Alexander Lebedev, All-Round Badass, Will Use Evening Standard To Fight Russian Corruption

Alexander Lebedev, London’s hippest new oligarch and the new owner of the Evening Standard, gives a revealing interview in the FT today. While Lord Rothermere diplomatically grits his teeth and squeezes out platitudes like “Alexander Lebedev shares my commitment to newspapers and will continue to invest in the Evening Standard”, Lebedev is one minute saying he won’t interfere with the editorial decisions at the paper and the next saying he’s going to roll it up and bash Putin over the head with it.

As well as saying he’ll plans to subsidise 20% of the running costs to “make sure the losses are not hurting the newspaper”, he said that through his growing media empire, he wants “to help Putin fight corruption”. “Noyeva Gazeta [Lebedev's Russian title] is not enough. Why not do it together with a British newspaper?” Well, I’m not sure front page splashes about dodgy Russian military officials are going to turn the paper’s financial troubles around, unless Lily Allen is somehow involved.

This desire to stamp out corruption in Russia has an emotional edge after the murder of a Novaya Gazeta staffer this week. Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer was shot in the back of the head in broad daylight, while Anastasia Baburova, a trainee journalist at the paper, was killed when she tried to apprehend the shooter. Markelov had represented a Chechen family whose mother was killed by a Russian colonel, and had held a news conference just hours before his death opposing the colonel’s release from prison. Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin said that surveillance footage couldn’t identify the killer. ”I can also state that there are no witnesses who saw the killer”, he said, before adding “any more”. Hey, that last bit was just a joke! Please don’t shoot me!

After the murders, Lebedev has been sounding off to the FT about how much we take for granted: “I think the British have a kind of arrogant, turn up the nose attitude towards their own free press. They think it should not interfere, for example, in their private lives. My recommendation to them is to try to live in a society that has no free press and see how this changes their attitude.” Expect increasingly ruthless doorstepping of Amy Winehouse in the Standard, both as a means to increase circulation and a valuable lesson to us all about societal freedom.

Elsewhere, he casts himself as the single saviour of the Russian liberty: “If [Noveya Gazeta] ceases to exist, I’m afraid we would lose the chance for this country to be free”. And if that wasn’t good enough, he’s also been flopping his brass balls around on his blog, where he posted the following after the killings (thanks to the FT for the translation): “Here at the paper’s editorial offices we know more than we can currently reveal. I’ll stay silent for now. Until the funeral.”

MP Richard Ottaway has questioned the national security implications of having an ex-KGB lieutenant at the helm of a British paper, but we should ignore such party-pooping – this is quite clearly the most badass thing to happen to the UK media for ages.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | January 22, 2009 11:27AM |