Russian Journalists Quit Over Censorship

A state-controlled broadcast center in Russia has just seen the result of censorship restrictions imposed by the Kremlin. In a rare show of protest a group of journalists all resigned stating that they could no longer work under the harsh restrictions imposed by the state. "Artyom Khan, one of the reporters who resigned, said restrictions were introduced when new management was imported last month from Channel One, the state television station that documents Mr Putin's every move."

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a nice gesture, but the poor guy has a long road ahead of him.

Next up, Channel One Exposes Number Two...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Channel One, the state television station that documents Mr Putin's every move...

Czar Putin, you sure that's a good idea?

"Next up, Channel One Exposes Number Two..."

Cold War, take... Two?

[u-bend]

You know, there are probably a lot of frustrated Washington bureaucrats and military types that would love to see a re-emergence of a Soviet Russian state--we'd be fighting real commies again, and not elusive and often invisible terrorists. And the wiretapping infrastructure is there to catch the red sympathizers at home now! Ah, Russia, how your people are always out of one pan and into another fire.

Re:right..

[Timesprout]

Because he is trying to build up a personality cult. It would appear Mr Putin has deigns on power greater than the Russian Presidency.

Actually, this is good news

[Control Group]

It speaks well of the net progress in the ex-USSR from the mid-eighties to now that a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot, and b) that the rest of the world has heard about it.

On the time scale of massive societal shifts, things are still looking up. Backsliding, certainly, but it's still a far cry from the heyday of Soviet control.

Too bad...

[DoofusOfDeath]

Too bad that their resignations will somehow fail to appear on the evening news programs. That kind of limits (but doesn't totally erase, I suspect) the impact of their protests.

In current Russia ...

[iknownuttin]

You will MOD yourself down! Or face the consequences!

Re:Cold War, take... Two?

[morgan_greywolf]

You know, there are probably a lot of frustrated Washington bureaucrats and military types that would love to see a re-emergence of a Soviet Russian state--we'd be fighting real commies again, and not elusive and often invisible terrorists.

That's what Iraq was at least partially about. Saddam Hussein was a very visible public figure -- it gave the folks back at home something to 'rally around.' With the War on Terror we're now back to shadow fighting enemies that we know very little about who sneak around blowing up stuff and killing troops. Does this last description sound familiar? It should if you know anything about the Vietnam War.

If there's a big boogieman out there, we need to build weapons and tanks and planes and spend big bucks doing it. But the public rarely rallies behind a cause that looks confusing and hopeless... the American public likes the classic "the good guys (U.S.)" vs "the bad guys (Russia, Saddam, Ax1s of da 3v1l, etc.)", not us vs. some tactics.

The good news...

[TrappedByMyself]

...is that we know about this story. The journalists didn't disappear into the night before they could be heard. It may not seem like it, but it is progress.

can at least follow russians' suit?

[superwiz]

How many journalists quit in post-911 self-imposed editor censorship? Is this what the world has come to? Russian journalists have more ethics than ours?

Re:FTA

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like how the U.S. main stream media does not mention Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul.
Ron Paul was in the national spotlight last week and made an Ass out of himself.

Dennis Kucinich, was in all the Democratic primary debates back in 2004 amd made Howard Dean look like a moderate.

Just because the left and right nutjobs don't get to see thier candidates taken seriously in the media does not make it censorship. It makes your candidate a nutjob. Media companies are not going to waste time and effort on anyone with 100% of the nutjob vote.

LA Times front page today

[sjw02001]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-f g-gazeta21may21,1,1616926,full.story?coll=la-headl ines-world&ctrack=3&cset=true/ [latimes.com]
For those who don't RTFA, this basically says there is one independent newspaper which publishes 3 times a week, is funded mostly by Gorbachev and another prominent politician, incurs huge losses, and has had mysterious accidents including death happen to several reporters. Any political scientist can tell you that this is not a sign of a healthy free press, and without a healthy free press democracy suffers due to lack of good information. Basically, the West has been worried about Putin and his backsliding into authoritarianism for quite some time but hasn't had the balls to do much about it. Yes, there is the internet, but you assume that a) everyone in Russia who wants to can get their news from the net, which is not true for many poor elderly folks, and b) those who might be politically savvy are tech savvy enough to find the independent sources on the net. If you lived through Soviet times, you'd be skittish about seeking out politically sensitive info if you had any sense.
In other words, this is a big deal.

Re:Actually, this is good news

[flyingsquid]

It speaks well of the net progress in the ex-USSR from the mid-eighties to now that a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot, and b) that the rest of the world has heard about it. On the time scale of massive societal shifts, things are still looking up. Backsliding, certainly, but it's still a far cry from the heyday of Soviet control.

Tell that to Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov, or the other Russian journalists who have been assassinated in recent years. Trying to read this as somehow being good news sounds disturbingly like the Neocon concept that democracy is somehow the long-term natural outcome of the human history, Bush's "people want to be free" theory. That idea is misguided as best, and as Iraq shows, dangerously unrealistic at worst. Western democracy is no more the natural outcome for a group of people than a house is the natural outcome for a pile of plywood, nails, and two-by-fours. Like making a house, democracy takes a lot of hard work and design, and continual upkeep. The developments in Russia- along with Russia's efforts to spread fear with its polonium assassinaton, and poisoning Ukraining politician Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin- suggest a deep, broad move towards totalitarianism. The odds of Russia emerging with a free society are good, but the outcome is not certain. It is too soon to pat ourselves on the back.

