rom: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 3/12/2007 1:17 AM
Press freedom: To understand these outrages, you need a Russian history lesson
As another Moscow journalist dies a violent death, Oleg Panfilov traces a pattern that long predates the rule of Vladimir Putin
Published: 12 March 2007
As Russian prosecutors continued last week to investigate how Ivan Safronov, the respected defence correspondent of Kommersant newspaper, was found dead in the snow having apparently fallen from his high-rise apartment, it was another Moscow paper that made an apposite observation. "For some reason, it is those journalists who are disliked by the authorities who die in this country," noted the popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets.
Safronov, 51, had repeatedly embarrassed the Russian government with his stories about its nuclear programme, and his newspaper colleagues have angrily rejected the suggestion that he took his own life.
"Of course he did not go of his own accord," wrote his deputy chief editor, Ilya Bulavinov.
The scepticism is hardly surprising, given the history of violent attacks on media professionals in Russia. Yet in the seven years that Vladimir Putin has been in power, he has presided over strange annual press conferences at which journalists gather en masse. According to Putin's press office, the most recent such event, which took place in Moscow on 1 February and was attended by at least 1,200 reporters, lasted three hours and 32 minutes - seven minutes longer than last year's. That allowed for questions from 65 of the journalists.
In the current environment, there aren't many Russian journalists who would pluck up the courage to complain at not getting a crack. Some that asked difficult questions in the past were subsequently harassed.
Anna Politkovskaya, the award-winning Novaya Gazeta journalist shot dead by a hitman outside her apartment last October, would not have gone to this press conference, nor would she have wanted to put a question to Putin, having long stopped believing what officials told her. If you published all of President Putin's comments on freedom of expression, the collective text would run to hundreds of pages.
This kind of "freedom of expression", Russian style, has a long history behind it. In 1702, Peter the Great published the first Russian state newspaper. In 1804, Tsar Alexander the First enacted a censorship law. Ever since, the liberal press has been in a state of perpetual conflict with Russian rulers, from Tsars to Bolsheviks.
It is 20 years since Mikhail Gorbachev spread the concept of glasnost (openness) and a new chapter in Russian history apparently opened. Communist propagandists suddenly became liberal journalists and independent newspapers emerged.
But with no history of fighting to win freedom to express themselves, Russia's journalists have set about creating their new media with one eye fixed on the Kremlin, for fear it would object.
Boris Yeltsin's nine years in office saw the emergence of new radio stations, TV companies, and the internet. Russian journalists - aided by their foreign colleagues - were actually able to bring a halt to the tragedy of the first war in Chechnya (1994-1996). The price was 20 journalists killed and seven missing without trace. That conflict was a test for both Russian media and society, when people were able for the first time to compare media reports about Chechnya with state propaganda.
Some credit must go to Yeltsin for never publicly abusing journalists or demanding censorship, even though, with his communist past, he sometimes found it hard to accept the truth. He understood that it was journalists who had helped him to come to power in 1991.
But Putin soon set about reviving the Soviet propaganda tradition. His team's first act was to restrict the access of journalists to Chechnya. Then in September 2000 he signed an odd document: the Information Security Doctrine. This carries no legal force, but has changed the relationship between state and media.
Much of the doctrine's content runs counter to the Russian constitution and the obligations Moscow has assumed as a member of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe. Putin was effectively telling both his officials and the general public that he would no longer tolerate opinions other than those espoused by the Kremlin.
The president has revived another Soviet tradition - meeting the heads of major TV companies and newspapers to instruct them about the nature of government policy and tell them how their media outlets should report important events.
Censorship is banned under the constitution, but it exists in the form of self-censorship by editors and proprietors fearful of laws that mean they can easily find themselves in court if their organisations produce reports that offend the Kremlin.
As it is, Russia has lost 13 reporters, murdered in contract-style killings since 2000. In the last two years, five Russian reporters have ended up in jail. Every year 50 new criminal cases are launched against journalists, more than in any other country.
Other outrages against journalists in provincial Russia pass unnoticed. It is six years since the killing of Eduard Markevich, chief editor of a small newspaper in the Urals, yet nothing is known about the motive. Family and colleagues of Vladimir Kirsanov, a regional newspaper editor who disappeared in Kurgan in 2001, have still heard nothing about his fate. And now Safronov.
Whenever he is interviewed by Western reporters, President Putin talks about Russia's freedom of expression. Perhaps some believe him. The problem is that nothing he does convinces ordinary Russians that they have that freedom.
Oleg Panfilov is director of the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2348004.ece
