The Turkmen Times

10:30 08 October 2008

The only English news source, either print or otherwise, I have here outside of the semi-irregular Internet I enjoy (not including month week old Newsweeks which, it seems, we will loose soon) is a Turkmenistan based news channel. My family has satellite T.V. as a surprising amount of people here do (there are only two TV stations broadcast from within Kyrgyzstan that I know of) and there are two channels from Turkmenistan which broadcast the same thing, one in Turkmen/Russian and the other in English. I initially turned to it because I was seeking news about the earthquake in Kyrgyzstan and none of the Russian channels I normally watch had anything on it at the time. Ever since that first time, I have continued to watch it, not for its news content which is almost nothing, but because of a somewhat sick fascination with it.

There seem to be only two people that work for the English version of this Turkmen channel- a man and a woman who both speak passable but far from perfect English in an odd monotone Turkmen accent (the guy is a lot better at English and easier to understand). The news content, as I mentioned earlier, is negligible and is basically a reporting on what the Turkmen President- I use the term because it is his title, not because he is in any way a democratically elected leader. In my quest for more information on the Kyrgyz earthquake, the only coverage this channel gave to it was that the President of Turkmenistan had sent a letter of condolence to President Bakiev of Kyrgyzstan- no mention of where, when, how, or any other details of the earthquake. This was all presented (in the 7 seconds it took to express that) with a pixilated map of Kyrgyzstan.

I guess I can’t expect more news from a country which has breaks with elaborate graphically designed proclamations that state “The XXIst Century is the Golden Age of Turkmenistan” in lieu of advertisements- also the official name of the station is the "Independent Impartial Turkmen News Network". However, the news coverage still continues to fascinate me; the main stories today were about the Latvian President visiting (legitimate), an international Book Sellers conference titled “The Golden Age of Turkmenistan in Publishing” attended by twenty some countries (semi-legitimate), grouses are pretty and Turkmenistan has a lot of a unique type them (not news but fluff like some in America), a report on making land arable that previously wasn’t and the reclamation of some number of hectares (confusing, and not really news), the number of tonnes of wheat that had been harvested that year as compared with last year- unsurprisingly the government is reporting a big increase (straight up propaganda, and not even interesting propaganda), and to top it all off, the fact that Turkmenistan has a lot of gas and oil reserves (which isn’t news, just well known facts). All in all, the news sounds much more like an economic advertisement for business investors than an actual attempt at informing the Turkmen public about anything- this theory has been reinforced with subsequent viewings and the realization that many of the less newsy stories are run pretty much every time.

Turkmenistan is a country where the previous president named the days of the week after himself (the current one seems slightly less egomaniacal) and the capital city has more fountains and unused gorgeous buildings than maybe any other in the world- no access to internet/wikipedia when I write these makes my fact checking ability negligible so I’d appreciate it if someone could let me know more about this country and whether or not this is true. This country seems fascinating from their news.