"Crazy news" replaces business news in Russia.

From Moscow Times:

Television viewers who tuned in to NTV on a recent Monday were in for a surprise.

Instead of the usual evening news featuring presidential meetings and prime ministerial visits, they saw a clip showing a man entering a supermarket naked. In another clip, a crow was being given wine from a plastic cup. A third piece showed two elderly women thrashing each other with shopping bags.

The motley collection of bizarre home videos lasted for 20 minutes. Then, finally came the news.

Touted by NTV as a roundup of crazy news every Monday to Thursday, the prime-time extravaganza is called "Mad Day" and precedes the news, which has had is starting time bumped back to 11 p.m. from 10:40 p.m.

"Mad Day" premiered on Oct. 13, roughly a month after the global liquidity crunch caught up with Russia, fueling suspicion that it might be an initiative to soften up viewers ahead of the relatively tame nightly news. The three main channels — Channel One, Rossia and NTV — have paid scant attention to Russia's financial crisis, both on their newscasts and other shows.

But in a sign that viewers remain unworried about the crisis, there has not been a revival in the popularity of shows featuring psychics, television analysts said.

NTV deputy CEO Alexander Nechayev denied that airing home videos under the banner of "crazy news" before the nightly news was an attempt to make the real news more palatable, saying the decision to push back the newscast had been made in April.