Consider that the emergence of western-style democracies with individual rights and accountable heads of state is a recent development, something that has only become fully developed in the past few hundred years. Meanwhile, China has been ruled by totalitarianism of one form or another for thousands of years. So, looking at the big picture, isn't the sure money on totalitarianism to eventually take over the world, not democracy? Sure, the spread and success of democracy has been a remarkable success story... but for a while, it looked like Communism might well be the system to take over the world, and then that fell apart almost overnight. How can we be so certain that democracy won't be a similar historical anomaly? Remember how certain people were that democracy would take root in Iraq, and beat out the forces of the Baathists, radical Islamists, militias and criminals? Every time something went wrong, instead of looking at the possibility we were failing, we patted ourselves on the back and said, "Yes, but look at the big picture! It's so much better than it was under Saddam!". Democracy still may win in Iraq, but our arrogance and complacency, our certainty that it would win out over the forces of totalitarianism, religious extremism, and anarchy, have vastly reduced the chances that it will.

Don't read this the wrong way. I actually agree with the Neocons on one issue: democracies should promote democracy outside their borders. But I think we need to understand that while this fight may be winnable, fighting for freedom is a hard, uphill fight, and that we are not necessarily destined to win the fight.

Re:The good news...

[ACS Solver]

That, or they got lucky. It's not like certain other journalists [wikipedia.org] that disagree with the Kremlin don't get murdered on Putin's birthday.

Re:Cold War, take... Two?

[WilliamSChips]

The Kremlin has never funded terrorists and the documents the neocons used to claim those things were in fact so-called "Black Propaganda" released by the CIA to dissuade neutrals from the USSR by associating them with terrorists. And of course, Islamic terrorism has always been a joke given that we've had only two attacks in the past two decades whereas white supremacists and anti-choicers* have made made over 32 attacks in 2007 alone.

*You lose the right to be called pro-"life" when you try to take the life of mothers and abortion doctors. (The hypocrisy of the rest of the movement is outside the scope of this post but I assure you it involves the correlated positions against birth control and methods of helping the mothers who have these babies)

Re:right..

[Red Flayer]

I'm not fully sure how gun control fell into the Democratic bucket in the first place.

As a straw man of the neocons in the NRA and the Republican Party. Gun control is a wedge issue used to create a false dichotomy between the Republicans and Democrats.

Corporate-allied Republican interests: The Democrats want to take your guns away! And kill babies! And force you to not go to church!

Mainstream Americans: Uh-oh, better vote Republican!
Republicans: Gee, thanks for getting us elected!
Corporate interests: No problem, now about those tax breaks and environmental law rollbacks we discussed...

Wedge issues like gun control are the reason that the white rural middle-class and poor consistently vote against their economic self-interest in state and national elections. It's identified with the Democratic Party because that makes the issue useful to the special interests that control the Republican party. Note that this works both ways, and the Republicans aren't the only part using wedge issues to divide the electorate...

Re:Actually, this is good news

[yoprst]

This may sound weird for you, but Soviet Union was more or less like teocratic state, with religion replaced by communism. There was a set of nonsense beliefs you couldn't question that governed everyone's life. Gorbachev's time was a time when this system suffered a great erosion (toward a free country). Now it's more or less feudal state (before Magna Carta), but because the rulers want to look nice in Europe, there's a lot of brainwashing and Potemkins villages to pretend it's a nice democratic state. The people from the class above you (there's a hierarchy) can do whatever they want to you (including murdering you, or taking away your propery) effectively with no penalty, but the system will make it look to like nothing bad happened. Interestingly, the brainwashing machine started under Yeltsin, who showed no autocratic tendencies: during the time of his reelection he has extremely low prospects for reelection, so major entrepreneurs (who later became known as oligarchs) have build a brainwashing machine to reelect him. Later, ex-KGB goons took over it.

Re:Not too different from MSNBC

[turing_m]

"Not saying there is no censorship in Russian media, but why can't "state controlled" network can't impose its own agenda like many other media companies do?"

It's a good question, but to answer it you need learn to read between the lines. You have to understand that a monopoly of influence is "good" when one group of people wield it, and "bad" when another group of people wield it.

Putin is "bad" because he dispossessed several oligarchs of their ill-gotten wealth. If he were "good", Putin would allow so-called "private" news organizations to portray him and his policies in a bad light so that whoever they choose to replace him will be seen as a better alternative. It has nothing to do with truth or justice, it is all about who is doing what to whom.

There is no such thing as a "free" press. Every publisher decides what content he allows his readership to read. If he is too stupid to exercise that control, an editor will only too gladly exercise that control for him.

And the distinction between state control of the media and private control of the media is also arbitrary. Control of the media leads to control of opinion which leads to control of the laws on the books and enforcement of those laws.

It's the reason for the cliche that "the first casualty of war is the truth", and why the first target of any occupation government is always the media organs of the country they wish to control.