It's worse than that. The platform is now beholden to the president for its survival.

If you're wondering how Russia slipped from a flawed democracy into an aurocracy, it was because Yeltsin fixed the 1996 election, by holding an axe over the head of the press. He made it very clear that anybody who wants to keep their broadcast licenses will need to shill for him.

It's how a drunken autocrat with an 8% approval rating, credited for both hyperinflation and mass unemployment, who launched a coup (that killed a few hundred people and caused a constitutional crisis) ended up getting re-elected.

And then at the eleventh hour, after firing his cabinet, again, he declares Putin his successor and resigns over a $10,000 bribery scandal.