rom: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 6/8/2005 4:31 AM

Editor Vows No Bias on Russia Today
By Oksana Yablokova
Staff Writer
    

Itar-Tass

Russia Today editor Simonyan, left, and RIA-Novosti chief Svetlana Mironyuk at a news conference Tuesday.

The organizers of Russia Today, the English-language satellite television channel the government plans to launch, said Tuesday that it would receive state funding but insisted that it would be independent of the Kremlin.

The channel's newly appointed editor, Margarita Simonyan, a former Kremlin pool correspondent for Rossia state television, said the government planned to spend about $30 million from the federal budget this year and a similar amount next year to launch the channel, which would report world news from a Russian perspective.

"We will not cover Russian news specifically," Simonyan, 25, told a news conference Tuesday. "We will be reporting world news and will be distinguished by our Russian approach to this news."

Both Simonyan and Mikhail Seslavinsky, head of the Federal Press and Mass Media Agency, said that the presidential administration would not interfere with the channel's editorial policy and said the channel's output would not be propaganda.

The channel aims to start broadcasting by the end of the year and attract enough advertising to be financially sustainable, Seslavinsky said.

Simonyan and Seslavinsky declined to give a definite launch date for Russia Today, although recruitment advertisements in the British press and Russian media have said the channel would start broadcasting in September.

The channel, news of which was released abroad to the media last Thursday, is being touted as a way for the Kremlin to improve Russia's image abroad. It will cover Russian and world news for audiences in Europe, the United States and Asia, one of the channel's organizers, the RIA-Novosti state news agency, said Tuesday.

Simonyan said that the around-the-clock Moscow-based channel would have four foreign bureaus -- in Brussels, London, Jerusalem and Washington -- and would rely on a network of stringers and news services for its reporting from other countries.

Simonyan said she planned to hire some 500 staffers, including about 200 editorial staff. The majority of the staff, including journalists, would be Russians, while native English speakers would be hired as news presenters and consultants to train Russian staff, she said.

In response to questions about the channel's financing, Seslavinsky said that starting a new channel without state support was "practically impossible these days."

"The situation is like this in the majority of countries," Seslavinsky said, adding that all attempts to launch major television projects in Russia without government support had failed. "It does not mean that the state will remain in this project forever, but it should be launched with the help of the state," he said.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/06/08/012.html