What's up with Olga Romanova?

Alistair (Ruminations on Russia blog) posted:

MosNews reports that TNT has taken Olga Romanova off the air allegedly because she reported that Sergei Ivanov's son would not be charged for killing a elderly women whilst driving. You would have to look pretty hard to find that piece of news in the Russian language.
It does not mark the end of free speech on broadcast television; it was already dead. It is however, another example of the 5th directorate thugs believing that they can control the flow of news when it proves to be embarrassing. The good news is that the Russian narod are at least 2 steps ahead of the thugs and no longer get their news from the television.

One needs to watch Olga Romanova’s analytical show only once to come to the conclusion – she’s a junk journalist. And it’s absolutely irrelevant if she’s pro-Western liberal or pro-Putin nationalist or anti-everyone anarcho-syndicalist. She’s sloppy, cynical and definitely suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. But her personal problems are of no importance if only she could do – before going on air – such simple things as (1) research, (2) thinking about problem she wants to talk about, (3) looking for logical integrity or (4) writing down some plan of the show. Ok, not the plan but just some notes, like “First, I talk about this and then about that”. I tried to watch Romanova’s show two times and both times I couldn’t stand the test. A couple of weeks ago she was “analyzing” the crash of a Russian MiG in Lithuania. I listened to this delirium for two minutes:

Generals from the Ministry of Defense said there were secrets about the poor MiG but today they said there are no secrets. So one day there are secrets but then they suddenly disappear. What happened to them? How comes secrets become not secrets? I mean secrets should be kept secret. Right? If secrets are not secret they are no secrets at all. No one calls not secret things secret. You know what I mean. But under Putin’s regime secrets suddenly become no secrets in just one day. What if we suppose that they were not secrets but were made secret by someone who loves secrecy?

And this verbal diarrhea goes on and on and on and on… Romanova reminded me a freshman who wrote a 340 words essay and was thinking how broad should be margins so the essay could be 15 required pages long. In comparison with Romanova even Yilia Latynina sounds like a solid quality political analyst. At least Latynina always manages to insert a couple of non sequiturs into her columns. Romanova cannot do even that. But somehow we are supposed to view Romanova as a beacon of free and democratic journalism.

She wasn’t fired from RenTV. She just argued with security at the studio door. Somehow she got an idea that she was fired. She went hysterical, rushed to Ekho Moskvy Radio and gave an interview condemning Putin and his KGB hounds of crushing the freedom speech in Russia. Next morning at least a dozen of American and European newspapers run the story “Romanova is fired from RenTV. Free speech on broadcast television is dead”. I wonder if their readers’ memory span exceeds one week. When for a thousand and the first time they read about total annihilation of free speech in Russia, do they ever think, “Hey! Didn’t I read the very same story five years ago?” Like in a joke: Mr. Pupkin committed suicide by firing six shots into his head. One revealing fact: when it turned out that Romanova’s dismissal from RenTV was a false alarm, not a single Russia bashing newspaper even mentioned it.