All the News...: Ashgabat

I tried for a long time to find local newspapers in Turkmenistan. I saw several newsstands in markets, but they all had only Russian newspapers, a couple of days old. And I never once saw anyone carrying or reading a newspaper. Finally, when I went to a post office, I found a big selection of local papers. As they each cost 500 manat, about 2 cents, I bought every one they had. But as I found out, there was no need to buy them all – although they had different names, different fonts and whatnot, all had absolutely identical front pages:

Most of the inside pages were the same, too. One of the biggest stories was the progress of the ongoing wheat harvest, with details of how much each region and sub-region was pulling in.

The wheat harvest also was a staple of the TV news. Sadly, my hotel room didn’t have any local channels, so my Turkmen TV viewing was limited to a couple of snippets I saw in people’s houses. But there were four channels, three of which usually also showed identical programming. The fourth was in various foreign languages, including English, making it especially sad I didn’t get to watch much.