Why Are There So Few Marina Ovsyannikovas — in Russia and Everywhere Else?

You need a heart made of granite not to be moved by Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian television producer who on Monday jumped onto the set of the state-run network Channel One during a live broadcast and shouted, "Stop the war".

The nature of the sign she held, which featured small Ukrainian and Russian flags and the words "No war", was perhaps the most touching aspect of her actions. Stop the fighting. Don't believe in propaganda. They lied to you here. Russians against war.

It wasn't a slickly designed placard, produced by graphic designers who were paid by the Rockefeller Foundation. She realized she was running out of space as the letters got narrower near the right margin. Was this made at home on the dining room table? Did she have an office with a door that she could lock? At some point the paper had been rolled up in a tube and was trying to get back on its own.

This was a single person, maybe with a small support network, realizing that she had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to tell the truth about matters of life and death. It's impossible to know how many Russians know about the video, given that the government is cracking down on dissent.

Where are the other Marinas? There must be thousands of individuals with the same means, motives, and opportunities. Many countries have less repressive media environments than Russia, but there are still few and far between opportunities to challenge government and corporate propaganda on TV. There were no questions about the U.S. drone program during the 2020 U.S. primary and general election debates. The main nightly and Sunday news programs spent 0.7 percent of their airtime on the climate crisis. Both subjects are crying for treatment.

Humans are averse to running on camera and making a scene. Huge numbers of people have realized live television is a great opportunity to take off all your clothes for an audience of millions. The number of streakers to people making political statements has to be 100 to 1.

One of the few examples similar to Ovsyannikova is that of Vladimir Danchev, a Soviet English-language radio commentator during the invasion of Afghanistan. In 1983, Danchev began quietly including truth in his broadcasts. He was taken to a mental hospital in the present day. He was able to return to his radio network but not as an on-air commentator, but he was given a job organizing the library record.

Michael Moore won the Best Documentary Oscar forBowling for Columbine on March 23, 2003 just days after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began. Moore used his acceptance speech to say that he was against the war. Moore and his wife returned to their home in Michigan and found three truckloads of manure dumped on their driveway. Moore's next movie was backed out by the studio that signed a contract to fund it. He needed a large security detail because he received so many death threats. The amount of hate directed to Moore's way was alarming when I worked for him several years later.

There have been disruptions of newscasts. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power snuck onto the set of the CBS Evening News just as the first Gulf War started. They shouted "fight AIDS, not Arabs" before being dragged away as the network went black for six seconds. Other protesters tried to do the same on PBS, but they never got on the air.

On rare occasions, the U.S. hosts like Danchev are willing to challenge the basic rationales for war. Even though MSNBC had the network's highest ratings, Phil Donahue was fired from his show in February 2003 even though he had started in 2002. It would be a mistake to have a show that was anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration, according to an internal memo.

Then there is the American who had her own show on the Russian television network, and used it to condemn Russia's annexation of the peninsula. Martin left the show after one year, although she said that the show never had editorial control. Martin now hosts the crowd-funded series Empire Files, meaning that all the episodes ofBreaking the Set have been deleted.

There are more examples, but not many. There are more instances of people with access to live TV who are unwilling to break ranks on air. Henry Kissinger was asked what it felt like to be a war criminal at an early 2000s dinner party by the anchor of ABC's World News Tonight.

In 2007, Couric told the National Press Club that people in this country were misled about the rationale of the Iraq War. Is this really being challenged by the right people, as one of the most famous and well-paid people on TV? She did not mention any of the doubts when she told her audience things like "Navy SEALS rock!"

Any explanation is speculative. It seems plausible that human beings are pack animals. We depended on our pack for survival. Maintaining good relations with the pack feels more important than abstract concepts of right and wrong, no matter how many constitutions we write or paeans to free speech we deliver. The host of the show that Ovsyannikova interrupted continued to read her propaganda without ever glancing back at the woman shouting about war behind her.

There will never be many people who will take the chance of live television to tell the truth. There could be more. The most likely way to make this happen would be for everyone to be impressed by Ovsyannikova and form a pack of their own, which is a challenge since it has to be a pack for people who hate packs.