russia the “leading political force” in the country. Putin also spoke at the party’s congress in June, where, for the first time since 2007, the event’s decor used imagery directly linking him to United Russia — including a poster with the president’s portrait and the captions “Being for Putin is the bare minimum” and “United Russia is the president’s party.”
The State Duma election — Russia’s first parliamentary election since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — is scheduled for Sept. 20. The only registered party with an antiwar platform, Yabloko, was removed from the federal-list ballot by the Supreme Court on Aug. 10. After Yabloko disappeared from TV airtime, the Election Atlas project noted a sizable increase in the percentage of overall coverage using a positive tone.
