Independent media be gone!

In 2011, Dmitry Kiselyov was awarded the Order of Friendship for his long service in media. In 2012, he was given the Award for Service to the Fatherland, Fourth Degree.

“The new propaganda, exemplified by Mr Kiselyov, seeks to agitate and mobilise the audience, to stir hatred and fear. Wearing a tight suit, he paces up and down, gesticulating and accentuating his words, then drilling them home with a sadistic smile. It is close in style to Orwell's two minutes' hate, stretched to more than 30.” (The Economist, March 29, 2014)

While oppositionist or liberal media outlets have been closed or deprived of means of broadcasting for remarks deemed outrageous, other media appear to have carte blanche, as long as they support the Kremlin.

TV presenter Dmitry Kiselyov, who is also general director of Russia Today, which superseded the state-owned media mouthpiece RIAN, is infamous for saying on a talk show program that the hearts of homosexuals should be burned and buried. In a recent interview with Izvestia, he defended his remarks:

“I don't disavow my words and will explain them one more time. You need to understand their context. It was a conscious provocation. I said them to deliberately set off a controlled explosion, to get the argument going and ignite a conflict of opinions that would be dramatic and entertaining.”

Kiselyov has been blacklisted by the US Treasury over his remarks on Ukraine and Crimea.

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Dozhd (Rain TV), which was on the brink of closure (see Russian Life March/April), continues to fight against huge financial odds after their blackout on Russian satellite providers. A fundraising marathon held by the channel, now confined to the Internet, has extended its running time for another two months. A ticker on the channel's website shows how much donations and internet subscriptions have extended its life and invites visitors to buy advertising or subscribe on behalf of their friends. A week-long campaign raised R40 million ($1.2 million), but the channel has still had to cut salaries and programming.

tvrain.ru/sos/

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An open letter to President Putin by a Vologda newspaper editor, Roman Romanenko, posted to his Facebook page, could send the author to prison for extremism.

Romanenko's crime? Satire.

Fed up with corruption in his decaying city, Romanenko jokingly asked Putin to invade Vologda as he had done in Crimea, in order to rescue its Russian population.

Romanenko has been questioned by investigators and could be sent to prison for up to six years if convicted.

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Lenta.ru was one of the few remaining online media outlets that was respected for its balanced coverage, i.e. not toeing the government line. But in March, its editor, Galina Timchenko, was forced out after Lenta published several articles and interviews about protests in Ukraine. Forty Lenta staff immediately resigned, including almost all its reporters.

A few weeks later, a Twitter war broke out when Lenta's ultra-popular Twitter blog
@lentaruofficial, called “Dear Editor” and adored for its humorous take on the news, began to be used by the news agency's new management.

The new bosses renamed the blog “Polite Editor” and began to post regularly. The name apparently referred to the online moniker of Russian troops in Crimea, who roamed the peninsula in unmarked cars and uniforms with no military insignia in early March while Putin denied Russia's military presence there. (Online, supporters of the intervention called the troops “polite people,” while critics nicknamed them “little green men” or “grasshoppers.”)

To this day, a Twitter account called “Polite People” (@vezhlivo) still blogs pictures of gun-toting soldiers with happy Crimean residents.

An online campaign urged people to mark the blog as spam, and several thousand have unfollowed it, but the blog remains popular.

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“In the past couple of years, the space occupied by unfettered journalism in Russia has shrunk dramatically. Some publications are directly controlled by the Kremlin, others through curators, still others by editors afraid of losing their jobs. Several media outlets have been shut down and others will close in the coming months. We of course assumed that they would come for us. But we believe that this is not forever... We hope that we will meet again soon.

Galina Timchenko, fired editor
of Lenta.ru