It’s the most wonderful time of the year. When a reclusive figure comes bearing gifts, when the air is full of familiar golden oldies, and when time itself seems to stand still. I am talking, of course, of Vladimir Putin’s annual marathon press conference this week.
Stretching for hours – four-and-a-half in this case – these carefully choreographed events have in the past been opportunities for Putin to present himself in a variety of roles: the omnicompetent chief executive; the caring father of the nation; the stern defender of the Motherland. This one was much the same, but somehow the magic has been slipping away.
The coronavirus precautions probably didn’t help. A handful of picked pool journalists got to be in the same room (after sitting out a fortnight in quarantine), but for the rest he was a disembodied presence on a big screen. Considering the sense that he was to a large degree simply rehashing old talking points, one began to feel that this could as easily be a work of CGI, a ‘deep fake’ video representation run by an artificial intelligence force-fed all his past press conferences and programmed to recycle them at will.
The trouble for him was that the journalists – even most of the tame ones from the government or government-friendly media – didn’t seem to be as on-message as in the past.
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